The premise is that food is a smaller share of the average budget today, so multiplying a food budget by three is too low. But they don't recalculate a new food budget every year, they literally just take the number from 1963 and add inflation.
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
They don't do that, nobody does that.
I agree that the poverty line is too low, and I agree that the original idea was not supposed to mean "more than this is ok", but the argument still doesn't really make sense even if the conclusion is correct.
He isn't arguing that they do that, he's saying that if we accept that that remains a reasonable methodology to extrapolate the data, then we can use that methodology to get an updated estimate. He gets his estimate a couple of different ways, and they end up similar.
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
They don't do that, nobody does that.
I agree that the poverty line is too low, and I agree that the original idea was not supposed to mean "more than this is ok", but the argument still doesn't really make sense even if the conclusion is correct.