Memo On Poverty In America

This memo is to inform you the complexity of poverty and how it affects multiple aspects of our economy and specific groups. Poverty is known as the economic deprivation of resources to certain demographics of the population. There are two basic types of poverty measure which are absolute measure and relative measure. In the handbook named “Poverty in America” by John Iceland. Absolute measure is counts all the basic and necessary needs a family needs and it stays the same over time. Relative measure defines poverty as a condition of comparative disadvantage which is evolving to fit the standard of living. A poverty line is based on the level of family resources deemed necessary to live within a minimal standard of living. Annual surveys are given out to households to collect data to dictate statistics of individuals using the tax information by the IRS. “The most widely used sources of data and statistics on household income and its distribution are the annual survey of households conducted as part of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Statistics of Income (SOI) data compiled from a large sample of individual income tax returns. The Census Bureau publishes annual reports on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States based on the CPS data,2 and the IRS

This measure is officially used as an absolute measurement of poverty. The official poverty measure was first introduced in the 1960s, and created by a women named Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration. The threshold that the official poverty measure uses is the 1963 minimum food plan times three as a three person household. One of the big benefits of the official poverty measure is that it was simple, minimum and straightforward on what was factored in the measurement and add all the basic emergency necessary that a family