15 Facts About US Poverty the Government Hides

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released its annual poverty report declaring that 43.1 million Americans lived in poverty in 2015.

We should be concerned about any American living in real material hardship, but much of what the Census reports about poverty is misleading.

Here are 15 facts about poverty in America that may surprise you. (All statistics are taken from U.S. government surveys.)

Poor households routinely report spending $2.40 for every $1 of income the Census says they have. The average poor American lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair and has more living space than the average nonpoor person in France, Germany, or England. Eighty-five percent of poor households have air conditioning. Nearly three-fourths of poor households have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks. Nearly two-thirds of poor households have cable or satellite TV. Half have a personal computer; 43 percent have internet access. Two-thirds have at least one DVD player More than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation. One-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV. (The above data on electronic appliances owned by poor households come from a 2009 government survey so the ownership rates among the poor today are most likely higher.)

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Activist groups spread alarming stories about widespread hunger in the nation, but in reality, most of the poor do not experience hunger or food shortages. The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects data on these topics in its household food security survey. For 2009, the survey showed:

Only 4 percent of poor parents reported that their children were hungry even once during the prior year because they could not afford food. Some 18 percent of poor adults reported they were hungry even once in the prior year due to lack of money for food. Poverty and Housing

Poverty and homelessness are sometimes confused. Over the course of a year, only 4 percent of poor persons become homeless (usually a temporary condition). Only 9.5 percent of the poor live in mobile homes or trailers; the rest live in apartments or houses. Forty percent of the poor own their own homes, typically, a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths that is in good repair. Facts About Extreme Poverty

The left claims that one in 25 families with children live in “extreme poverty” on less than $2 per person per day. Government surveys of self-reported spending by families show the actual number is one in 4,469, not one in 25. The typical family allegedly in “extreme poverty” reports spending $25 for every $1 of income the left claims they have. In Calculating Poverty, Census Ignores the Almost Entire Welfare State

Why does the Census identify so many individuals as “poor” who do not appear to be poor in any normal sense of the term? The answer lies in the misleading way the Census measures “poverty.” The Census defines a family as poor if its income falls below a specified income threshold. (For example, the poverty threshold for a family of four in 2015 was $24,036.) But in counting “income,” the Census excludes nearly all welfare benefits.

In 2014, government spent over $1 trillion on means-tested welfare for poor and low income people. (This figure does not include Social Security or Medicare.) Welfare spending on cash, food, and housing was $342 billion.

The cash, food, and housing spending alone was 150 percent of the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S. But the Census ignored more than four-fifths of these benefits for purposes of measuring poverty. Effectively, the Census counts poverty in the U.S. by ignoring almost the entire welfare state.

Do the higher living standards of families receiving welfare mean the welfare state is successful? The answer is no. The real aim of welfare should be to make families self-sufficient: capable of supporting themselves above the poverty income threshold without reliance on government welfare aid.

Despite having spent over $25 trillion on means-tested welfare since the beginning of the War on Poverty under President Lyndon Johnson, many Americans are less capable of self-sufficiency today than when the War on Poverty began.

The pathways to self-sufficiency are work and marriage. We should reform the welfare state to promote these. Able-bodied recipients should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of getting aid. Penalties against marriage in welfare programs should be removed.

2009 was a long time ago, and things have changed...a LOT.

>>>If you have a big screen TV, air conditioning, able to eat everyday without having to go to the food bank or soup kitchen, if you live in a spacious apartment or house or drive a car, you aint poor! <<<

I would agree with the above quote to a degree.

Big screen TV’s are like the old crt tv’s anymore. I see quite a few poor people owning them, but they were picked out of dumpsters and are older technology..ie they can’t go online, and you can’t ‘’cast’’ a movie or show onto them.

Some apartments/dwellings offer only one source of heating/cooling. Electric. Cooling is no more a luxury in the Southern usa than heating is in the north. When you live with 9 moths of winter, you need heat. When you live with 9 or 10 months of heat, you need cool, especially in apartments and trailers/manufactured housing.

