Portside

What could a labor radical with a doctorate in Marxian economics accomplish in the neoliberal “stop and frisk,” Bloomberg administration? The answer: reform policies he advocated, recalibrating poverty to the benefit of the poor, remain policy today.

The 2011 official poverty rate is 15.1%. The new poverty measure presented—and missed by a wide margin—the opportunity to bring into public view how widespread the problem of poverty is for American families. If what we mean by poverty is the inability to meet one’s basic needs a more reasonable poverty line would tell us that 34% of Americans—more than one in three—are poor.