'Poor' Americans Have Surprising Amenities

Much has been made of the persistent poverty rate in the United States more than 50 years after President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the launch of an “unconditional war on poverty in America.”

But the actual living conditions of the more than 45 million people considered “poor” by the Census Bureau today “differ greatly” from popular conceptions of poverty, according to a report from The Heritage Foundation.

The reason: In determining who is below the poverty line, the Census Bureau considers earned income almost exclusively, ignoring nearly all government means-tested spending on the poor.

Yet U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs, in 2012 dollars, since 1964. Last year the federal government administered over 80 means-tested welfare programs providing cash, housing, food, medical care, and other social services to poor and low-income Americans.

These programs include Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, and food stamps.
“Because the official Census poverty report undercounts welfare income, it fails to provide meaningful information about the actual living conditions of less affluent Americans,” Heritage observed.

The foundation used data from various government reports to compile these eye-opening facts about “poor” Americans:

• Nearly three-quarters of households classified as living in poverty in a recent year have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more.
• 80 percent have air conditioning.
• Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television.
• Half have a personal computer, and one in seven have two or more.
• 43 percent have Internet access.
• 92 percent have a microwave.
• Nearly half live in separate single-family houses or townhouses, 40 percent live in apartments, and just 9.5 percent live in mobile homes or trailers.
• 42 percent own their own homes, and their average home has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
• Over two-thirds of their homes have more than two rooms per person.
• The average poor American has more living space than the average individual — average citizen, not average poor citizen — in France, Sweden, Germany, or the United Kingdom.
• A U.S. Department of Agriculture survey found that in a recent year, about 83 percent of poor households reported that they had enough food to eat, and 82 percent of poor adults said they were never hungry at any time in the prior year due to a lack of money for food.

“The poor clearly struggle to make ends meet, but they are generally struggling to pay for cable TV, air conditioning, and a car, as well as food for the table,” conclude Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, the report’s authors. Rector is a senior research fellow and Sheffield is a policy analyst in the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at Heritage.

“The average poor person is far from affluent, but his lifestyle is equally far from the images of stark deprivation purveyed by advocacy groups and the mainstream media.”