Follow-ups from readers to my post about the re-proletarianization of America:

Mr. Derbyshire—As a South Carolinian, I ask you to not forget our own Senator Lindsey Graham as a helpmate to Sen. Kennedy in bringing about the current immigration situation. In that President Bush was here in Columbia this weekend past at a Graham fundraiser, we had the great disappointment of having the nexus of amnesty reform in the heart of the affliction.

And:

Mr. Derbyshire—Here is another reason why the “ranks of the poor and dependent are swelling.”

The link is to a l—o—n—g (13,000+ words, 5 graphs, 3 tables) Policy Review piece about the history of attempts to measure poverty. Short version:

The U.S. federal poverty measure is premised on the assumption that official poverty thresholds provide an absolute poverty standard—a fixed inter-temporal resource constraint. Such a standard should mean that general material conditions for the poverty population should remain more or less invariant over time. Yet quite clearly, the material condition of the poverty population in modern America has not been invariant over time—it has been steadily improving. The OPR thus fails—one is tempted to say that it fails spectacularly—to measure what it purports to be tracking over time. As an indicator of a condition originally defined in 1965, the official poverty rate seems to have become an ever less faithful and reliable measure with each passing year.

[Me] Yes, but (as, to be fair, the Hoover report takes pains to point out) there’s always something relative about poverty. The middle-class family of 1950 would look poor today in many respects; and Gibbon notes that the plutocrats of ancient Rome had “neither glass in their windows nor cotton on their backs.” When I drive through the poor section of my own town, as I do every time I take my son to football practice, it definitely looks poor. To reflect, as I occasionally do, that by every metric known to man, these people are far, far better off than my parents were in 1950, does nothing to erase the impression.