From Johnson's War on Poverty to Trump's War on the Poor

The Trump administration has proposed a change in the way the federal government measures poverty. On the surface, this proposal may appear to be an innocuous, technical adjustment. It’s not. Instead, this change would dramatically reduce the number of people who qualify for vital basic assistance programs, including Medicaid, children’s health care and food assistance.

To understand what is happening, it helps to remember how the official poverty measure was first created.

The first U.S. poverty measure was a simple calculation. In the mid-1960s, a Social Security Administration researcher took a Department of Agriculture survey of household food consumption and found that a typical family of three or more spent about one-third of its post-tax income on food. The SSA then used USDA’s “economy” meal plan—a diet that would be nutritionally adequate in temporary or emergency situations—and multiplied that cost by three. That back-of-the envelope measure, which wasn’t based on an explicit accounting of costs for housing, health care, or anything other than food, is still effectively our baseline for measuring poverty.

  Politico

No wonder the poverty line is ridiculously low. "Temporary or emergency" situations, and even then, for food only.

So, what is the Trump administration proposing instead? Rather than updating the outdated measure itself, the proposal would change the inflation measurement to one that grows more slowly than CPI. That means that even if their incomes remain too low to meet basic living standards, fewer and fewer Americans would fall below the slower-growing poverty line over time. They would then cease to be eligible for public safety net programs designed to serve low- and moderate-income people, something the administration itself acknowledges in its proposal. According to a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, at least 250,000 seniors would receive less help in paying for prescription drugs, 300,000 children would lose their health insurance and hundreds of thousands of people would lose food assistance.

[...]

In fact, over 80 federal programs and policies use some form of the official poverty measure, including the Children’s Health Insurance Program, public housing programs and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Millions of people who are struggling will lose access to these programs, causing greater poverty and hardship for millions of children and families.

I don't understand what they think people will do when pressed into dire straits. The article is titled A cynical way to make poor people disappear. They won't disappear. The question is: what WILL they do?

h/t Sara Kendzior

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.