I’ve been skeptical about the way the government uses data to tell us what’s really happening out there in the economy. For years, I’ve argued that the Gross Domestic Product is a flawed tool if it is used to argue how people are doing and it certainly doesn’t tell us much about the *distribution* of wealth–GDP just tells us that stuff is being made or not.

Now, the Census Bureau seems to be getting into the obfuscation business. The Bureau recently revamped the way it measures poverty–and, according to our friends at the Economic Policy Institute:

The new measures are flawed (and biased
downward) because, among other reasons, they do
not account for families’ expenses for child care
and medical care and attribute major new
categories of income (such as potential income
from home equity) to families without making the
adjustments to the poverty threshold necessary to
create a consistent measure of well-being.

Duh. Who was the genuis number cruncher who came up with the idea to ignore child care and medical care as costs that significantly hit the pocketbook of every working family? And, as for a rise in home equity being counted as income, that’s one of those statistics that may make sense to an accountant but should make any person nervous: if you sell your home, you may derive temporary income but you have to live somewhere. It’s a stretch to me that poor people are likely to flip some home to take advantage of increased home value and, then, find another home, while still pocketing some profit from the sale.

The full report can be read here.