What would you want your legacy to be if you were nearing the end of your second—and final—term as New York's mayor? Would you want to admit that far more New Yorkers were poor than anyone expected?

"The world has changed a lot," said New York City Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs yesterday. She was announcing, at the NAACP conference in Cincinnati, New York City's proposal for a new way to decide who is and who is not poor. For 40 years, we've used a scheme invented by a nutritionist that uses as its sole criteria the cost of food; it assumed that food costs one-third of household income. But now, food costs just one-eigthth of household income. Also, you may be aware that there is sort of an issue with the cost of housing in New York City: housing is, on average, 45 percent more expensive here.

So when you run the City's new numbers, you see that not only are more New Yorkers than previously thought actually living in poverty, there also a great many more are living near poverty. There are more poor children; there are far more poor seniors. (Mostly "pharmaceutical" costs, said Gibbs.) But what gains New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, besides the appropriately heart-warming feeling of admitting the truth? "I think it's an important conversation in this presidential election," said Gibbs.

Two years ago, New York City began a process of evaluating how to count the poor. In true bureaucratic fashion, they realized the wheel had already been invented and settled on adopting a measure proposed, and never used, by the National Academy of Sciences 13 years ago.

One important thing the calculation does—barely noted in the press today—is count all aid as income. Food stamps, the earned income tax credit, Section 8 housing, or "the value of a public housing authority apartment": "All of those benefits to the household are not counted as cash," said Gibbs. "You're really understating the resources that are in the household."

Wisely and fairly, or not, all that cash is now lumped in as income. Yet even with that assistance, nearly a quarter (23 percent) of New Yorkers fall under the new poverty threshold: $26,138 a year. Under the old measure, fewer than one in five were considered "poor."

These new numbers even exclude everyone who resides in a jail or a shelter. It also remakes into households unmarried couples with children, where previously one of those people was counted as a single person; this brought the poverty rate down from nearly 19 percent to 18 percent. So every way to knock people out of the count of the poor has been accomplished, and the numbers are still absolutely disastrous.

Bloomberg said something odd on the radio on Friday; he was speaking of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and how the "welfare rolls are down 26 percent since 2002": "And [Giuliani] also started the program of trying to get people to work, with a requirement to work if they wanted help. I think it's fair to say that we've taken both of those things and we've taken them to the next level and hopefully whoever comes after us will take them to even another level ... but that was the first big reduction in the poverty numbers."

This is a funny thing to say, when the numbers used by Giuliani are now revealed to be a lie. People were actually getting poorer, while Giuliani got credit for making it look as if they weren't.

It is also a funny thing to say because the City's new numbers show that working will not keep you from poverty. "It shouldn't be that you are working full time and you still can't have your basic needs met with that income," said Gibbs. "There's a penalty in terms of taking work and you were often worse off than when receiving a package of benefits."

The welfare-to-work theory instituted by Giuliani and prolonged by Bloomberg, even the administration now admits, has a tendency to fail, when the work available cannot keep you from poverty.