Rob, you suggest that the incomes implicated in the poverty rate ? such as $10,000 to $15,000 ? are too low for the poor to be able to afford homes and cars. Friend, you are missing my point. First, households that report $15,000 in income are, on average, spending something like $21,000. Of course, this is on average. For some there isn?t much of a discrepancy, but for others it is large ? particularly if they are getting free health care, free child care, free or nearly free housing, food stamps, etc. Perhaps that is why, contrary to your point, nearly half of all ?poor? families own their own homes, nearly 75 percent of ?poor? families own at least one automobile, and the average expenditures of the bottom quartile of the income distribution reflect a standard of living roughly comparable (adjusted for inflation) to that of the median U.S. household in the 1970s and to middle-income households in Europe today.
No, we are not talking about whether folks should have to go potty in outhouses. Poverty is a real problem, but its extent is massively overestimated due to poor data collection and reporting.
Your second point, regarding poor children, brings up tougher issues. I happen to believe that a limited, constitutional government still has a responsibility when it comes to the needs of minors. I also believe, as it happens, that elderly or disabled folks with no means of support from their families become, in effect, ?wards of the state.? In both cases, the argument is a practical one, related to the necessity of ensuring public order: without some kind of public-policy response, we would end up with bulging county lockups and abandoned or neglected children whose plight would impose real costs on everyone.
But in providing temporary relief for needy families (gosh, that term sounds familiar) or a true, minimum ?safety net? for wards of the state, we should be careful not to create snares that trap generations of people in poverty. Such snares are woven, I contend, out of the strands of self-destructive behavior and unfortunate choices that people make ? again, dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock, and failing to build useful skills and work experience. We don?t help children by putting their parents on a perpetual dole, thus keeping adults from facing the consequences of their actions and learning from them. And we don?t build real skills and work experience by passing laws that arbitrarily raise the minimum wage. Laws don?t make someone?s work effort worth more. Only skills, responsibility, education, experience, and innovation do that.
On sex ed, the clear message should be that having children out of wedlock is a serious handicap that should be avoided. Whether to send that message via abstinence-based education or birth-control tutorials is perhaps a debate for another day.
Lastly, you suggest a tension between my causal arguments about poverty and fluctuations related to the economic cycle. No, I didn?t mean to suggest that general economic trends have no impact on poverty rates. They obviously do. But their influence is less than the influence of personal behavior. Let?s flip things around: it would be wonderful for our economy, for producers and consumers as a whole, if fewer young people dropped out of school, had children out of wedlock, and participated only sporadically in the labor market.
