Poverty may be less than reported

Robert Rector, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, says the news is not particularly good, but that it does show a lot of information about poverty is "simply incorrect."

Rector

"The report does show that the American public is suffering a lot," he acknowledges. "But when the American public hears that there are 46 million poor people, they're thinking about people who don't have adequate housing, don't have enough food to eat and can't put clothes on their kids' back -- and the reality is that a very small number of the 46 million people that the census is identifying as 'poor' meet those conditions."

According to Rector, the overwhelming majority of poor households live in a house or apartment that is in good repair and is not overcrowded. Meanwhile, most of them have air conditioning and cable television, and half of them have a computer. Moreover, Rector says an overwhelming majority say they had enough food to eat in the last year, they were able to meet their essential needs and they got medical care when needed.

"Why is the census so inaccurate?" Rector asks. "Well, when the census defines a family as poor, they say, for example, a family of four will be poor if it has an income of less than $23,000 over the course of a year. But when they count income, they exclude almost the entire welfare state, all food stamps, all public housing [and] the earned income tax credit."

Last year, the government spent $927 billion on means-tested welfare programs providing cash, food, housing and medical care for low-income Americans. Rector says 100 million people received at least one benefit out of that means-tested system, which does not include Social Security or Medicare. The average benefit per recipient is around $9,000.

More information on Heritage's research, including links to that mentioned above, is available on the Heritage website.