I have probably mentioned that The Economist is one of the best magazines in print, and I have probably also mentioned that such a statement coming from my mouth surprises me most of all. After all, what business does a self-avowed anti-globalization liberal have advocating a magazine that champions the World Bank and the IMF as forces by which the world will be improved? Nonetheless, there is something refreshingly insightful about a magazine that describes political power and action by and large in the terms in which decisions are actually made, as opposed to the rhetoric in which they are usually couched after the fact when decisions which have already been made are finally presented to the public. There is also something startlingly refreshing about The Economist’s particular mix of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, and for good reason.

The main advantage of conservatism, back in the good old days when Reagan was president (note that only the current state of affairs could one recast the Reagan era as a golden age), was small government, the kind that left many policy decisions to the states or, even better, to the munipalities, with the goal in mind that the laws would most accurately reflect the composition of the community at a microcosmic level. Fair and good, I suppose, from a theoretical point of view. Furthermore, he believed, the government being incompetent at best in most endeavors, it should simply not get involved whenever possible. I think most of us can agree with the sentiment behind that. But now, as the Christian Right continues to become more and more influential in politics, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, conservatism has become an unthinking march toward ignorance and regression.

Luckily for me, the folks at The Economist will not see me stopping here to watch their woods fill up with snow, so I can feel relatively free to reprint without permission some of their pertinent insights about the current administration. It is important to keep in mind that the magazine is the self-proclaimed champion of the free market, a typically conservative standpoint. Thus their criticism of George Bush reveals much about the nature of Bush’s conservatism.

This month, we have a study about poverty in America, which deserves to be quoted at length. First, though, take a look at the chart, and notice the year in which poverty began rising so abruptly. Coincidence? Now read on to see what the statisticians at the magazine have to say about how poverty is measured.

Contrary to popular belief, President George Bush’s campaign against terrorism is not the first time the United States has waged war on an abstract noun. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Then, as now, the administration had some trouble defining the enemy. The poverty line it eventually adopted, a line first drawn by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration, remains in place today, adjusted for inflation, but otherwise scarcely altered. Two parents, bringing up two kids, are judged to be poor if they live on less than $18,660 a year (for an unencumbered individual under the age of 65, the threshold is $9,573). On Thursday August 26th, the Census Bureau revealed that 35.9m Americans, or 12.5% of the population, fell below this poverty line in 2003, 1.3m more than the year before.

Whatever crude logic it possessed at the time, the Orshansky poverty line is by now quite arbitrary. Its originator calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. The Census Bureau does not repeat this exercise to determine today’s poverty line; it does not recalculate the cost of an adequate diet or remeasure the share of income spent on food. It simply adjusts Ms Orshansky’s figures for inflation. Thus today’s dollar thresholds do not tell us how much a family or individual needs to get by in today’s America; they simply restate the cost of feeding a family in the 1960s in today’s prices, and multiply it by three.

As the Census Bureau is the first to concede, the poverty line is not a “complete description of what people and families need to live”. A more complete description would show that poor families now spend a far bigger share of their budget on housing (nearly 33%, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics) than on food (just 13.2%). Child care, done for free by the mothers and grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s, is now a big expense. Deducting this expense from the measured income of families would add 1.9m to the official poverty figure, according to estimates by Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution.

But a better measure of poverty would also assess the various weapons the government deploys against it. The current measure ignores non-monetary benefits, such as food stamps. Nor does it count the earned income-tax credit, a benefit paid via the tax code to the working poor, which has become every policy wonk’s favourite way to redistribute money. The Census Bureau has already experimented with such measures, and is probably itching to finally retire the Orshansky line. But its political masters in the Office of Management and Budget may be nervous of any innovation that would raise the official poverty number. To the bureau, the poverty line may be a mere “statistical yardstick”, but to the administration, it is a political stick its opponents might use to beat it with.

But if the level of poverty is fairly arbitrary, changes in the level are quite telling. Poverty fell throughout the long economic expansion of the Clinton years, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Particularly striking was the fall in poverty among single mothers and their families, from 35.6% (4.4m) in 1993 to 25.4% (3.3m) in 2000.

The bubble years were also a period of ferment in the country’s welfare laws. State handouts came with new strings and time limits attached. Single mothers were encouraged, often required, to work. In a 2000 study, Rebecca Blank, who once served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that welfare reform—both the state experiments of the early 1990s and the federal overhaul of 1996—reduced the poverty rate among female high-school dropouts by about 5 percentage points.

But the latest census figures show a partial reversal of these gains. Poverty among the households of single mothers has increased from 25.4% in 2000 to 28% in 2003. Child poverty has also increased. In retrospect it is clear that Mr Clinton signed his 1996 welfare reform at an auspicious time: the economy was creating jobs faster than people were being ousted from the welfare rolls; the states implementing the reforms were flush with cash. But as Congress now debates how to revamp and extend the law (the 1996 act was due to expire in 2002), all of these stars have fallen out of alignment.

Firms are reluctant to hire, and even when they do, they are loth to offer health insurance. Employer-sponsored health plans covered 1.3m fewer Americans last year than the year before. State governments are strapped for cash; as a result, they are cutting back on child-care assistance. Many welfare recipients are now close to using up all the months of help they are entitled to. Unfortunately, those who remained dependent on welfare when times were good are the least likely to get a job now that times are not so good.

Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th century British prime minister, likened the rich and the poor to “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were . . . inhabitants of different planets”. As a guide to the less fortunate of these two planets, the Census Bureau’s poverty figures are flawed and anachronistic. But they do show that welfare reform is not by itself enough. Unless the labour market tightens further this year, there will be many more Americans discovering the other planet for themselves in 2004.

We should keep all this in mind while counting the number of references the Republicans make to “compassion” at the convention this week.

so i guess my only question would be, is it REFRESHING?

i'd show this economist of yours to my dad, because he used to be able to hear arguments if they were presented soundly, but now he's on the "during these trying times blah blah" bandwagon and there's just no point.

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is refreshing. I did deliberately use the word twice, though as a different part of speech each time to avoid complete redundancy, because I often find myself feeling quite refreshed after reading The Economist, as though a cool Bahamanian breeze were blowing through my otherwise equatorial day.