[Alabama] Report sheds light on poverty

from The Cleburne News

“Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person.”
The Alabama Povery Project’s recent report “The Picture of Poverty” reveals some interesting myths and facts about povery and welfare as well as an assessment of Cleburne County.

Among some of the myths looked at in the report are:

*Most poor are lazy and don't want to work.

*Most of the poor get welfare, so the aren't really suffering.

*Most of the poor are better off than the rest of us because the government pays them to lie around and have more babies. But we ordinary tax payers can't afford to have more kids because the government won't subsidize us like they do the "welfare queens."

*Families on welfare eat better than those of us who work for a living. If they didn't buy all the junk food and steaks they do and managed their money better, they wouldn't be poor.

The facts, they found, are: *In 1990, 60% of the poor in the U.S. were not able to work due to their age (too young or disability, or the lack of jobs. All of these are circumstances clearly beyond the control of the individual.

*Most poor citizens do not receive aid from the government, either because they are not eligible, not willing to apply, or do not know that they are eligible. In Alabama, only a minority of welfare recipients receive any cash aid at all. Among those who do receive AFDC payments, an average of $29 per child each month or $348 a year was paid (1990). Compared to the income tax deduction of $2,450 per child, it is clear that the middle classfamilies have more government- supplied incentive to have kids than the poor do. In fact, the fertility rate of women on welfare is less than the fertility rate of all U.S. women of child bearing age.

*The average Food Stamp allotment in 1990 was 79 cents a meal per person. For a poor person, no amount of "good management" can result in sufficient nutritious meals throughout the month while on Food Stamps. We imagine what we see someone buy on food stamps is what they buy every week, but most food stamp recipients do one big shopping trip a month and try to make it last through the month.

Why do myths persist?

*The media perpetuate mythic images of "welfare queens" by running the same tired stories, and presenting as the norm a black family with four kids, allconceived by different fathers and all of them born while the welfare. The next time you see a welfare story in the newspaper or on TV, look critically at the images they are presenting to you. Absent are the laid-off workers, the sick and disabled, and the unemployed workers who are poor and need help.

*We want to believe myths. We are not mean-spirited people, but we all fear the possibility of being poor. By demonizing the poor, it allows us to believe that "We will never be poor, because we are not like those people." But in fact, we are. In a 25-year study of the American families done by the University of Michigan, at some moment in those years fully one-quarter of all families studied experienced poverty.

*Politicians profit from encouraging myths. When is the last time a politician got elected for telling a truth we did not want to hear? In the case of welfare myths, politicians can balance the budget on the backs of the poor, and we will support this.

More Facts on Poverty

*Most recipients of welfare are not black, contrary to our myths. While people of color are disproportionately poor in the U.S., they are not the majority of the poor, nor are they themajority of welfare recipients.

*Most people are poor because they have experienced the loss of a job, reduced wages, or the loss of a wage-earner in the family. Divorce, desertion, health crisis, job loss, and unemployment are the most common reasons people in the U.S. are poor.

*Most welfare spending in the U.S. has been health care assistance to the aged poor and disabled (the Majority of Medicaid spending), and not to poor families in general.

*Getting a job will not end poverty for most people in the U.S. because many of them already work. They just don't earn enough to stop being poor. Workfare is not a solution to the problem of part-time, low-wage jobs that do not pay enough to support the families of their workers. When workfare stops subsidizing childcare after the first year on the program, not many moms will be able to keep those low-wage jobs without the subsidized childcare.

*Most welfare recipients are not teenage moms, as the media hype and recent myth-driven welfare reforms tend to indicate. In fact, no more than 7% of the U.S. welfare families are headed by a teen mom.

Said the report, “Of the state’s many liabilities, none is more significant than its long heritage of poverty. Varying from 14 to more than 20 percent, Alabama’s poverty rate continues to be among the nation’s highest. Affecting nearly equal numbers of blacks and whites, urban dwellers and rural people, the one aberration in statistics seems to be age. Alabama’s poorest residents are its youngest and oldest. What does it say about the moral values of a society when its poorest, least powerful, most neglected people are its children and its senior citizens?”

The study found that in 2000, 314,897 Alabamians lived with incomes below 50 percent of the poverty threshold. A total of 698,097 lived below poverty.
In Cleburne County, (in 2000), 1,716 of the white population lived below the poverty level while 161 blacks fell into that category. Some 2,778 lived below the 125 percent of the poverty threshold.

There were 108 female-headed familes with children under 18 below the poverty threshold.
The study also found 2,407 residents Medicaid eligible. The county has a 19.6 infant mortality rate and only three physicians serving the area. The ratio of physicians to the population is 1/4,881.

The report noted per capita income for Cleburne County is $14,762 with a median household income of $30,820. Average number unemployed is 380 and 1,327 households with no earnings, 110 with public assistance and 928 in poverty who are too young or too old to work.