Dr. Laden said the study supported what the federal scientific advisers had advocated: lowering the air quality standard below the present 15 micrograms per cubic meter.
Even if the recommendation is adopted, leading to a poverty threshold of $22,841 for a family of four, the official poverty measure will still be a measure of deprivation and severe hardship rather than a minimal, decent standard below which no one should fall.
Schwartz predicts that CASAC will recommend that EPA officials tighten the standard below 60 ppb in 2013.
Although her EPA predecessor, Lisa Jackson, had once proposed a standard below 70 ppb, McCarthy rebuffed a suggestion that regulatory costs might have influenced her decision to go with 70 ppb.
The absence of a fingerprint check alone dropped Uber's standard below that of taxicab companies, which are mandated in California to run fingerprint checks on drivers.
The idea is similarly implicit in an international anti-poverty NGO's suggestion that the post-2015 framework should be underpinned by "the idea of a social floor a minimum standard below which people should not be expected to live" [ 74].
