More grist for campaigns: Poverty in America rises

He adds that the Census tends to significantly undercount the number of people enrolled in Medicaid. "The Bush administration has gone out of its way" to expand Medicaid, he says.

Others, however, say the Medicaid undercount doesn't ultimately affect the numbers, since a study showed that those Americans who inaccurately report their lack of Medicaid coverage to the Census still report having some other form of coverage.

The Medicaid expansion is reflected by a somewhat smaller increase in the numbers of uninsured, says John Holahan of the Urban Institute, noting that without it, the ranks of the uninsured might have swelled to around 46 million, rather than the 45 million cited in the report.

Democratic candidate John Kerry said in a statement yesterday that the census numbers are another reason to choose him as president in November. "Today's economic numbers underscore the fundamental choice at stake in this election for the American people: four more years of an administration that puts the narrow interests of the few ahead of the interests of most Americans, or new leadership that will serve as a champion for the middle-class and those struggling to join it.

Some Democrats criticized the Bush administration for releasing the figures a month earlier than usual. Typically they are released in September.

As with health insurance, the means for arriving at the poverty numbers has long been controversial. Most experts agree that the current method is not very good. Developed in the 1960s, the poverty threshold is essentially three times the amount needed to feed a family - $18,810 for a family of four this year. It doesn't count non-cash income, such as food stamps, housing subsidies, or the earned-income tax credit, and also doesn't acknowledge regional differences in cost of living or the fact that food now constitutes a much lower portion of a family's expenses while housing and child care costs have risen.

Still, the current measure "does a pretty good job of measuring the temperature at the bottom end of the economy," says Douglas Besharov, director of the American Enterprise Institute's Social and Individual Responsibility Project.

The relatively high rate of poverty - not much different from 35 years ago - is in striking contrast to that of other industrialized nations, says Sheldon Danziger, codirector of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. "The kinds of technological change, globalization, and the reorganization of production mean that folks with the least education and skills have been left behind for the most part, even when the economy is doing well over the past 30 years."

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