President Obama is indeed trying to redefine poverty as we speak.
If he gets his way it will be relative but in a crazy relative way:
"By defining poverty so broadly, we drain resources that instead could be focused on those who truly are in dire straits. And we spend billions that could be cut from the budget instead.
Because we overdefine and oversubsidize “poverty,” the Census Bureau reports that we have 43 million poor people. To help them, we spend over $900 billion a year in federal and state dollars. Do the math. We spend more than $20,000 apiece for each person deemed poor. For a family of four, that’s $80,000. And it’s on top of what they may earn for themselves.
We spend it through over 70 means-tested programs that give cash, food, housing, medical care, and more. As the Census Bureau explains, “The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).”
[] “Most of the persons whom the government defines as ‘in poverty’ are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term.”
Because we define poverty in overly broad terms, the cost to taxpayers is increased and we lose focus on those who need or deserve help the most."
http://www.newsmax.com/ErnestIstook/poverty-HeritageFoundation-stimulus-spendingcuts/2011/07/19/id/404120
So what is it that Obama wants to do: He wants to change the definition of poverty so that the level of income changes automatically as the standard of living goes up. The poor might be better off tomorrow but if their neihbor is better off too then even more people would be included in the rolls of the poor. Why it is conceiveable that the poor could all be living in luxurious penthouse apartments but if other people were all living in larger or better penthouse apartments they would still be poor. Poverty could NEVER end and would always increase. The spending on an ever growing group of people would always increase while more money would be diverted away from those with true needs.
The present and proposed plans to address poverty by using too broad a definition of poverty cheats those who are really in need.
