Today, the U.S. Census Bureau released a long-promised alternative method for measuring who’s officially considered poor and who isn’t. The old approach, established 50 years ago, set the poverty line for a single parent with two kids just below $18,000.

The calculation was pegged to one thing: food costs as a share of annual income. It didn’t take into consideration hundreds of billions of dollars the needy get in food stamps and other benefits – or whether one lives in an expensive city or a cheaper, rural area. The new metric is aimed at providing a more accurate count of the resources poor people have and the bills they’re saddled with.

What difference does it make how poverty is quantified? Policy makers will use the new – and hopefully improved – system to better evaluate and target federal aid programs designed to help those who need it the most.

In September, the Census Bureau said that the number of poor Americans had risen by nearly 10-million since 2006 to 46.2 million people. But most poverty experts called the measure flawed.

WEIGH IN:

Will the Bureau’s new Supplemental Poverty Measure give us a more accurate picture? Will it alter dramatically who’s eligible for benefit programs? Dollar figures aside, what does poverty look like to you? Does your simplified lifestyle seem like hardship to others? Where do you draw the line between “near poor” and impoverished?

Guest:

Kathy Short, Economist, United States Census Bureau