Republicans seem eager to prove one of the Democrats’ favorite talking points, that Republicans “don’t care about the poor.”
Last week, in what can be most charitably explained as an effort to put Democratic campaign advertisers out of work, Mitt Romney spoke the words verbatim.
Before that, Newt Gingrich proposed that since “poor kids have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” they should become janitors in their schools.
Condemnations from the Obama campaign or columns like one by Charles Blow, entitled “Newt’s War on Poor Children,” could write themselves.
Democrats like Blow continue to paint poverty as bone-tired, Dickensian misery. The Republicans have yet to find a way to explain, with both clarity and sympathy, that poverty in America today, unlike poverty in Dickens’s time, is closely associated with unemployment and underemployment.
To support the conventional Democratic vision, Blow cites some of the data. “Three out of four poor working-aged adults — ages 18 to 64 — work,” he writes. “Half of them have full-time jobs and a quarter work part time.”
He cites an analysis of census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, who found that most poor children live in a household with at least one employed parent.
“Even among children who live in extreme poverty — defined here as a household with income less than 50 percent of the poverty level — a third have at least one working parent,” Blow continues.
“And even among extremely poor children who live in extremely poor areas — those in which 30 percent or more of the population is poor — nearly a third live with at least one working parent.”
But Blow’s own numbers can’t support his narrative. Fully half of poor working-age adults work less than 35 hours a week, the Labor Department’s current definition of “full-time,” and a quarter don’t work at all.
It’s hardly cheering news, moreover, that only a third of children in extreme poverty live with a working parent — especially because (though Blow doesn’t say it) precious few of those parents work full-time.
Further, by using the phrase “working parent,” the columnist obscures a key fact: Poor kids almost always live with a single mother. As he surely knows, the poverty rate for children living with single mothers is 30 percent, compared with 6 percent for those living with married parents. Simply put, a lot of poor people clearly aren’t employed full-time, or at all.
The problem has little to do with the recession. During the late ’90s — when the employment rate sank to 4 percent — poor black men continued a long trend of leaving the work force. In 2005, 38 percent of poor men between 25 and 35 weren’t working at all and only 29 percent were working full time.
The general rule that work reduces poverty has held during the Great Recession. Census Bureau data show that poverty jumped from 13.5 to 14.5 percent among people working fewer than 35 hours a week between 2008 and 2009.
Among those who didn’t work, poverty rose even more, from 18.9 percent to 22 percent. But full-time workers saw no increase in poverty. And just 2.7 percent of men and women working full-time live in poverty.
In fact, as economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano, among others, have shown, since the 1970s, the hours worked by the richest quintile of the population have increased substantially — particularly among those working 50 hours or more — while the hours worked by the poorest quintile have declined.
None of this is to say that low wages among those at the bottom aren’t a problem or that even in good times there aren’t powerful reasons — mental illness, physical disabilities, poor skills, prison records — that people who want work can’t find it.
But candidates need to push back against the Dickensian trope of the near-starving, exhausted worker, which will do little to alleviate poverty today.
Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal and the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Adapted from the Winter issue of City Journal.
