Experts: Gauge for poverty outdated

How does the government decide who’s poor? The same way it has for more than 50 years: By calculating the cost of a no-frills food budget from the 1950s, multiplying by three and adjusting for inflation. Many experts say the formula results in a fairly warped poverty measure. Still, that standard anchors vast amounts of research on household incomes in the United States and determines eligibility for billions of dollars in social-program spending.