Most reviewers have panned the Heritage Foundation’s new immigration study. (See Keith Hennessey, for example.) Yet, Bryan Caplan notes that Robert Rector (co-author of the study) has done some excellent work demonstrating that there are not very many poor people who are deserving of our charity. For example:
The vast majority of America’s “poor” are rich by world and historic standards. 82% of poor American adults say they were never hungry during the last year because they couldn’t afford food; 96% of poor American parents say their children never went hungry because they couldn’t afford food. Half of poor Americans live in a single-family home, and 41% own their own home. Poor Americans have 60% more living space than the average European. 82% of poor Americans have air conditioning. 64% have cable or satellite T.V. 40% own a dishwasher. 34% have a T.V. that would have made billionaires drool in 1990. Materially speaking, poor Americans are doing just fine.
Furthermore, they could easily be not poor: “Most poor American adults could have avoided their situation with prudent behavior ― especially by delaying childbearing until they marry.”
[O]ver 60 percent of fathers who have children outside of marriage earned enough at the time of their child’s birth to support their potential family with an income above the poverty level even if the mother did not work at all. If the unmarried father and mother married and the mother worked part-time, the typical family would have an income above 150 percent of poverty, or roughly $35,000 per year.
But then Caplan cites Rector for lack of moral consistency. Most poor immigrants are “deserving.” Their poverty is no fault of their own.
We often hear about how hard it is to “make ends meet” these days. With the possible exception of the down turn in the economy, people have enough to live on and lead comfortable lives. It’s actually very easy to make ends meet. Just consume less than you earn and live within your means. I’ve done this for years!
I think part of the problem is that people watch television and read magazines and buy into the myth and view what is actually affluence as being the norm. It’s not that it’s hard to make ends meet; it’s that people tend to want what’s just beyond their grasp. They want the new car rather than drive the used car they can afford. They want the larger home rather than the modest home they can afford. They want over-priced clothing from pseudo-designers and the newest cell phones.
It’s easy to push the numbers around. Discounting the children who are U.S. citizens, that number would be more like 4 trillion. But torture the data a little and $6.3 is much more likely to get you headlines.
Those numbers are interesting considering 1 in 5 American children are supposedly starving. “Food insecurity” laff. I always enjoy it when people actually look at survey methods.
This family would be considered poor by many people today, a family of 4 living on 14k a year, but somehow they do it: http://www.blissfulanddomestic.com
It’s not so much that divorce is a cause for poverty, it is the loss of a potential earner from the family. I think there would be less poverty if people learned to live and work in groups, marriage is the most traditional form of this, but it doesn’t have to be the only form.
Yes, America’s poor people are in a lot better condition than most other developing countries. However, I do think it is important, for a Nation as awesome as America, to do the best for its citizens to succeed. I do think falling into poverty is easy in today’s society, and so we do need to have programs that help people break out. That said, I don’t believe in free hand out!
I am kind of skeptical of the heritage study, it not so much marriage as much as having a social-group-network that is there to take care of each other, both socially and economically. This is very much present in Asian cultures. Moreover, systems like these can exist outside of marriage.
We need to be more focused on what we are doing to get people out of poverty with more education-skill based training, and not get too fixed on how many household materials they have.
Interesting post, I wasn’t aware about the state of being “poor,” in America was better than out European peers. No less, I do think that immigrants who are coming into this country and doing low-income jobs are a different group of people. They are taking daring initiatives to find opportunities, a trait I feel many don’t have. A trait that is crucial for being an entrepreneur!
Wow, the study is interesting, even though I am not fully convinced by all of it.
The problem with this post is that it automatically deems the term poor as absolute deprivation. The developed world should have long forgotten about this type of “poverty” and measure it in more practical and relative terms. Exclusion can still very much so exist regardless of whether abject poverty still exists or not.
@Samuel: You bring up a very important point. The US has become a very individualistic society and the concept of poverty has been distorted via ideological premises that have promoted exclusion and apathy toward any form of collectivism.
As a society we don’t want to think of people going without food or being homeless. However, the state of poverty is relative. We deem babies and their mothers deserving of public medical support. We deem children deserving of free education, and their parents free of the obligation to pay for primary and secondary education. Some advocate for the poor lament the lack of free day care for most young families – although the poor receive it. Society provides housing allowances and requires cities to provide public housing. Lower-income households get Food Stamps worth hundreds of dollars per month. The working poor — all the way up to the median income are not required to pay federal income taxes. People retired today are eligible for highly subsidized medical care through Medicare. Seniors today also get far more from Social Security than they paid in. There numerous anti-poverty programs. Welfare as we know it may be gone; but it was replaced with a piecemeal welfare program.
Moral relativism is neither moral nor relevant.