It’s possible that a beggar could make more than $11 some hours, leading to an average $11 over a year, but Mr. Stossel has in no way demonstrated this.
“but Mr. Stossel has in no way demonstrated this.”
There have been newspaper interviews of panhandlers in our area: $11 hourly actually is a quite reasonable expectation for hourly earnings for these folks.
In reality, the estimates vary a lot:
http://www.ehow.com/info_7814173_average-yearly-income-panhandler.html
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2255/how-much-money-do-beggars-make
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_Rose
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC121964/
in part because only about one fifth do panhandling full-time and because of various limitations/biases in how these data are collected.
It might be kept in mind that panhandlers don’t pay income or payroll taxes. Thus, even someone earning minimum wage for 2000 hours a year ($14.5K) is probably earning the equivalent of someone earning a taxable wage of $18K.
FWIW, 10% of U.S. workers earn less than $10.8K a year.
(Table 1 in http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/105xx/doc10527/10-02-Workers.pdf) Thus, I think it’s indisputable that panhandling “beats” working (income-wise) for at least some fraction of the working population.