Many spacious houses and apartments are absolute health hazard dumps. Especially those in inner cities. Why the health department doesn’t shut them down is a mystery, but maybe those decreped dwellings keep people off the streets.

I’m talking dwellings with the ceilings falling down, the doors don’t fit in the frames because the houses are sinking and are no longer level. I’m talking $4-500 /mo electric bills as a matter of course...with or without air conditioning because the wiring is old and so are all the appliances ...that only half work.

Places that haven’t been painted, refloored/carpeted in 30 years or more, are full of roaches and bedbugs...

A good many of you people do NOT have even the faintest clue as to how the poor truly survive.

The lucky few who do have a computer tend to have very old, pieced together computers. Most don’t. Phones? Most have old technology freebie flip phones. Many are trying to survive on $4-500 per month with 98% of that going toward just the rent which tends to be no less than $400 for one of those sinking, unpainted, roach-bedbug filled dumps..and that price is for a studio or efficiency which barely allows room enough for a double bed and a chair. Forget a kitchen table. Now THAT’s a luxury in many places! A freaking Table with non-broken chairs...and a place to put it where you can actually sit at it.

Most of the poor people that I know, are on foot. They are elderly, disabled, and can’t make both an auto insurance payment AND be able to register the car in the same month. “ONLY $5.00 to them is what they might be lucky enough to make it through the month on after paying rent and utilities, not to mention medical co-pays that they do NOT always get help with.

You can’t line up all the ducks and make them fit all scenarios as I see done by truly ignorant trolls on forums nation wide. Many of these people only get $50-90/month foodstamps and are grateful for it because it helps...a little. Foodbanks rarely give out meat and when they do, it tends to be spoiled meat donated by a grocery store...last day of sale but it’s reeking and sticky when you thaw it out. And you are lucky to get one package of meat in a month in the places that do have it to give.

Often times, the canned goods are well past their expiration dates and don’t tell me that they last forever. They don’t.

A good 95% of what’s given at foodbanks are carbs, pure carbs. Carrots, peas, (canned of course...not much nutrition left after over cooking due to commercial canning processes), corn...all carbs. Bread, pasta, rice, beans...all carbs. Poptarts and fig newtons..carbs. Expired mayonaise in swollen containers to put into the expired tuna that is more than half water and floating flakes. Dump the water out of this cheap tuna and there’s roughly 2 tablespoons of meat there to put into a processed package of tuna helper than when finished doesn’t serve 4 at all! Unless of course you add some vitamin free canned corn, nutrient deficient stale white bread...without even margarine..We can add some chocolate cookies and cream pop tarts to that for dessert so we don’t feel totally deprived..wow! A luxury food that the poor don’t deserve to have!!

And then wonder why the poor are fat so you can make fun of that, too.

Oh! And here’s a good one! Kids get backpacks full of food at school to take home to last the weekend...

I’ve got news for you. That may happen in some places, but it does NOT happen everywhere. How nutritious is plastic packaged pudding? Chips ahoy cookies? Sugar brined canned fruit? Ya, the tummy might feel better but there’s always a persistent hunger as the body protests the poison chemical laced/leached artificial food with the added poison to make them taste better as it screams for real food/nutrients. And we wonder why the poor kids are fat as they are made to sit at desks 6-8 hours per day eating garbage they are lucky to have because after all, the poor shouldn’t have good things in their lives according to some writings I’ve seen on forums across the nation.

So the poor mainly consist of elderly, disabled, and children. All of whom are dependent upon the age groups in between. But the age groups in between are dependent upon a service industry for their living. Basically 10 bucks an hour, but not enough hours to pay the rent unless one is fortunate enough to live in an area where they can work 3 jobs and juggle schedules, have to work 12+ hours per day, many of whom are single moms/dads trying to juggle their work ours around their kids school hours and who don’t earn enough to pay for child care plus all the bills. Many don’t even own cars, and those who do struggle to put gas, keep up with insurance, registrations, repairs. This is now middle class America folks!

