Visualizations : Ownership of Property and Consumer Goods in Poor Households : If these "poor" families making less...

This data shows how many “poor” families own homes and other consumer goods.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg2064.cfm#_ftn9

“Anonymous” made the comment: "When you put the word poor in quotes, what’s your point? That a family scraping by on $20,000 a year has a cushy life because they have a refrigerator? I mean really, do you expect people to use iceboxes or something?
Posted Saturday September 15, 1:00 AM

Response:

cgreen says:
Anonymous, the point of putting “poor” in quotes is contained in the entire study, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg2064.cfm#_ftn9

Did you read it all? Or did you just have a knee-jerk reaction?

One of the points made was that some families “scraping by” on $20,000 actually get much more than that in benefits, which are not counted in the assessment of “poor”. For example food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and $600B a year of other benefits are not counted when determining a families income and poverty level.

I noticed you chose to point out the “refrigerator”, which most people would consider a necessity for keep food from spoiling. The chart shows that 99% of the so-called poor have one. So the point of the visualization is to point out that the so-called “poor” in America are better off than the average person in many countries,and better off than the average person in America’s past.

I note you you did not choose to discuss that 62% of the poor have Satellite or Cable TV, or that 25% of them have Large Screen TVs. You also did not note that 36% have a Personal Computer, 70% have Air Conditioning, and 42% own their own home.

For example, did you read the following quote from the study:

“For most Americans, the word "poverty” suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. But only a small number of the 37 million per­sons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity. Most of America’s “poor” live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago. Today, the expenditures per person of the lowest-income one-fifth (or quintile) of house­holds equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation."

However, probably the most useful part of the study, beyond just exposing the liberal media and politicians on this issue, is the analysis of causes and pointers to solutions:

"Of course, the living conditions of the average poor American should not be taken as representing all the poor. There is actually a wide range in living conditions among the poor. For example, a third of poor households have both cellular and landline telephones. A third also have telephone answering machines. At the other extreme, however, approxi­mately one-tenth have no phone at all. Similarly, while the majority of poor households do not expe­rience significant material problems, roughly 30 percent do experience at least one problem such as overcrowding, temporary hunger, or difficulty get­ting medical care.

The remaining poverty in the U.S. can be reduced further, particularly poverty among chil­dren. There are two main reasons that American children are poor: Their parents don’t work much, and fathers are absent from the home.

In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year: That amounts to 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year— nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.

Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

While work and marriage are steady ladders out of poverty, the welfare system perversely remains hostile to both. Major programs such as food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage. If welfare could be turned around to require work and encourage marriage, poverty among children would drop substantially."

America’s poor compare favorably with the gen­eral population of other nations in square footage of living space. The average poor American has more square footage of living space than does the average person living in London, Paris, Vienna, and Munich. Poor Americans have nearly three times the living space of average urban citizens in middle-income countries such as Mexico and Turkey. Poor American households have seven times more hous­ing space per person than the general urban popu­lation of very-low-income countries such as India and China. (See the appendix table for more detailed information.)

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg2064.cfm

The World’s Wealthiest Poor
By Bill Steigerwald
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=36BD9AB4-3667-48FC-A5FE-A89757979301

Q: Are these 37 million officially poor people the same people year after year, decade after decade?

A: Not exactly. Some of them are just down there temporarily. Others tend to be in poor or near-poor status for a long time. That would tend to be true of single mothers, for example. … But vis-a-vis the single mothers, it’s important to understand that 38 percent of all children are born to a mother who is not married and in half of the cases she is actually living with the father and the couple will express an interest in marriage but it never actually happens. One of the simplest and most important things we could do to reduce child poverty would be to go and communicate to those couples — all of whom are low-income — the importance of marriage for their own well-being and for the child’s well-being.

Q: You don’t make these numbers up — you rely on information provided by the Census Bureau. So how does this myth of the poor never seem to be debunked or straightened out in the media?

A: All of the data I provide come directly from government surveys. Those government surveys are not heavily publicized by the media, because since the beginning of the War on Poverty the politically correct thing to do is to just exaggerate the amount of poverty that exists in the United States as a way of encouraging more welfare spending.

Your methodology is poor and your grammar needs help. My family was “poor” as you put it, making about 10K between both parents. We had a dishwasher (garage sale), color tv (garage sale), two cars (about 15 years old, always broke), a refridgerator (garage sale), washer/dryer (garage sale), air conditioning (always broken, but we would have claimed on a census survey), landline (often cut off). Our house actually had no central heat, because when it broke, we could not afford to fix it. Electricity often shut off. We had no insurance and could not afford to go to the doctor. I currently have health and dental problems as a result. We were often out of food.

Your survey does not tell the whole story. Feel glad that you have never been poor, and hopefully never will be poor and even gloat it over the rest of us. But, it is really disturbing that you would deny health insurance to someone because they have a refrigerator.

I have been to other countries and seen non-u.s. poverty. You know what? It makes me even more ashamed that my rich and plentiful homeland can’t make sure kids get food and health care. In some other countries, the resources simply don’t exist. Here they do. It is sickening that we don’t use them properly.

wah wah
I was poor when I was younger too, and had used appliances and cars that broke down occasionally. The point of the study still stands: the so-called “poor” in America have a lot of things that the really poor elsewhere in the world can only dream about. Then the liberal politicians come to my door and ask me to pay for health insurance for the guy next door making $83,000 with a jet ski in his driveway!

I would rather have health care made more affordable to all, and keep the Bush tax cuts in place to keep the economy strong and jobs growing, rather than confiscate from the producers of society.