Study shows official measures of American poverty off-base

For more than 45 years, the poor in this country have been identified by the U.S. Census Bureau's Official Poverty Measure — a tool that determines America's poverty rate based on pretax money income, which does not reflect all the resources at a family's disposal.

That method of calculating who is poor and who is not has been under fire by researchers for years because it doesn't calculate the benefits of anti-poverty programs — such as food stamps and housing subsidies — into its formula. In response to the criticism, the Census Bureau released in fall 2011 the Supplemental Poverty Measure to more accurately assess poverty in America. A culmination of more than three decades of research on poverty measurement, the supplemental measure is used as a complement, not a replacement, for the Official Poverty Measure.