We should also point out that some scholars reject the notion of “near poverty” as a quantifiable classification of economic status altogether. Robert Rector at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, for instance, told the New York Times in 2011, “I don’t have any objection to this measure if you use the term ‘low-income.’ But the emotionally charged terms ‘poor’ or ‘near poor’ clearly suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist. It is deliberately used to mislead people.”[13]
Conclusion
Where does this leave us with Stein’s claim that “one in two Americans remain in or near poverty”? We found it to be untrue according to most conventional measures and definitions of near poverty. The official Census Bureau measure got us nowhere near 50 percent of the population when combined with any of the commonly used definitions of near poverty. Moreover, if we combined the SPM with the commonly-used definition of near poverty as between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty line, it comes out to only 32 percent of the population, or roughly one in three Americans.
