The Census Bureau recently released a new, Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which will provide an alternative to (but not supplant) the official measure created in 1964 and considered outmoded and inaccurate by many experts.
The SPM takes into account both resources and expenses excluded from the official measure, such as tax credits and child care expenses.
And it is a work in progress that incorporates the combined wisdom of decades of analysis and which will be refined as needed with input from many experts, including those at the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP).
Over the years, IRP has helped inform major efforts to improve the official measure that ultimately guided development of the SPM.
In the early 1990s, IRP affiliates helped develop National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations, which remain the gold standard, and, a decade later, IRP researchers served on the Committee on National Statistics that updated NAS’s plan.
Most recently, IRP Director Timothy Smeeding co-organized with the Census Bureau and Brookings Institution a May 6, 2010, gathering of experts in Washington to evaluate the new SPM. The first alternative statistics will be published in fall 2011, alongside the official data, the latter of which will still be used for determining government program eligibility.