The source for the percentage of poor households owning a home is the federal government. The full cite, via Rector and Johnson, is ?U.S. Department of Commerce and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, American Housing Survey for the United States: 2001.? I looked up what appears to be a relevant table, which appears to track fairly closely with the percentage (46 percent) that Rector and Johnson use. Just look down the left hand columns. Now, I will note that this is limited to households who dwell in a structure, so to the extent the truly homeless are classified as poor households, the percentage might change slightly, down a few points, let’s say. But no way are we talking about a tiny fraction ? 7.5 percent or 4 percent ? according to the data from HUD. Perhaps what you are looking at involves a measure of households who no longer have a mortgage, not the same thing as homeownership obviously.
As far as comparisons to middle-income families go, I notice that you don?t dispute my citation of evidence suggesting that poor families today have average expenditures comparable to the median U.S. household in the early 1970s. I view this statistic, again straight from federal reports, as devastating to the claim that the poor are getting poorer, that opportunity is shrinking, and that poverty as currently ? and expansively ? defined by the Census Bureau is a meaningful concept. You did choose to ridicule my comparison to European living standards. I should have been clearer, here: I was talking about assets owned and services available, not simply monetary income.
Next, you talk about the fact that many families with below-average incomes do not have access to free health care, free child care, public housing, and the like. Granted. We are talking about poor families, about families with apparent incomes below the poverty line. Actually, large percentages of these families are enrolled in such programs. Virtually all are eligible for Medicaid, so they are effectively insured whether they are enrolled and using medical services today or not. In most cases, you are referring to waiting lines or lack of eligibility for services that involve families with incomes above the poverty line. We can debate whether they should have access to such wealth transfers, but that?s not germane to my point about poverty. Unless you account for these substantial transfers ? worth many thousands of dollars ? you cannot yield a satisfactory measurement of real poverty.
Finally, I never suggested that low-income people are residing in ?carefree sloth? just because they earn more than is reported and are more likely to own assets than is commonly believed. In fact, I never suggested that I considered these facts to mean that the folks in question were defrauding the taxpayers. Most of the households that I would consider as wrongly classified as poor still face significant economic challenges. We should seek to boost their prospects by stimulating job growth, improving education, reforming our post-secondary education and training policies, and transforming transfer programs such as Social Security and unemployment insurance into personal-account systems that let people build real assets and make decisions that best meet their individual needs.
As always, thanks for engaging in the debate. I am sure we both hope that our readers across North Carolina will find the differences of opinion illustrative, stimulating, respectful, and a useful starting point for their own thinking and conversation about the government?s proper role in combating poverty.
