A pet peeve of mine has been the way in which government statistics mislead us–and that is even without actual lying by politicians and their operatives. Take the Gross Domestic Product–it only tells you that stuff is being made, not whether the average person can pay their bills. Even when the GDP goes up, it doesn’t give a very good picture, particularly in today’s divide between rich and poor, where life is headed for most of the people.

    To help get a better picture, the good folks at the Center for Economic Policy and Research looked at the federal poverty line–and found it wanting. Instead, CEPR looked at the budgets of people to try to determine what their lives are truly like:

In the typical state, 22 percent of people in working families suffer from economic hardship because their earnings and income from other sources, including public work supports and other public benefits, fall below the basic needs budget standard for where they live. By comparison, only 12.6 percent of Americans live below the federal poverty line.

     In other words, the federal poverty line understates by almost 100 percent how many people are struggling every day to survive. And this wouldn’t surprise you, either:

The report also shows that most economically insecure workers have jobs that pay low wages and provide few or no benefits or "bad Jobs". Only a minority of jobs nation-wide are "good jobs", in other words, ones that pay at least $17 an hour and provide health and retirement benefits.

    Read the full report here. Reading it you can’t help but remember that when John Edwards was in the presidential race, poverty was a central topic–and it has now receded because each candidate is now targeting "demographics".