Myth: Severe poverty requires government action

Liberal myth

Because so many Americans are mired in poverty, we need more expansive government programs to relieve their plight.

The facts

Material hardship clearly exists in the United States, but it is quite restricted in scope and severity.

• Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

• Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

• Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.

• Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

• Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

• Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. Two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

• The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

• Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

• 92.5 percent of the poor report their families have “enough food to eat,” while less than 2 percent say they “often” do not have enough to eat.

The welfare state is not the answer to poverty

Government programs have not worked to reduce poverty in America. Since President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty in the 1960s, the U.S. government has spent trillions of dollars—and did little to reduce poverty.

Real solutions: Work and marriage

Work and marriage are sure ways to reduce poverty, especially among children. Government welfare programs, however, perversely remain hostile to both by rewarding idleness and penalizing marriage.

• In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year. This is less than half a full-time job, and about 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 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.

Reduce illegal immigration

Stemming the tide of illegal immigration must be a part of any strategy to reduce poverty.

• Each year, the U.S. imports, through both legal and illegal immigration, hundreds of thousands of additional poor persons from abroad.
• One-quarter of all poor persons in the U.S. are now first-generation immigrants or the minor children of those immigrants.
• Roughly one in ten of the persons counted among the poor by the Census Bureau is either an illegal immigrant or the minor child of an illegal.

Related Heritage research

• Robert E. Rector, “How Poor Are America’s Poor? Examining the ‘Plague’ of Poverty in America,” August 27, 2007.
• Robert E. Rector and Kirk A. Johnson, “Understanding Poverty in America,” January 5, 2004
• All Heritage research on poverty and inequality