There's a little nuance needed when it comes to poverty in the US, since it's based on a floating measure. [the following is copied from previous comments I've

There's a little nuance needed when it comes to poverty in the US, since it's based on a floating measure. [the following is copied from previous comments I've made on this subject] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/nationaldata.html http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/nationaldata.html Americans below the poverty line in 2009 are more likely to have things like complete kitchens, complete plumbing, automobiles, air conditioning, and dishwashers than Americans as a whole in 1970. Put another way, if we used the living conditions of someone at the poverty line right now and used that to define the poverty line in 1970, over half of the 1970 population would be below the poverty line. .... the definition [of poverty] is tied to CPI, which is tied to housing costs, which are more likely to include the cost of a full kitchen now than in the past especially for people near the bottom. I would argue that for someone in that position, having a full kitchen is better than not. Yet the CPI-based measure treats the cost of having a full kitchen as a negative (inflation), without treating the benefit of the full kitchen as a positive [end copied segment] Point being, the definition of "poverty" has some hidden inflation built in.