Are there really 15.1 percent of Americans really living in poverty?

A multi-millionaire who owns several houses (with servants' quarters), matching his and hers Bentleys, a luxury yacht, and a private jet could find himself listed as "in poverty" in the United States. In fact, Warren Buffet could easily find himself categorized as "in poverty."

How?

Because the United State Census--where all those statistics are coming from telling us that 15.1 percent of Americans are living in poverty--takes account only of income for the year. So if a rich person shows a loss (which is quite common) or has fancy accountants who can reduce his adjusted gross income to below about $22,000 (assuming a family of four), he is counted as poor by the Census.

Go figure.

Child Poverty is Up: More news on what happens when you have fewer traditional families

Child poverty is in the news again, this time because of a newly-released report from Kids Count. As the Louisville Courier-Journal put it:

The number of children living in poverty has increased in Kentucky and Indiana, following a national trend of high unemployment and growing poverty in families, according to the latest “Kid Count,’’ an annual state-by-state survey of child well-being by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The poverty rate for children is listed at 23 percent in Kentucky, up from 22 percent last year. That is overstated, of course, since Kids Count relies on U. S. Census data which only takes account of a family's annual income, not it's total assets.

The Census data is notoriously unreliable as an indicator of poverty, since the average family living "in poverty" is actually not all that bad off. Almost half own their own air-conditioned home and have at least two color televisions; over two-thirds own their own car (a third have two); and the majority of the "impoverished" have VCR or DVD, have cable or satellite reception, and have a microwave oven and automatic dishwasher.

So let's think of this in some perspective.

But the interesting thing about the data is that, along with the "poverty" rate, the percentage of children growing up in one-parent homes is continuing to rise. Gee, I wonder if those two things have something to do with each other.

In fact, the two chief predictors of whether a person will go on welfare is whether he or she (usually she) has had a baby out of wedlock or is divorced.

Go figure.

But let's not get all excited and do something crazy like have our schools and other cultural institutions start to uphold the traditional family as some kind of ideal or anything (Not like there's really any danger of that happening).

The nation's poor are too fat. You gotta love America

Several years ago, I created quite a stir by arguing, in a debate in front of the Louisville Forum, that the chief health problem among the poor is not hunger, but obesity. The public health authorities (to use a technical term) flipped out. They couldn't deny my data, which I had derived exclusively from federal government sources, but they had all kinds of excuses about how what I said was misleading.

And this from people who are claiming there is a "hunger" problem in America.

Now comes more evidence that poverty in American is characterized chiefly by eating too much. The report, from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, has Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina as the five states with the highest rates of obesity. It does not make any claims about the relation between poverty and obesity, but what do you want to bet that if you took the mean income and compared it to the level of obesity, you would have a strong correlation?

Is there a problem with poverty in Louisville--or anywhere else in America?

The Louisville Courier-Journal says that 15 percent of Louisville residents live in poverty. Is this true?

Several years ago, I debated a professor from the University of Louisville at a meeting of the Louisville Forum on the issue of welfare reform. That was during the debate that led up to the passage of welfare reform legislation in the Clinton administration.

The professor talked confidently about a number of things related to poverty, including the problem of hunger in America. I pointed out a number of things about the statistics on "poverty," among them, the fact that hunger was far less of a problem among the American poor than was obesity.

Needless to say, that got my picture in the paper the next morning, along with the headline, "Policy analyst says poor people have a problem with obsesity," or something like that.

The reporter from the Courier-Journal followed me out of the meeting, obviously hunting for the most outrageous quote he could get from me. I obliged him as best I could. "Where did you get those statistics?" he asked. "From the same place my opponent got his: from the federal government, mostly the U. S. Census." Apparently he then went out asking a number of different experts about the statistics I had quoted. But (despite what I'm sure was a concerted effort on his part) he couldn't find anyone who could dispute them. The best he could get out of them was that I had "misinterpreted" them.

On my comments about obesity for example, the best he could do was a professor somewhere who said that, yes, obesity was a problem among the poor, but that was because they ate junk food. That was the closest thing to a refutation the reporter could muster.

Several years later I had a debate with the head of social services for Boyle County at Centre College in Danville, who claimed that over 20 percent of children in Boyle County were living in "poverty." I used the same data I had used before, which met with the same indignation, although little could be said to counter it.

Here is an updated version of the statistics I used then, from Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Institute, drawn from several government reports:

• 46 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
• 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• Only six percent of poor households are overcrowded; two thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
• Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.
• 97 percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
• 78 percent have a VCR or DVD player.
• 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
• 89 percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

In Wednesday's Courier-Journal, Marcus Green writes of the problem of "poverty" in Louisville. Is there really a problem of "poverty" in Louisville, much less any other place in Kentucky? When people use a word like "poverty," they picture inadequate food, housing, or clothing. Is this really true?

Not if he is relying on the Census definition of "poverty." Part of the problem is that the Census definition involves only income earned during the year. It does not take assets into account. So if you are a business owner with three homes and a luxury yacht, but you had a business loss that year, you are considered to be living in poverty.

Real poverty is not a major problem in the United States, and certainly not in Louisville. If you want to see real poverty, go to a third world country. They know what poverty is.