In the minds of most Americans, the word poverty may conjure up Dickensian images straight out of "Oliver Twist": lack of access to food, water, shelter and clothing, and basic medical care. But one of the nations leading authorities on poverty and welfare reform insists this just isnt the case.
Most of the 46.2 million persons classified as poor by the federal government live quite comfortably, he says.
Nearly all poor persons live in houses or apartments that are in good repair and not overcrowded; in fact, the dwelling of the average poor American is larger than the house or apartment of the average nonpoor person in countries such as France and the United Kingdom, says Robert Rector in an article published Thursday in National Review, summarizing data from his 2011 report published by the Heritage Foundation, "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor."
By their own reports, most poor persons in America had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and to obtain medical care for family members throughout the year whenever needed, Rector added.
Some 80 percent of poor adults and 96 percent of poor children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and is well above recommended norms in most cases, he continues. Some 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite TV; half have a personal computer; 43 percent have Internet access; and one-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
Heritage published a follow-up report Sept. 5, detailing Rectors prescriptions for tackling what he says is the major cause of child poverty: the absence of married fathers in the home. The report is titled "Marriage: Americas Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty."
Sunshine State News interviewed Rector Friday, and asked him how Floridas poor fared in comparison with those of the nation.
None of these data sets allow for any type of state breakdown. Theyre simply too small. Theyre very good at providing national figures but you cant break them down by state at all, he says. I would imagine, having looked at a lot of different data sets, that there is not a whole lot of variation. Florida is a fairly affluent state, so I would guess that Floridas poor probably look marginally better than the national figures, but not by a whole lot.
Rector made clear he has no personal antipathy toward the welfare state per se.
Im not the least bit libertarian; I very much support the welfare state he says. It is a fact that people fall on hard times; people have a limited capacity to support their children, and society believes that we can help these people out and level the playing field a bit.
But its very important to look at how we do that, he adds. If you want to level the playing field a bit and help people out who have limited capacity to sustain themselves, you have to be very careful that youre not making the situation worse by discouraging work and discouraging marriage and other behaviors that are really necessary to achieve self-sufficiency.
Rector was inspired to research poverty, its root causes, and welfare reform by what he says is continued misrepresentation of the nature of poverty in the mainstream press.
I first did this kind of research about 20 years ago. I would sit and watch the national news stories about poor people and they would feature homeless families or people living in dilapidated trailers and so forth, he says. Im a social scientist who specializes in this topic and I happen to have access to all this government data that shows that while poor people are not living the life of Riley by any stretch of the imagination, their actual living standards are very substantially higher than the typical press account suggests.
Rector admits that it is precisely the welfare state that keeps the nations poor from living up to popular stereotypes. But he insists that what government statistics are measuring is not so much true poverty (though he acknowledges that such situations do exist) but rather a lack of self-sufficiency.
The goal of the War on Poverty was not to prop up peoples living standards through a massive welfare state. Lyndon Johnson, in launching the war on poverty, said that he wanted to deal with the causes of poverty, not merely the symptoms of poverty, he explains. He went so far as to say that he intended the war on poverty to reduce the number of people who would receive welfare, and to turn the poor from tax eaters into tax payers. His goal was self-sufficiency, not welfare dependence.
We have spent over $19 trillion on the war on poverty [since 1964], and individual capacity for self-sufficiency has not increased one iota, Rector says. The problem is that the welfare state as it is currently configured actually undermines self-sufficiency by rewarding idleness, penalizing work, rewarding single parenthood, and penalizing marriage. And those factors, particularly when they pass from one generation to another so that low levels of work and the absence of marriage become norms in low-income communities, generate huge populations that are fundamentally incapable of self-support. Exactly the opposite of what Johnson was attempting to achieve.
Rector tells Sunshine State News that, where single mothers are concerned, there is a direct causal relationship between getting married and rising out of poverty. His Marriage report documents several facts that at first glance seemcounter-intuitive, but are backed up by hard data: most out-of-wedlock births occur to adult women in their 20s, and only about 8 percent of them to teenagers; the vast majority of unwed fathers are employed and make enough money to lift their children (with their unwed mothers) out of poverty; out-of-wedlock pregnancies are almost never caused by a lack of access to birth control; and the vast majority of out-of-wedlock pregnancies are not purely accidental, but are partially intended or at least not seriously avoided.
In addition to requiring all able-bodied recipients to be employed before being offered assistance, Rector proposes a five-pronged plan for the federal and state governments to combat child poverty:
- Encourage public advertising campaigns on the importance of marriage that are targeted to low-income communities.
- Provide marriage education programs in high schools with a high proportion of at-risk youth.
- Strengthen federal abstinence education programs that provide critical information on the value of marriage to adults, children, and society.
- Make voluntary marriage education widely available to interested couples in low-income communities.
- Provide marriage education materials and referrals in taxpayer-funded birth control clinics.
Reach Eric Giunta at egiunta@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.
