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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