Obama re-election theme: Champion of the middle class [Reader Post]

Obama plans to shift this country’s definition of ”poor” and near-poor” from the super-high ”nearly half of the country,” to a much lower number when the US Census comes out a few week prior to the 2012 election.
Cool, huh?
He ”saved” us!
(On paper.)

Robert Rector of the NYPost touched on this last week.

New Yorkers can be forgiven for shock at the newspaper headlines last week informing them that millions more of them were “near poor” or “low income.” They might relax a bit on learning that the “root cause” is simply new definition of poverty from the Census Bureau.

Indeed, under the Census definition, a family in New York City is “near poor” if it has full medical insurance and an annual income below $77,000. (In Oakland, Calif., the figure is $88,000!)

The Census report actually put nearly half the US population as “low income”

In fact, it was a surreptitious and dubious shift by the Obama administration, setting the “near-poverty” income level very close to the median-household income in most communities. (“Median income” is the point at which half the households have more income, and half have less.)

if you define “near poverty” as an income roughly equal to the median, that means that by definition nearly half the population will always be “poor” or “near poor” — regardless of any changes in actual living standards.

Obama’s new poverty measure will produce very odd results. For example, if the real income of every single American were to magically double overnight, the new measure would show no drop in poverty or “near poverty,” because the poverty- and near-poverty income thresholds would also double.

In other words, the president has introduced a statistical trick.….designed to promote Obama’s obsession to “spread the wealth.” By suggesting that many more Americans are poor or near-poor, the Census generates political pressure to raise taxes and expand the welfare state.
….
[T]here is a huge gap between poverty as it is understood by most Americans and “poverty” as defined by the government. And now Obama has widened that gulf.

Under this new, propaganda-driven definition of poverty, the gap between common-sense and government poverty statistics will grow much larger. The Obama administration is twisting statistics to confuse voters, rather than providing accurate information.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/team_poor_trick_hmh726JdxaRenT0G6T0HCL#ixzz1hqWYXoLO

Tom Blumer of PJMedia took this to the next level….

The Census Bureau’s recently created “Supplemental Poverty Measure” (SPM) looks like a ruse to artificially show economic and poverty-reducing improvement in time for the 2012 presidential election. …..

SPM’s consideration of taxes will help Obama’s reelection campaign if (and I believe it’s more like when) the Census Bureau surprises everyone and releases its related report in October of next year instead of November, as it did this year, and attempts with media help to give it greater credibility than the official measurement.

By far the largest tax low-income families pay is the payroll tax.
In 2011, that tax was reduced by two percentage points.

As a result, when next year’s SPM report comes out, millions of Americans will no longer be “low income” under its framework.

I can imagine the campaign verbiage already: “Who first broached the idea of eliminating part of the payroll tax? Why, it was Barack Obama, who singlehandedly moved millions into the middle class in one bold move, undoing much of the damage of the past decade’s misguided policies.”….

It must be nice to be able to create your own customized measurement to arrive at the conclusions you want.
Don’t be deceived, and don’t let your friends be fooled.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-the-obama-administration-politically-manipulating-the-poverty-data/?singlepage=true

@Ditto:
Read the 2nd link I posted from the source.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-the-obama-administration-politically-manipulating-the-poverty-data/?singlepage=true
Obama’s TRICK will be to suddenly change the way poverty is measured (the new, “Supplemental Poverty Measure” ) so as to appear to cut poverty rates in the USA sharply!
Bet on these new, dramatically improved numbers to come out in time for them to help Obama in his re-election.

The ”poor & near-poor” numbers we now use, under Obama, are artificially inflated to reach up to almost 1/2 of all Americans.