By John Cranford, CQ Columnist

It’s that time of year again, when the plight of the poor in America appears briefly on the front pages of newspapers (and on general news Web sites), only to disappear again for another 12 months.

This annual emergence of poor people as a top public concern coincides with the Census Bureau’s publication of statistics about the poverty rate for the previous year. The announcement is generally accompanied by sincere hand-wringing and lately by protests that the official count of who’s poor in the United States is based on a woefully inadequate analysis.

Poverty Rates Compared

Soon, though, things may be different. The news late last month that the number of people living in poverty rose again in 2007 — as did the share of the population that is officially poor — again made headlines. But so has an effort on Capitol Hill and elsewhere to get a firmer handle on the scope of this national embarrassment.

In fact, Congress is finally paying attention to a 13-year-old recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences that calls for a thorough overhaul of the methodology for setting the poverty line.

Prodded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City has already adopted this proposed new standard and found that it paints a very different picture than do the existing statistics on poverty in the nation’s largest city.

And perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, but in many demographic groups — though not all — New York found in using its new methodology that it had significantly more poor people than were counted by official federal-government figures: more seniors, more whites, more blacks and more Hispanics. One group, which is already quite large, that didn’t appear worse off in the New York City example was children under 18. More than a quarter of the city’s kids live in poverty under either measure.

The arguments for changing the calculation are well-known to the small circle of policy advocates, think tank mavens and lawmakers who make a practice of studying — and working to eliminate — poverty. The central point is that, no matter how well-intended, the tools the government uses were accidentally derived decades ago and are outdated in their approach.

The government’s official poverty measure is based solely on the cost of a nutritious diet. Three times that amount is what constitutes the poverty line — an admittedly simplistic calculation that was first used in 1964. “It is not too strong a statement to say that, 45 years after they were developed, the official poverty thresholds are numbers without any valid conceptual basis,” Brookings Institution economist Rebecca M. Blank told the House Ways and Means Committee in July.

A New Calculation

Blank, who is on leave from the University of Michigan, where she is also co-director of the National Poverty Center, is not alone in advocating an approach that takes into account the cost of housing, energy and transportation, in addition to food. She and others also want to credit people with the value of the government benefits they receive, including food stamps, the earned-income tax credit and housing assistance — and not merely count their cash income.

It’s a persuasive argument: Using those broader sets of income and expenditure data should provide a much clearer view of where poverty exists in America and whether assistance programs are working as intended. “In a very fundamental way, our poverty statistics failed us and made it easy to claim that public spending on the poor had little effect,” Blank told lawmakers.

In fact, there’s something for almost everyone in the proposal to broaden the calculation of what it means to be impoverished. Such a change should appeal to the poor, who are likely to be better served in the end. And it should benefit middle-class taxpayers who foot much of the bill for government assistance and therefore care about the proper stewardship of limited government resources. Those reasons explain why liberal legislators such as Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington and conservatives such as Republican Rep. Jerry Weller of Illinois are on board.