Poverty through a Clear Lens

By Alexia Nader

Edited by Emily Kim

The statistics of the U.S. Census Bureau’s new experimental poverty measure are staggering: 16% of the population in the country is living in poverty, about 2.5 million more people than we previously thought. The numbers in the new measure have changed from even two months ago, when the Official Poverty Measure was released, because the bureau has decided to take a closer look at the actual daily lives and expenses of the poor—health care costs, financial relief provided by social programs, and child care expenses—and change the way the poverty threshold is determined to get a more accurate picture of poverty in this country. You don’t hear very often that a government bureau is inspirational, but here it comes: Now that the Census Bureau is revising its old methodology, changing its way of measuring poverty so that it clearly and fairly reflects the lives of the poor, the rest of us need to follow in its footsteps. We need to take a hard look at the ways in which we perceive poverty in this country and cast aside our myths about the poor.

A controversy that surfaced a few months ago bore out the skewed views of conservatives about life under the poverty line. It all started with a paper published in July by the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, entitled “Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What is Poverty in the United States Today?” Using statistics from various 2005 governmental surveys (mostly the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey), the authors of the paper claim that a poor household isn’t that different from the median U.S. household in terms of its number of kitchen appliances, electronics, and modern household luxuries. They dig up some eye-catching statistics to bolster their case: 75% of poor households had air conditioning, 38.5% had a computer, 54.5% had at least one cell phone, 97.9% had a TV, 29.3% had a video game system. The authors conclude with sweeping statements. “There is a vast gap between poverty as understood by the American public and poverty as currently measured by the government,” they claim, adding that the gap will only get worse with “Obama’s new ‘poverty’ measure” (it seems they’re referring to the measure that was just released by the Census Bureau) and the influence of “the mainstream media.”

On the July 20^th episode of “The O’Reilly Factor,” Bill O’Reilly takes these statistics and runs with them. “How can you be poor, and have all this stuff?” O’Reilly blithely asks his co-host Lou Dobbs. Then come the Heritage Foundation paper’s percentages bulleted on the screen, and the men titter over the numbers before putting on serious faces.

Dobbs: “It is really extraordinary to think about these conveniences that are enjoyed by the people, for whom we give great care and consideration—that is, the poor. And those of us who think back to when we were younger and didn’t have a television set, we were poor. We didn’t get a television set until I was in high school.”

O’Reilly: “What I think this is all about is the underground economy.”

O’Reilly’s proposed course of action is punitive—he suggests lowering income tax and increasing sales tax; clearly, for him, these poor are getting a lot of money illegally, spending it unwisely on TVs, microwaves, and air-conditioning and need to be reined in and reprimanded like children. Jonathan Rothwell takes these ideas to task in a post last month on The New Republic’s blog. “While the notion that poor people use welfare programs to enjoy the accoutrements of a middle class lifestyle fits in neatly to the ‘welfare queen’ trope that has been used to justify cuts in public transfers to poor people, it is far from reality,” writes Rothwell. Instead, he asserts, with the statistics from the latest Consumer Expenditure Survey as support, the poor actually save and spend their money much in the same way as middle and upper classes, possibly even more prudently.

But however ridiculous and unfounded the arguments in the Heritage Foundation Paper, the statistics still stick with you. In my case, at least, they were surprising enough to warrant investigation. I wanted to check their accuracy and see if the numbers have changed in the current recession. The data in the 2005 survey more or less checked out, but more importantly, the statistics from the 2009 Residential Energy Consumption Survey show that, in many cases, more poor households (defined as poor by guidelines set out by the Department of Health and Human Services) have electronics and household luxury items than before the recession. Last year, approximately 50% of poor people had computers and of these people 85% had Internet service; 28% had one TV in the house, 34% had two; 64% have a washer in the house, 60% have a dryer. That a substantial percentage of our poorest population in the U.S. has modern appliances was great news, but left me wondering—why was I so shocked by these numbers in the first place?

