Another method of calculating poverty is to go beyond before-tax money
income and include in-kind government benefits such as food stamps and housing
subsidies, along with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which provides cash
transfers to low-income working families as part of the tax system. Alternative
measurements that include these income sources show lower poverty rates compared
with official statistics—but again, the trend in poverty rates is quite similar
across the official and alternative measures (Short, Garner, Johnson and Doyle,
1999). We will return to this issue below.