Is the Obama Administration Politically Manipulating the Poverty Data?

[Geee]

PJMedia:

The Census Bureau’s recently created “Supplemental Poverty Measure” (SPM) looks like a ruse to artificially show economic and poverty-reducing improvement in time for the 2012 presidential election. Longer-term, it appears to be a rigged mechanism for demonstrating how ObamaCare, assuming it survives legal challenges and attempts at repeal, is a resounding success.

If I’m right, the press is doing a really good job of setting things up. A recent Associated Press item which gained an usual amount of traction in the center-right blogosphere with an unfortunate shortage of skepticism told us that “1 in 2 Americans are now poor or low income.” SPM, which is indeed what AP cryptically referenced, radically redefines what it means to be “low income,” in the process adding almost 40 million more people to that category in 2010 compared to the number in the bureau’s official income and poverty report.

Though there are many technical and conceptual problems with the bureau’s traditional poverty measurements, the only problem that matters to Barack Obama and his reelection team is the political impact of the official poverty rate. During the supposed era of Hope and Change, the rate has stubbornly and sharply increased. In 2007, the year before the arrival of what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy since mid-2008, that official rate was 12.5%, about the same as the previous four years. After increasing to 13.2% in 2008, it zoomed to 14.3% in 2009. When it hit 15.1% in 2010, it meant that the administration’s supposedly brilliant set of Keynesian policies had essentially taken us back to where we were in the early 1990s. The official poverty rate seems virtually assured to increase yet again when the bureau releases its results in September 2012, at which point the rate will likely be higher than at any time since the mid-1960s.

To be clear, the problem from Team Obama’s perspective isn’t that more and more people are living in economic misery. (Please, with hundreds of dead bodies resulting from the Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious and the president’s 2009 advice to a daughter that her elderly mother should have been “taking painkillers” instead of having life-extending surgery, to name just two examples, spare me the garbage about Obama’s and his administration’s alleged compassion.) The real problem is that the American people have learned that more and more of their fellow citizens are economically miserable. Even worse, they will have that message reinforced less than two months before Election Day 2012 — unless something is done about how poverty is measured and reported.