[Comment] ALABAMA VOICES: Americans' poverty more than simple material want

From The Montgomery Advertiser



By John R. Hill

When you imagine poverty in America, what comes to mind? A rundown mobile home in the Appalachians? A cramped apartment in Los Angeles with a box fan in the window? A hungry child with no toys for Christmas?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 37 million Americans were in poverty in 2004, up 1.1 million from 2003. But what do these Americans look like? In 1999, Robert Rector and his associates at the Heritage Foundation tried to answer that question by using the detailed responses given by householders in a survey by the U.S. Department of Commerce. What they discovered just might shred your stereotype of the typical American person in poverty.

According to government data, the typical poor American very likely owns his own home (46 percent do). It has three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a garage and a porch or patio. It has air conditioning (76 percent) and is in good repair. There is enough space in the home for everyone living there (94 percent). In the garage, there is at least one car (75 percent).Inside, the typical poor American has a color TV (97 percent) connected to a satellite dish or cable connection (62 percent), as well as at least one VHS or DVD player (78 percent). In his kitchen, he has a microwave oven (73 percent) and a pantry with enough food that he and his family do not go hungry (89 percent).

If he or one of his children needs medical attention, he is able to get it (96 percent or better for children, 88 percent or better for adults, depending upon the service needed). And, in the past year, the average poor person has made enough money to meet his essential needs (84 percent). Even if he is among the lowest 20 percent income earners in the country, his per-person expenditures are equal to those of the average American family in the 1970s, even after adjusting for inflation.

Granted, these findings do not represent all of America's poor. Because living conditions vary widely for all poor persons, about one in three poor households suffers from at least one chronic hardship, such as crowded living conditions or lack of access to medical care. Nevertheless, America's free market economy has made it possible for almost all of us to no longer suffer from a deprivation of goods and services. In Rector's own words: "While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians."

For most Americans in poverty, a lack of stuff is not the problem; rather, poverty is a symptom of greater, less tangible forms of impoverishment. For many of America's poor, there is a poverty of family. In nearly two-thirds of all poor households, children grow up with no father present, and the number of children born out of wedlock increases by an average of 1.3 million per year. In Alabama, female-headed households with children are six times as likely to live in poverty as compared to married couples with children.

Depriving a family of a father has serious financial consequences. According to the latest poverty data from the U.S. Census Bureau, homes where only the mother is present have to get by on less than half the income of households where both the mother and father are there. If, according to Rector, female householders were able to marry the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters of all children in poverty would be lifted out of it immediately.

Likewise, some of America's poor households have an impoverished work ethic. According to another report published by Rector and Heritage Foundation researcher Rea Hederman Jr. in 2003, "the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year; that amounts to only 16 hours of work per week." If only one adult in this household worked 2,000 hours per year -- a full 40-hour work week for 50 weeks a year -- almost 75 percent of children living in these households would begin living above the poverty line.

Granted, welfare-to-work efforts like the 1996 reform of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) have lowered single-parent poverty rates in Alabama to about half their number in 1995. Nevertheless, almost half of all adult TANF beneficiaries are doing nothing to create their own self-sufficiency.

The abundance of goods necessary to a comfortable life in most of our poorest households should tell us that America's war on material poverty is largely over. Now that the poor have the essentials they need to survive, America's leadership should insist that they also be given opportunities for self-determination by requiring work for their welfare and encouraging strong, stable, two-parent families in which to raise a generation of children that need not suffer poverty.

John R. Hill is research director at the Alabama Policy Institute. Write him at 402 Office Park Dr., Suite 300, Birmingham AL 35223.