Remembering Mollie Orshansky

Who invented the government's definition of poverty? Mollie Orshansky. She liked to say she was very poor, however, she managed to get a college degree in 1935 and landed a nice government job, something neither of my parents, who were about her age, were able to do during the Great Depression (extended to “great” by FDR, when the rest of the world just had a plain old depression).

Because of her research and government service, poverty will never go away, it will just get redefined with an ever rising threshold.  In fact, under Obama a higher percentage are poor than in 1965 when the War on Poverty began. If you have an ounce of common sense you know that's a lie because we have 126 federal programs that transfer money from the middle class to the bottom classes.

Here’s a bibliography of her work. http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v68n3/v68n3p79_bib.html