People who earn adequate money are now looked at as the wealthy. Those are the ones who have resources enough to pay all their rent, utilities, groceries, clothes, reliable and decent transportation with all the attending costs, who can pay a phone bill and were able to get that nice free phone just for changing phone companies, and maybe at tax time they can purchase a flat screen tv (and throw the old one in the dumpster so some poor person can retrieve it and get called names for owning an old flat screen tv...how dare the poor have a luxury!)

Y’all don’t know the reality. You see a poor person on food stamps to to the store in a ‘’fancy’’ vehicle that they most likely borrowed so they can shop once a month.

You want to know the reality???? Go stand in line with them 2-3 times a week at the church pantries. Listen carefully...throw out a woe or two and watch the line jump on it with bigger woe’s of it’s one like a fish charging a baited worm. Show up at the same places week after week and become familar with the faces...even in a big city. People are creatures of habit. Pretty soon, you’ll discover that each person has their favorite pantry to hit up several days a week because each one provides something different that they need. This one gives canned goods, this one gives hygiene, this one has some animal food, that one includes a little meat and fresh veggies...they stand in lines for hours and hours,day after day, and then have to lug the stuff home...often on foot or bicycles. Most have difficulty walking. Many are raising grand children abandoned by parents who couldn’t cope anymore, or who are in school full time trying to improve their lives (on the tax payer’s dime...grants, loans etc)

Unless you stand with these people and live as they do..a few hundred dollars a month which is less even than a minimum wage job. They aren’t lazy, but they are unemployable on a consistent basis for many reasons..no jobs available that they can actually do, and if they do, they risk loosing a steady check that hangs in there during times when their physical impairments get the better of them, and they’d loose their jobs if they had them.

When the resources are slashed by governments, THESE are the ones who take the full brunt of it.

It doesn’t do any good to experiment and live like the poor because for the poor, there is NO end. An experiment has a beginning and an end so you don’t get the full effect of...despair and hopelessness. The discouragement and depression won’t take you down as it does them. That’s why the drugs and alcohol.

It takes a hundred bux week to eat well, but it only takes 30 or so to stay drunk all week and screw the food. At least you can laugh about something.

It’s a lot like Stockholm syndrome. You adjust and don’t even realize you did. You can’t even see any other way.

I will say, I raised 2 kids and lived below poverty line even though working full time. We did not have air conditioning (in central Texas), heat was propane space heaters (no leaving those on while sleeping), did not own TV or any of those gadgety games and the girls were not able to participate in many extracurricular things that cost money. I did not choose to be a single mom. I did not get what would have probably been the equivalent of food stamps or welfare in the 70’s 80’s and 90’s although the I received milk and things thru WIC for about 2 years for the younger daughter and the girls were on the free lunch program at school. I drove an old pickup with no heat or A/C because I’d had that before my husband escaped via no-fault divorce. We lived in the country in an old (mortgage-free) farmhouse built in 1905 (no insulation) on 3/4 acre with about 1/4 of that garden. I worked more than 40 hrs/wk but kept as much food planted as possible. We ate. Went to church, school and worked. Life was ok.

I voted conservative in every election. My daughters are 31 and 40 now, married to veterans, each has 4 kids. Both will tell you horror stories about their childhood doing without but what child doesn’t? The girls vote conservative. The 3 grandkids old enough to vote, vote conservative.

I said all that to preach to the choir at FR I guess that it does not matter what one’s income level is. It matters what your personal value is. In short, IMO, it matters if you are a Christ centered household.

No pity responses! I am remarried to a GREAT God fearing man who was surprised as all getout to find a middle-aged working woman who was not a feminist. Thats a side-note. Jesus says feed the hungry, and we should, but financial well-being does not make a life.

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