hurray! despite two of my attempts at a reply disappearing seems I'm finally allowed to contribute to this thread again...
citygirl said:
JP - Do you think that a family of 4 could live on 1550 pesos a month? Seriously?
Have you checked the INDEC website at all? Do you know how they define poverty and why? Do you know what percentage of the country live below this line? Do you know that the infamous 6 pesos a day (688 a month) was what INDEC defined as "abject poverty" - a level under which the family would be necessarily malnourished because it is impossible to buy adequate nutrition for less than 688 a month?
According to INDEC, several hundred thousand families already live on under 1550 a month. You are aware that Argentina is a developing country with extreme levels of poverty right? That around 8000 children die each year from malnutrition?
INDEC established a measure of abject poverty to determine how many families live beneath the threshold for any meaningful form of life. Clarin took a figure used to define "abject poverty" (indigencia) and recast the government's definition of "abject poverty" as "what the typical family spends"
And nobody bothered to question Clarin. Nobody seems to have bothered checking the sources. Why? If this was a report in the US media it would have been dissected and ridiculed within minutes. But for some reason people are all to ready to believe the worst of this government without ever thinking to question media that isn't exactly known for its objective reporting.
@El Queso
You claim that the ONLY reason the government put the line there is to boast about how low poverty figures are. Whats the basis for this assertion? Do you know anyone who works in INDEC, or in government? Do you know how this government has tackled extreme poverty? Establishing an absolute measure of abject poverty is invaluable if you actually want to tackle it. The government has various tools which it can use to combat malnutrition and extreme poverty. And they have been very successful in many respects. The universal asignacion por hijo covers 3.5 million children. Infant mortality has plummeted during the past decade.
Your friend might feel poor relative to the obscene wealth that many live in, but at 3600 he's pretty much earning the median salary in Argentina.
This is a developing country, where people starve to death. For all the shitty, illogical and infuriating things this administration has done, lifting people out of abject poverty has been one of the few things nobody should be arguing about. Claiming your friend lives in poverty earning 3600 a month when people are literally starving to death is ridiculous.
Hand on heart - how many people complaining about how "unrealistic" the government are being in their assessments have bothered to go to the INDEC website and find out what these numbers mean, how they are calculated and why?
INDEC cook their inflation figures. That is well known. But prior to them losing credibility over inflation they were known as one of the leading statistical research groups in Latin America. The staff working at INDEC are not fools, and the work they do isn't completely useless. Yes, there is an element of political control within INDEC, but discounting everything they do based on their inflation figures is extreme. I have a good friend who works in INDEC, and he gets to see first hand the impact the work he does has on budget setting, policy development and implementation. Strangely enough, his work doesn't make the front pages of Clarin.
