The release of the new poverty data on Friday—just in time for those of us with money to forget about it over the weekend—inspired me to pull out my calculator and do a little math.

The Post ran some slicing and dicing of the numbers, but didn’t give me what I was looking for, so I popped on over to the Census web site and got the full report. In summary, 12.1% of us—ballpark 34,570,000 Americans—are officially poor.

So what does it mean to be poor? If you live by yourself, it means you make less than $9,359 a year. Unless you’re over 65, in which case you’re deemed able to get by on $8,628 a year. But if you’re in a family of two, you’re poor if you pull down $11,756 per annum, or about six grand each. The scale goes up to “nine people or more” at $37,062, which works out to just over four grand each (forgetting about the “or more” part for the moment).

Really, the table is much more complex than this, and includes various columns for non-wage-earning kids, so take my word for it that this is just the gist.

A few pages later, we learn that of those 34 million in poverty, 24,534,000 people live in 7,229,000 poor families, the rest being singly impoverished.

Another subset of poverty: 14,068,000 people make less than half the poverty threshold, with the rest being between half and 100% of the poverty line.

So, what’s the point of these numbers?

My question is, what’s the aggregate amount of money that the poor are falling short of being not impoverished? Since the numbers are different for the singles and the families, we have to work that out separately.

There are 10,036,000 single poor. Their per capita poverty deficit is $4,798. So this group is collectively falling short by $48,152,730,000.

For the 24 million and change who are in poor families, they’re short by $2,123 each. So this group needs $52,085,680,000 to be on the poverty line.

So we have a nice round number of around $100 billion to make all of these people just barely poor. If you want to make them officially not poor, crank this number up to $125 billion, and everyone’s falling on the official line of “nearly poor”. (Skipping for the moment that this leaves out the currently nearly poor, which is 13 million other folks.)

That’s it. You want to declare war on poverty, and pretending for a moment that we had the political will to do so by just handing out checks, it would cost between $100 and $125 billion. Comparing this to a few other numbers currently in the news: $77 billion spent so far turning Iraq into rubble. $87 billion proposed to rebuild the rubble. $396 billion proposed for the Department of Defense, in addition to the Iraqi supplementary.

So… do you think we have our priorities straight?