The Heritage Foundation released a paper, "Understanding Poverty in America" earlier this month that Paul Harvey featured in the noon edition of his broadcast today. This is a very important issue to understand in an Election year because Democrats often claim to be fighting for impoverished people. However, never do they define what they mean by the poor.
Here are a few facts from the Heritage Foundation's research to keep in mind when you hear people talk about government needing to help the poor:
1. The typical "poor" person owns a car, has air conditioning, has at least one color TV, a VCR or DVD, has cable or Satellite TV reception, and has a microwave.
2. Most poor children are "supernourished and grow up to be, on average one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy."
3. The report cites that in the typical poor family only 800 hours of work a year supports the family (that is 16 hours a week). If only one adult would work 40 hours a week (that is 2,000 hours a year), then 75% of the poor children would not be labeled as poor.
While these three points can be found in the first couple of pages of the article, I would recommend reading the entire report. Near the end of the report the writers discuss "root causes" of poverty which are "low levels of parental work and high levels of single parenthood." It makes one wonder how the government can fix either of these problems. Both of these sound like individual responsibility issues to me...but hey, what do I know? I'm just a citizen who worked hard and practiced abstinence until marriage and family planning thereafter. Obviously I was just lucky and neither of those required discipline or sacrifice.
