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Measuring Poverty by Counting the Faults of the Poor

Categories: Articles:Social Justice | Published: 01/07/2015 | Views: 1646
The Government is intending to change how it measures child poverty. We will move from counting people’s ability to afford the basics of everyday life to counting a selective and set of personal characteristics which muddle the causes and effects of poverty. The question asked by the proposed measures is not “Are you poor?” it is instead “What personal flaws can your poverty be blamed on?”. (Joint Public Issues Team)

If you watch the news you would be forgiven for thinking the Government uses only one measure of child poverty when in fact there are four. (The Newsnight package here at 17 minutes is a good summary of what is regularly reported and as such is breathtakingly inaccurate.)

The Prime Minister gives the same message. In a much reported example he said “because of the way it is measured, we are in the absurd situation where if we increase the state pension, child poverty actually goes up”  Sadly he chose not to mention that the effect of raising the state pension on the measure of child poverty are tiny and that using one of the other three measures of poverty it is actually likely to reduce the measure of the number of children in poverty. Read more here

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