Our previous research argued that interest payments on consumer debt should be subtracted from household income to measure poverty. We estimated 4 million additional poor Americans in 2007, calling them "debt poor." This paper finds that the debt poor are somewhat like the poor (they are...

This paper updates and extends my earlier work on how the middle class fares throughout the world based on the microdata sets that comprise the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). Wave #6 LIS data, recently released and centered around 2004, provides an opportunity to assess what has happened to the...

This paper examines how consumer debt impacts middle-class households. Interest payments on this debt reduce spendable income and household living standards. We argue that it is necessary to account for interest payments on consumer debt when measuring income inequality and the size of the...

This paper discusses the regressive nature of tax exemptions for children compared to child allowances and estimates the decline in child poverty in several developed countries due to child allowances. The paper then estimates the decline in child poverty in the United States due to tax...

Our previous work argued that the official U.S. poverty definition is flawed because it ignores interest paid on household debt. When it was developed in the early 1960s, this was not a problem because U.S. households had little consumer debt. Today, most households have considerable consumer...