> Is it possible that things have been this bad, and Milei’s policy changes have slowed down the economic decline enough that the poverty line is more accurate?

Possible? No. But that's the excuse they will give. It works in the first year of a new government but won't work in the second. Argentina is in recession for 5 consecutive trimester. A GDP decline of 2.6% and inflation above 100%.

I suspect how Milei would frame it is he's focusing on the currency crisis and deficit. If/when that is under control, Argentina will be more attractive to foreign capital or some other mechanism of creating better paying jobs which will alleviate poverty.

I don't think the people quoted in the article are saying the plane is going down, but rather the policies will probably get reversed due to politics.

53/42 is 26%, not 10%.

It was obvious and predictable that laying off government workers and ending various subsidy/stimulus/welfare programs would leave many people worse off in the short term. There better be a part two of this plan.

The Guardian stole the sensational headline but then buried the context. Here's the full context from the original Reuters article[1]:

> Argentina's poverty rate soared to almost 53% in the first half of the year, official data released on Thursday showed, the first hard evidence of the painful impact of libertarian President Javier Milei's tough austerity measures.

> That marked a steep jump from 41.7% at the end of last year and more than double the 26% just seven years ago, underscoring the severe cost to regular Argentines of repeated economic crises that have hammered the South American nation.

So the new austerity measures nominally increased the poverty rate by 10%, but the previous rate was already far too high and only getting higher. It remains to be seen whether Argentina can be put back on solid fiscal footing where wealth can grow, and grow equitably. But we know two things for sure: Argentina was already a wreck, and stopping runaway inflation is incredibly difficult. Argentina's inflation is/was incomparably worse to anything the US has experienced, now or historically, but if the US manages to have stemmed it's relatively mild inflation without triggering some kind of downturn (we'll know in the next few quarters) most economists will consider that somewhat surprising.

And Argentina's Gini index was already above 0.40, so it was hardly an exemplar of wealth equality. It's index is about the same as Chile, which had (until Milei) a much more conservative government and even slightly higher per capita GDP, not to mention a significantly lower poverty rate.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mileis-austerity-seen...

What kind of education is that