The (Non) Working Poor
Ryan | 6 09 2007If you're a first time visitor, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed, which will keep you up to date with all the latest New School Politics posts. Thanks for visiting!
Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Robert Rector recently published an essay on the standard of living among poor Americans. Those designated as poor include the bottom 12.6% of economic agents in the US which amounts to 37 million people. Most of his data came from the Census’ annual report from the last year. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Here’s a tasty bite:
In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year: That amounts to 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year— nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.
Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.
The most dawning thing of course is that the average “poor” American is supported by just 16 hours of work per week. This naturally leads us to question, why? Well, first we should ask what simple economics would lead us to ask–what are the incentives? Incentives as they apply to the poor may be personal–they prefer to be lazy and dependant over being diligent and competitive–while others may be government induced–they prefer to work less and rely more on welfare and government transfer payments. Incentives that apply to employers include the inflated cost of their labor–everything from minimum wage to employer mandated benefits to other embedded costs of business–which discourages businesses from hiring for longer hours. Moreover, many of the poor may not be worth being employed at all due to sickness, or disability, or downright irresponsibility.
With an unemployment rate approaching full employment, its not reasonable to accuse lack of employer demand for the short work weeks. While certain leftist economists may say that the demographic in question represents a disenfranchised group of discouraged workers who have been displaced by the capitalistic system, for if our amount of worker disenchantment was high so too would our employment rate in general as their levels only logically correspond.
The breakdown of the family, specifically among poor black families is a perpetual problem that certainly has economic implications. For one reason or another there is a lack of family structure for many in poor urban neighborhoods. This simply diminishes the opportunity to create a stable and effective environment in which to raise children. The result is extremely detrimental and perpetuates a cycle of delinquency. The answer to what causes this delinquency is more broadly sociological and I do not think I am equipped to give ideas, but let me say that it is certainly an intriging issue that deserves to be explored.
But in terms of what I can recommend, there are certainly political reforms that can encourage more work among the poor. In order to amend the poor incentives that exist at present, we should eliminate the price floor on labor as well as other employment regulations on businesses and also curtail welfare as well as entitlements to as large an extent as the political process will allow us. If we remove all of the incentives not to work it is logical to assume that people will start working harder and adapting a more independent mind set to their own lives, and by weeding out the lazy yet able workers we can more accurately identify those who truly have disorders and are not able to work so that charities, for instance, have an easier time identifying those who are truly in need.
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I honestand where you are coming from, and at this
Arthus Erea | 6 09 2007I honestand where you are coming from, and at this time I think you are being far too judgemental. they prefer to be lazy and dependent over being diligent and competitive - some times you come off far to harshly. As the essay you quoted pointed out, many of the poor come from single family homes. It is not an issue of being lazy for most of them, it is an issue of time and stress. Let’s see you raise a family, survive a violent neighborhood, while working a 40 hour week - by yourself. While I agree that we should not subsidize the poor, we should not downgrade them with generalizations such as lazy and dependent. You do not know the situation of most of the people you so harshly criticize. In fact, I’d say the really lazy and dependent people are the middle class children living in their parents basements and playing games all day. You’ll find far more of them than poor people sitting around doing nothing.
Lets go over this again: they work, on average, 16
Ryan | 6 09 2007Lets go over this again: they work, on average, 16 hours per week. That is dismal. At this time in our economy labor is in very high demand so i have trouble excusing their idleness. Either its incompetance or lazyness, both of which they bear the responsibility for. Unless i see evidence to the contrary, i think that is the most rational assumption to be made…
Honestly, that statistic is far from the truth of the
Arthus Erea | 6 09 2007Honestly, that statistic is far from the truth of the matter. First of all, it is an average which in itself tends to be accurate when dealing with numbers which include so many outliers (those who don’t work at all, which I agree is incredibly lazy and pathetic). Second of all, 16 hours isn’t as little as you think for an average. The average student only “works” 20 hours a week, assuming 180 day school year and 8 hours per day.
20=(180(8*5))/360
Are you lazy and incompetent? From what I see, I highly doubt it. Yet you only “work” 20 hours a week average.
That’s not to mention single parents trying to raise a family. Would you rather they simply abandoned their family to fend for itself? That will really do miracles for the economy in a couple of years… even more violent high school drop-outs abandoned by their family.
Besides, your whole premise in this is counter to the idea of libertarianism. Shouldn’t we trust the market to sort this out? After all… it is doing so already - these people are poor.
Intervening in the market are we? Providing incentives from tax payer dollars?