I suspect that it comes from buying into, at least partially, a liberal myth about poverty: that there is one type of poverty, which involves being hungry and homeless—basically the extreme poverty seen in the lowest social sectors of underdeveloped countries. This idea of a single archetype of poverty, is what Barbara Kiviat eloquently argues against in the November 28 issue of Time in her article “Below the Line.” She separates out five myths that stem from this basic misconception and showing how they fall short statistically and logically. She rightly points out that poverty can’t be solely measured by material deprivation, that “poor families might well own a car or subscribe to cable TV,” but a more realistic way to consider poverty is in terms of “a family’s ability to make ends meet.”

Providing powerfully lucid visual support for Kiviat’s claims is the Danish photographer Joakim Eskildsen’s accompanying photo essay of portraits of the poor in their living spaces and landscapes of their neighborhoods. In it, we see a myriad of situations: a hefty woman lying on a thin mattress under an overpass in New Orleans, reading a book; a man posing outside his solitary tent in the bare Georgia woods where he lives because he doesn’t want to be in a homeless encampment; a woman sitting erectly with her son beside her on the grey concrete steps of her apartment complex in Fresno. We see houses with electrical appliances—neat clapboard homes with air conditioning units and cars in the driveways, trailers, and apartments—and also the worst that can happen to them. One of the pictures shows a completely incinerated clapboard trailer and two toddlers sleeping soundly in strollers in the foreground. The caption reads: “No one was hurt in the fire, but her family lost everything they had, including a computer they had recently bought. Adell, who also lost her previous trailer to an electrical fire, makes less than minimum wage as a dishwasher at a local restaurant.”

Ignoring the fact that a significant portion of the poor has access to modern appliances excludes an important issue from the discussion of poverty—that electronics and household appliances are not luxuries, but actually necessities for living in a developed country. We cannot reasonably expect the children of the poor to do well in school without access to a computer and Internet at home. Neither can we expect their parents to find and do well at work without access to a car. Most importantly, we cannot expect their households to function without air conditioning in warm climates, cooking appliances like microwaves appropriate for modern food preparation and storage, and even TV for keeping connected in some way to the world at large. The conservatives say that these items are luxuries—they’re not. But when liberals suggest that nobody under the poverty line has these necessities, they fail to distinguish between people who are struggling to maintain the minimum acceptable standard of living and people who face conditions in which no citizen of a developed country should live; the groups have different needs that should be addressed with different social programs and policies.

Maybe in today’s extreme political climate, claiming that all the poor are living like the poorest of the poor is the only effective way to get people to even acknowledge the issue of chronic poverty. However, it also does a disservice to the poor to not pay attention to the actual day-to-day issues that they face and decisions that they make because you are too busy imagining that everybody is living like the worst-off members of the group. What good does it do to accuse the government of letting the poor starve, like Rakim Brooks did in an article last month on Dissent’s blog, when 89% of people living under the poverty line received benefits from the food stamp program (SNAP) and their children received additional benefits from a supplementary nutritional program?

Instead, we should be trying to see where SNAP is working and where it isn’t. The bigger issue might not be that the poor don’t have enough money to buy any food, but rather that they can’t get to grocery stores, or that they don’t have the time, energy and know-how to cook healthy, nutritious meals. (Mark Bittman made a good case for education as a bigger factor than affordability when it comes to the poor and food in a September op-ed piece in the Times.) The fervency of liberals in championing the causes of the poor is admirable, but we also need to know where to direct our energy. There are so many problems that we have to face when it comes to poverty in this country, we don’t need to add invented ones.

While it’s extremely important to debunk the conservative myth that the poor are secretly living the good life because of illegal income, government money and a lack of frugality endemic to their class, it’s equally important to examine the shortcomings of the liberal view. On one side there’s callousness, and on the other, pity. Both of these attitudes are meant to distance the American poor from the rest of society. The poor aren’t inhabitants of a different planet or a far-away underdeveloped country. They’re our fellow citizens—that means we’re all implicated in their living situation. But we won’t ever really know what that situation is until we are willing to give their lives a clear, honest look.

Alexia Nader is a member of Penn’s class of ’09, a graduate student in the Cultural Criticism and Reporting program at NYU’s journalism institute, and a contributor to newyorker.com.

Photo credit: 5magazine.wordpress.com

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