-
City Hall Dispatch: New poverty measure
Today's Washington Post, in an article about Mayor Bloomberg's new poverty measure, says,
But Bloomberg's aides said that while food accounted for a third of household spending in the 1960s, food now accounts for only an eighth of spending, with housing and transportation taking a larger slice of income. The new measurement, put together by New York's Center for Economic Opportunity, takes into account a household's spending on food, clothing, shelter, transportation, utilities and out-of-pocket medical expenses.
This is interesting. There has been so much ink spilled recently about food prices rising, so it's a bit jarring to read that they have actually dropped as a percentage of household income by nearly 20 percentage points.
If I had to guess, my hunch would be that all other household expenditures--rent, energy, gas, health care, etc, have been rising pretty steadily through the years, while food prices have just undergone a rapid increase, leading to a similar rapid increase in alarming newspaper articles
---David Freedlander
- Follow Us
advertisement | advertise on am New York
advertisement | advertise on am New York
Partners
Search cars
