Americans Want to Raise the Poverty Line
By Mondaire Jones
The federal poverty line serves as the basis for the provision of many essential governmental services, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, and housing assistance.
As I have written in Crooked and spoken about on NowThis, the federal poverty line is not grounded in the lived experience of most Americans. Currently, the federal poverty line — just $12,760 per year for individuals and $26,200 for a family of four, based on a calculation that has not been updated since the 1960s — is wholly unrealistic.
Worse yet, it does not account for any geographic variation — families living in my home county of Rockland, NY are held to the same standard as a family in Kentucky, despite Rockland being an order of magnitude more expensive. In Rockland, the average monthly cost for housing is $1,440. Food costs $612. Child care costs a whopping $2,188 per month, and health care $525. Add in transportation, taxes, and other costs, a family of four must earn $6,477 to meet its basic needs. Yet the federal government’s definition of poverty says that this family must make do with $2,183 per month.
It should not come as a surprise, then, that most Americans support raising the poverty line.
A Data for Progress poll found that 52 percent of those surveyed think that the federal poverty line is too low, while only 15 percent think it is too high. The numbers remain remarkably consistent across the political spectrum: 54 percent of Democrats believe the federal poverty line is too low, compared to 46 percent of Independents and 51 percent of Republicans. Similarly, 14 percent of Democrats believe the federal poverty line is too high, compared to 18 percent of Independents and 14 percent of Republicans.
Even more striking, there is overwhelming support for raising the poverty line to $38,000 for individuals, which would help millions more to benefit from federal assistance programs. Of those polled, 59 percent either strongly or somewhat support raising the federal poverty line to $38,000. This includes 64 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans.
The Recognizing Poverty Act (H.R. 5069) would fix many of the problems with today’s poverty line. The bill requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to develop a modern measure of poverty that accounts for modern costs like cell phone and internet bills that are not currently accounted for, in addition to the traditional costs of health care, child care, and education. Its lead cosponsor, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), has estimated that this bill would raise the federal poverty line to $38,000 for individuals living in high-expense areas — the level that the majority of respondents in Data for Progress’s recent poll support. If elected to Congress, I would proudly champion this bill.
The coronavirus pandemic has hammered home the need for governmental assistance programs. More than 36 million Americans have lost their jobs since March. That would mean a real unemployment rate of 22.5 percent— a level not seen since the Great Depression. And low-income Americans have been hit the hardest: 39 percent of those in households earning $40,000 or less have lost their jobs during this pandemic. As these families face economic devastation, we must ensure that we are not unfairly excluding those in need from programs that are meant to help them weather the storm.
Now, more than ever, strengthening the social safety net by raising the federal poverty level is imperative. That is something most Americans agree on, and something I will fight for if elected to Congress.
Mondaire Jones (@MondaireJones) is a resident of South Nyack, NY, and a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s 17th district.
From May 8 to May 9, 2020, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,235 likely voters nationally using web-panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, urbanicity, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is ± 2.8 percentage points.
Due to rounding, some values sum to 99 or 101 percent.