This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 22nd, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

20 years since the landmark welfare reform of 1996,

what do we know about success and failure and how should we think

about reform going forward? Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the

Cato Institute. Tanner kicked off today's conference on welfare reform in the FA Hayak Auditorium.

Nobody that I know of left or right believes that the official census measurement of poverty

is a good measure of poverty. In fact, I think you find almost unanimous agreement

that it is about as bad a poverty measure

but it's going to find.

It doesn't cover either benefits or taxes in many ways.

Remember I talked about that there's this

shift from cash benefits to in-kind benefits. The official census number doesn't

count in-kind benefits. It only counts cash income. So let's say somebody was below the

poverty line and they received free housing, they get food stamps, they get a

number of other types of government benefits that actually raises their standard of living above the poverty line.

The official census number would consider them still to be poor.

It also doesn't necessarily cover taxes so you could have somebody who was above the poverty line as far as their income goes but their take home pay would take them below the poverty line and we'd consider them not poor.

So it's just a bad measurement all the way around.

Much better are some of the alternative poverty measures.

Census Bureau has its own alternative poverty measure.

And a number of social scientists have developed poverty measures as well that take these sort of benefits into account.

...