Fox News Watchdog

Glenn Beck claimed that President Obama was drastically changing the poverty scale in a way that would effectively classify Beck as “in poverty” because other people in his community are wealthier than he is. In fact, the measurement would supplement, not replace, the poverty measurement currently in use, and it would not count Beck as poor.

From the March 10 edition of Premiere Radio
Networks’ The Glenn Beck Program:

BECK: Barack
Obama has announced he’s changing that scale. It’s no longer how many potatoes — how many potatoes you can
buy. Can you buy a roof over your head, potatoes, gasoline, the basic necessities to stay afloat? No, no,
no. It’s now a comparative scale. So how much money do you have compared to
others in your area?

PAT GRAY (co-host): Again, that’s
Marxist.

BECK: I would be — I’d be in poverty. I’m probably the
poorest guy that lives in my town. I live in — I mean, New
York has great concentrations of wealth.

[...]

BECK: I’m the poorest guy. I’d be on
the poverty scale because I don’t have as much as they have. You see what
they’re doing? What he’s doing is constantly compare yourself to someone else.
We don’t do that in America.
That’s what got us here. What got us into this trouble is, well, they’ve got one. I want a
flat screen. I want that. They have one. How come I don’t have one? It’s
keeping up with the Joneses, period.

And look what they’re creating. They are creating a cage
that you’ll never be able to get out of. And I’m not talking about — you know, I’m not talking about a
literal cage, I’m talking about a cage,
a prison of laws and concepts. We’re already — we’ve already built a cage for our kids. We’ve already told
them, ah, don’t worry, everybody gets a trophy. No, they don’t. Now, how are our kids going to
get out of that cage that we all
built for them? The
cage that says you don’t have to compete, you don’t have to worry about it — you’ll get
it, you’re owed it, you deserve it. Well, they’re not going to get what we’ve
promised them. They’re going to get what they deserve and what we deserve.

[...]

BECK: We are not
living our personal lives in a way that we deserve anything better than what we’re getting or are about to get. That’s
what must change. Not a new scale on how to measure poverty. And a poverty
scale that has you compare yourself to your neighbors. Oh, my gosh. I mean,
what are we doing? How do people with eyes not see it? How do people with ears
not hear it? How many — how many people
got out of Cuba, got out of the Soviet Union, Poland, that are now looking at
it and going, “America, wake up”?

Alternative
measurement not replacing poverty measure in effect since 1960s

Commerce Dept.: Current poverty measure will
“remain the definitive statistical measure.” A March 2 press
release by the U.S. Department of Commerce
about the “Supplemental Poverty Measure” stated that the official
poverty measure used since the 1960s “will remain the definitive
statistical measure.” It added that the alternative measure “will not
be the measure used to estimate eligibility for government programs. Instead, it
will be an additional macroeconomic statistic, providing further understanding
of economic conditions and trends.”

Alternative measurement would not classify Beck as poor

Wash. Post: Alternative
measure would “consider expenses such as housing, utilities, child care
and medical treatment.” From a March 3 Washington Post article
about the Supplemental Poverty Measure:

The old
definition, developed in the mid-1960s using data from a decade earlier, was
based on the cost of food and a family’s cash income. The new one,
acknowledging that food has become a smaller share of poor families’ costs,
will also consider expenses such as housing, utilities, child care and medical
treatment. In gauging people’s resources, the new method will include financial
help from housing and food subsidies, in addition to money from jobs and cash
assistance programs.

CAP: Alternative measure’s “geographic
adjustments” would “present a more realistic relationship between
cost of living and what it takes to meet basic needs.” A
March 2 report
by the Center for American Progress states that a flaw
of the current poverty measurement is that it “includes no adjustment for
geographic disparities in cost of living. This means that two families with the
same income — one in
Tate County, Mississippi and the other in Seattle, Washington — are considered equally as well off despite
the fact that fair market rent for a two-bedroom
apartment is $574 per month in the former and $987 per month in the latter.” The
report notes that
the alternative
measurement would address this by including “some form of geographic
adjustments that present a more realistic relationship between cost of living
and what it takes to meet basic needs.”

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