Now, if this post wasn't in the rhetorical sense, I
/gradster(1)/ | 6 09 2007Now, if this post wasn’t in the rhetorical sense, I would call you a capitalist pig. But as well as being rather stupid it wouldn’t get my point across - I don’t think you get it. To explain Arthus’s point more thoroughly (hopefully) I would like to see you try to wake up every day at 6, make lunches for your younger kids, hand money out of your rapidly shrinking wallet to the older, sign permission slips, urge your despondent teenager to get on the bus, and finally sink back into a chair to relax only to realize that you have yet to take a shower and get ready (in only 15 minutes) for your job, however short it may be. Then throughout the day you may get calls from the younger ones complaining that they have left their homework at home, have to worry about your love life, try to get a new job (key point: you may not be even high school educated) worry about your teenager’s future, do taxes and various other bills, and THEN finally sink back into your chair. Only to jump up yet again (exciting your aching back) when you realize your kids are home. After a grueling session of attempting to figure out which snack you will prepare, serve, and clean up after, you must attempt to get them to do their homework for this night, making sure it is neatly in their backpack this time. Even more of a challenge may be getting your teenager to respond to your unsuccessful attempts at urging him to do the same things (while still getting to bed on time) when, OH MY GOODNESS, you realize it’s nearly 8:00 and the younger ones are whining (only one of the many times). You slave over a gourmet dinner that it turns out nobody likes, then dish out store bought ice cream to attempt at smoothing it over. Still getting resentful looks you put the kids to bed and move out into the kitchen to back cupcakes for them for the next day, only to find your teenager eating the sugar. Why, you ask? Because I’m hungry, he undoubtedly responds. Why didn’t you eat anything at dinner? you will diligently ask. He will, no doubt take two respond that he wasn’t hungry then. You finally manage to fill his stomach temporarily with an apple or two and a granola bar when you realize it’s 11:00 and there’s still the cupcakes to be made, along with laundry to be done and a resumé to be completed. Oh well.
Think about it a little more carefully from the so called “devil’s advocate” position.
/gradster(1)/
Grandster: firstly, I am overwhelmed by your empirical evidence. Second,
Ryan | 6 09 2007Grandster: firstly, I am overwhelmed by your empirical evidence. Second, I am being sarcastic.
Arthus: i understand that it is an average, but an average also portrays the big picture best. The average of all Americans in the work force is between 40 and 45 hours in a week. A 16 hour week is about the equivalent of working for 3 hours each business day. Whether or not you have children, are married, etc. that is simply not acceptable if you expect to support a family…or even yourself. In the same fashion that the “average” worker on minimum wage is neither a full time worker nor a single parent, there is no reason to go to extremes and suspect that every one of the poorest 37 million Americans belongs to a single parented family of four. Hypotheticals are not something to base an entire argument on.
Second, like it or not, people are ultimately responsible for their outcomes. if a woman happens to have 3 children out of wedlock it does not mean that she is void of the responsibility to support them. If a man chooses only to work part time to support himself he should not be able to mooch of others to keep himself afloat.
Finally, I am in no way contradicting free market ideas. The “political reforms” which I imply are “free market” ones, meaning change by scaling back government regulation and involvement. Simply I am letting the market create its own incentives, which it does better than anyone else. That requires some reform, because currently there is not a completely free market among low wage workers.
And secondly, my name is not "Grandster". Neither is it
/gradster(1)/ | 7 09 2007And secondly, my name is not “Grandster”. Neither is it “/gradster(1)/” though you may call me that.
/gradster(1)/
/gradster(1)/ Your scenario applies to that of middle class families
Chou | 7 09 2007/gradster(1)/ Your scenario applies to that of middle class families too, except that
1) The middle class pays more taxes.
2) The middle class gets no benefits.
3) The middle class has slightly different problems.
4) The middle class works 40 hours/week.
Thus, your point is moot.
This applies to healthcare too. Why should I pay taxes to pay for healthcare for someone else’s oversexed, tobacco, gluttonous life? Even better, why should my 2 kids have to pay for that person’s 15 kids’ future problems, because they will be cursed as single parent children, as well as genetics?
You can’t assume everybody is equal. Socialism’s great fall, perhaps, is evolution and natural selection. Biological factors, misunderstood by most liberals, unfortunately destroy the socialist utopia that they all envision. Thus, a free market solution has to be in order.
And if you think we have a free market today, I will laugh hysterically before directing you to something called the FCC, the EPA, and the FDA.
Whatever. It's pretty obvious that I'm not going to get
/gradster(1)/ | 8 09 2007Whatever. It’s pretty obvious that I’m not going to get anywhere with you, and I feel no desire to continue now that my post was lost. It was supposed to be before the “and secondly” post.
/gradster(1)/
I agree that we should not be paying for other
Arthus Erea | 8 09 2007I agree that we should not be paying for other peoples problems. I agree that social welfare is unfair and contrary to natural selection. However, I disagree that poor people are nescarily lazy. Some of them are stupid, yet work very hard. Some of them have simply been unlucky. Therefore, you should not apply generalities to “the poor” as lazy and dependent. Let them figure their problems out for themselves.
Secondly, why should we care that they only work a 16 hour week? They are poor after all. Just cut back social welfare and see how they survive… no need to punish them further. If they manage to care for their family and themselves while only working 16 hours a week, then it is not our problem.
Arthus, that's the exact strategy we're advocating :P
Chou | 8 09 2007Arthus, that’s the exact strategy we’re advocating
While that may be what you are advocating, Ryan at
Arthus Erea | 8 09 2007While that may be what you are advocating, Ryan at least seems to be having difficulty restraining himself from insults and generalizations of the poor as lazy and stupid.
thats not true arthus. i am simply trying to use
Ryan | 9 09 2007thats not true arthus. i am simply trying to use the limited information supplied to shed light upon some of the causes of such little work being done by the nation’s poor.
if you would revert to my earlier comment you will see that i also submitted the possibility that disabiliy, lack of ability (different from “disability”), and government intervention were also important contributers…