BEND, Oregon – I’m on the other side of the country this week, attending a conference at the Sunriver Resort in the Cascade Mountains. It’s picturesque and about 15 degrees cooler than Raleigh.
But in my defense, I’ll be spending most of my time inside (where there’s a lovely view of a snow-capped mountain through the window…)
Okay, go ahead and hate me. I can take it.
I’ll be back at the keyboard soon enough. In the meantime, I’d like to call your attention to a new study from the Heritage Foundation. It concerns a longstanding complaint of mine: the poor state of poverty statistics. From the executive summary:
What Does It Mean to Be Poor in America?
Each year for the past two decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in “poverty.” In recent years, the Census has reported that one in seven Americans are poor. But what does it mean to be “poor” in America? That’s the question examined by Robert Rector, a senior research fellow, and Rachel Sheffield, a research assistant, at the Heritage Foundation.
To the average American, the word “poverty” implies significant material deprivation, an inability to provide a family with adequate nutritious food, reasonable shelter and clothing. The actual living conditions of America’s poor are far different from these images.
• According to the government’s own survey data, in 2005, the average household defined as poor by the government lived in a house or apartment equipped with air conditioning and cable TV.
• The family had a car (a third of the poor have two or more cars).
• For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, a DVD player and a VCR.
• If there were children in the home (especially boys), the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.
• In the kitchen, the household had a microwave, refrigerator, and an oven and stove.
• Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone and a coffeemaker.
The home of the average poor family was in good repair and not overcrowded. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average (non-poor) European. The poor family was able to obtain medical care when needed. When asked, most poor families stated they had had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs, say Rector and Sheffield.
Although the overwhelming majority of the poor are well housed, at any single point in time during the recession in 2009, around one in 70 poor persons was homeless.
I’ve written about the nation’s flawed poverty measurements a number of times. For example:
Let’s break down those poverty statistics. When it is reported that North Carolina’s poverty rate has risen above 14 percent, that does not mean that 14 percent of our state’s households are full of destitute, starving people trapped in the underclass. First, only pre-tax cash income reported to the government is used to estimate poverty. If a household receives free health care, free child care, free food, and free housing, this will obviously boost its standard of living significantly without showing up in income data.
Off-the-books income is also an important fact of life for many, as are support from relatives, the ability to tap savings, and the ownership of homes, cars, and other assets. Given that some expendituresurveys show living standards for “poor” families to be at about 40 percent more than their reported income, it should not be surprising that more accurate measurements find poverty rates far lower than officially reported.
Moreover, these poverty rates are snapshots in time. Most spells of poverty are relatively brief, a few months in length. There is a core group of households considered “chronically poor,” but the rate is in the neighborhood of 2 percent.
Another consideration is that poverty isn’t a disease you catch or the product of exploitation by the capitalist class. It is strongly associated with a failure to build human capital, often due to unfortunate choices made by young people who aren’t thinking clearly about their future. Even using the flawed Census data, the U.S. poverty rate is only about 4 percent for two-parent families with children in which at least one parent works full-time, about 3 percent if the other parent works part-time, and lower still if both parents are high-school graduates. It is at least conceivable – if hard to accomplish through public policy – for fewer youths to drop out of school, have children out-of-wedlock, and fail to develop work skills and experience. Thus, it is conceivable to reduce poverty markedly.
Conceivable, that is, if you think clearly and critically about the nature and causes of American poverty.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.