Politicians Exaggerate the Plight of the Poor

John Edwards a Democrat presidential candidate is going around the country saying that America is in the grip of a poverty crisis. According to Edwards one out of every eight Americans is in dire poverty and does “… not have enough money for the food shelter and clothing they need.”

My initial reaction to Edwards’ perspective on poverty is a combination of cynicism and concern.

The cynicism is based on the fact that during every election too many politicians use the plight of the poor for political purposes.  The politics of “class envy” has long been a favorite strategy of liberal politicians.

My concern is based on the fact that political grandstanding aside poverty is a real problem for millions of Americans. There are people who struggle daily to meet basic needs but not in the numbers that Edwards would have us believe. The statistics for people living in poverty show something decidedly different. In fact the poverty rate actually decreased last year.

According to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau the percentage of people living at or below the federal poverty rate fell from 12.6 percent to 12.3 percent for the first significant decline since 2000. While this does represent about 37 million people (about one in eight) the claim that all or even most of these people face the serious hardships described by Edwards is simply not true.

A report written by Robert Rector and published on August 27 2007 by The Heritage Foundation puts being poor in America into perspective. The report looks into the overall well-being of people who live at or below the federal poverty line and it reveals some interesting facts.

For instance according to various government reports of the 12.3 percent of the U.S. population that the Census Bureau defines as living in poverty:

• Forty-three percent actually own their own home.
• The average home owned by families living in poverty has three bedrooms with one-and-a-half baths a garage and a porch or patio.
• Almost three-quarters of poor households own a car and 31 percent own two or more cars.
• Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color TV and over half own two or more color televisions; 78 percent have a VCR or DVD player; and 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

It is also important to note that when the Census Bureau calculates the federal poverty rate it does not include benefits such as food stamps and additional subsidies for housing energy costs or healthcare in their calculation. This means that the actual purchasing power of many people classified as living in poverty is quite a bit higher than their income alone would indicate.

In other words the average person that the Census Bureau defines as living in poverty today is not facing the dire consequences described by John Edwards.

While this data gives a different perspective about the plight of most people who are defined as living in poverty what is more telling is how the demographics of poverty have changed over the last 40 years.

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty the overall national poverty rate was 22 percent in the late 1950s. This rate declined steadily to 12.1 percent by 1969. At that point about 25 percent of those living in poverty were elderly. In 2006 the poverty rate for the elderly was down to 9.4 percent yet the overall poverty rate is slightly higher than in 1969. The overall poverty rate has remained at this level primarily because of the unprecedented increase in the number of children being born out-of-wedlock and the increase in legal and illegal poor Hispanic immigrants.

In a paper published in September 2007 by the American Enterprise Institute University of Maryland Professor Douglas A. Besharov reported that if the proportion of Hispanics in the U.S. population had remained the same as in 1975 then our poverty rate would be 11.4 percent or 2.4 million fewer people living in poverty. Besharov reported that nearly one-fourth of all poor people in the U.S. are first generation immigrants and their children.

The Institute for Research on Poverty also reports that of all family groups poverty is highest among those headed by single women. In 2006 28.3 percent of all female-headed families were poor compared to 4.9 percent of married-couple families. Black families make up the largest proportion of families in poverty. Since the late 1960s the out-of-wedlock birth rate among blacks has increased from about 25 percent to almost 70 percent. As a result the poverty rate among blacks is the highest in the nation.

According to another Heritage Foundation study if poor mothers married the fathers of their children almost three-fourths would immediately be lifted out of poverty. The report also points out that if at least one adult in each of these families would work a full-time job 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of poverty.

The bottom line is that most of the poverty in America is the result of personal choices — bearing children out-of-wedlock dropping out of high school and not joining America’s workforce. Compounding that are lax immigration policies that allow high numbers of poor immigrants of which a high percentage also bear children out-of-wedlock.

These are disturbing facts about poverty and its causes that John Edwards and other politicians from both parties leave out of their campaign speeches. If they ever do start talking about work and marriage as solutions to the problem of poverty their views might be met with a lot less skepticism.