Poverty?

The buero of census ("Statistisches Bundesamt") has released a study that is now heavily touted in the media.

It says that 10.7 million Germans (or 13 percent of Germany's population) live in poverty.

What strikes me as totally odd is their definition of poverty: "Has to make do with less than 60 percent of the average German income". The better news outlets actually do not omit this fact (see for example tagesschau.de for a rather good and balanced description of the study, although their headline still is "10.7 million Germans live in poverty").

So if you have 10 percent of the population with an annual income of 1 million and 90 percent make 30,000 a year, then 90 percent live in "poverty"!

This discussion is very counterproductive. I'd like to see poverty defined as
the unability to afford or unavailability of at least one of these three:

• reasonable food and drink
• a home that deserves the name,
• medical insurance

There are people in Germany that do not have these. Please discuss what to do about those! That has the advantage that there are way fewer of those, so it is actually a problem that could be solved by public effort.