Opinion | Mitch Daniels seems to misunderstand poverty

The Census Bureau issues an annual supplemental poverty measure that fully counts food stamps, rental assistance, tax credits and the like as income and that analysts generally favor, and this measure places the poverty rate for 2017 at more than 13 percent, a fact Mr. Gramm’s book doesn’t acknowledge. Mr. Gramm gets his poverty rate down to 2.5 percent — and his estimate of low-income families’ average income up to over $45,000 — primarily by taking the hundreds of billions of dollars of Medicaid and Medicare payments to health providers, dividing the amount of those payments by the number of beneficiaries and counting the result as though it were income poor households can use to make ends meet. That makes poverty appear lower and income higher.

Unfortunately, Mr. Gramm’s assertions and Mr. Daniels’s uncritical reliance on them do more to distort than to illuminate these issues.

Robert Greenstein, Washington

The writer is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Harvard Kennedy School and the founder and former president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Let me get this straight. Mitch Daniels maintained there is very little poverty and economic inequality in America because “the government takes in taxes (and borrows) from middle- and upper-income citizens” and then redistributes their wealth to lower-income citizens.

Mr. Daniels thus concluded that the government’s policy makes nearly everyone at parity for income and lifts poverty-stricken people to middle-class status. Mr. Daniels got it wrong; the opposite has occurred during the past 25 years. In that period, the number of billionaires and millionaires increased dramatically at the expense of nearly everyone else, and most wealth is now owned by the top 10 percent. Why? In large part because of President Donald Trump’s $1.9 trillion tax cut and President George W. Bush’s $2.8 trillion in tax cuts (including extensions), which benefited mostly already wealthy people. And to finance most of those tax cuts, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bush borrowed money, thus causing the nation’s debt to skyrocket.

Basically, the past quarter-century has witnessed an unprecedented upward redistribution of wealth to upper-income individuals, courtesy of the rest of us.