I want to go back to Reed, here, where he outlines what he called the coin of the realm, that black poor people are poor because of their behavior and cultural profile---or something like that. Obviously I agree that is the establishment wisdom. And it has been pretty much accepted since Reagan by the liberal Democrats, who somehow forgot the volumes of poverty studies and documentaries during the sixties and beyond that tried to dispel this mythology.
Meanwhile of course, the Right has been busy promoting the same old garbage which does dove tail nicely with Obama's few comments about missing fathers and willingness to work, etc.
Here is the Heritage Foundation's Understanding Poverty in America:
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm
This seems to have been written to counter the Edwards campaign. Here are a few choice excerpts:
``Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.
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, over a quarter of poor households have cell phones and telephone answering machines, but, at the other extreme, approximately one-tenth have no phone at all. While the majority of poor households do not experience significant material problems, roughly a third do experience at least one problem such as overcrowding, temporary hunger, or difficulty getting medical care.
The best news is that remaining poverty can readily be reduced further, particularly 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 1.3 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 encourage work and marriage, remaining poverty would drop quickly...''
Isn't that nice? The welfare queen couch potatoes are enjoying their air conditioned home entertainment studios, living in the all American dream home with three bedrooms, one and half bathrooms on half acre lots.
Here are the US Census Bureau official poverty lines:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/threshld/thresh07.html
For a householder with one child the line is 14,291/yr. Doing the math (always suspect in my case), that's 274.83 a week, or 6.87/hr. The official US Dept of Labor minimum wage is 5.85/hr. Working for minimum wage gets 234/wk, 12,168/yr. In other words, if you support one kid and work at official minimum wage you are officially below the poverty line.
The US minimum wage figures to about 1014.00 a month, which is just about the average rent for a studio or one bedroom efficiency apartment in the SF Bay Area.
The poverty line for a single householder under 65 is 5.18/hr, 207.44/wk, 10,786/yr. Given the official minimum wage is 5.85/hr, just about any deduction off that hourly rate lands you below the official poverty line, which is just 0.67 cents an hour less.
These US official figures are ludicrously low.
And yet, the Heritage report implies it uses the US Census poverty line, but Heritage doesn't directly say so.
``Each year, the U.S. Census Bureau counts the number of "poor" persons in the U.S. In 2005, the Bureau found 37 million "poor" Americans. Presidential candidate John Edwards claims that these 37 million Americans currently "struggle with incredible poverty." Edwards asserts that America's poor, who number "one in eight of us... do not have enough money for the food, shelter, and clothing they need," and are forced to live in "terrible" circumstances. However, an examination of the living standards of the 37 million persons, whom the government defines as "poor," reveals that what Edwards calls "the plague" of American poverty might not be as "terrible" or "incredible" as candidate Edwards contends.''
I love the use of scare quotes on poor, terrible, incredible, and plague. Beleive me, if you're living on 10.7k here you're a miracle worker or homeless. Something is seriously out of sync between US Census poverty lines and the Hertiage report. But I can't figure it out. If I apply US Census poverty line figures to local reality, then, the official poor must only include the homeless. If I believe the Hertiage report picture, the poor are much better off than me.
Around here (SF Bay Area), under San Francisco City law, the minimum wage is 11.03/hr, 441.20/wk, 22,942/yr. Of course this is only enforced through official employment. I think it only applies to businesses with more than 10 employees, but I could be wrong. In any event, small business employment is more the norm here and seems likely excluded from this ordinance and similar ones in Oakland and Berkeley. And, this doesn't count the endless stream of immigrants hired off the street where wages are negotiated ad hoc and paid in cash. In Oakland the going rate off the street for casual labor is loosely around 10/hr. Let me explain. The company pays that when we need extra help for a few hours.
I've spent a considerable amount time in the last ten years in poor households in Oakland and San Francisco. The picture the Hertiage Foundation report paints is a statistical fantasy. When I look at their sources, they have put together figures from Commerce, Energy, and Census to yeild this:
``As the table shows, some 46 percent of poor households own their own home. The typical home owned by the poor is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths. It has a garage or carport and a porch or patio and is located on a half-acre lot. The house was constructed in 1967 and is in good repair. The median value of homes owned by poor households was $86,600 in 2001 or 70 percent of the median value of all homes owned in the United States.5''
First of all, very, very few poor households I've visited on the SF side live in their own home. A few, as in two or three, live in Bayview, the rundown former factory housing tracks out along 3rd St and Pailou... These essentially look like East Oakland, for the same reasons. Dead shipyards at Hunters Point, and closed factories off Army St (now Cesar Chavez St). The other couple of locations are in the Outer Mission or Excelsior district.
The the vast majority of homeowners I've run into in SF were out in the Avenues, mainly Asian-American and very obviously middle to upper middle income. Most poor homeowners I've seen, live on the Oakland side. And the poor who own homes is definitely the exception. Half acre lots? You're kidding. (I am naming these locations so readers can wiki or census track them if anybody is interested...)
Over here, the typical poor houses I visit are in rundown neighborhoods in East Oakland where sixty plus year old cheap housing tracks on very small lots rot in place. They were originally put up in the boom years of heavy industry and manufacturing, and have been in decline since the 60s and 70s when industry and manufacturing and their jobs took flight.
Most of these houses have three bedrooms, but most of the disabled live in the living room because they can't get into the bedroom. Most bathrooms usually have some access, because the door and part of a wall have been taken out and covered with a curtain. This kind of house has usually been handed down from aging parents who are now dead or in a nursing home and their late middle aged children now occupy the place. If late middle children have one of their adult children with them and their grandkids, then the place is over crowded.
Sure there might be a car or even two. Does it run? Is it paid for? There is a whole street culture of guys who get old clunkers or pickups to run or keep running, so technically the `household' owns a car. More realistically, I would say, most poor households have access to a car somewhere in the extended family or friends.
Somebody better come up with a more realistic picture of poor households in urban America. According to the Hertiage fantasy, the US poor are living the all American dream and presumably better off than the average European middle class household. I find that physically impossible.
CG