Last month the Census Bureau released a report which announced there are roughly 37 million poor persons living in America. The number was roughly the same as the prior year, although as a percentage of population it has come down. The left has used this report as an excuse to attack Bush’s tax cuts as well as spending on the war. The claim is that higher taxes and lower military spending would allow us to better care for these poor unfortunate souls. The Heritage Foundation recently released a report detailing what exactly it means to be poor in America, and it reveals that our poverty level is not as bad as some would like you to believe.

The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from various gov­ernment reports:

• Forty-three 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.
• Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• Only 6 percent of poor households are over­crowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The average 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.
• Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
• Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
• Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

Some will look at these statistics in disbelief, wondering how it is possible that 43% of poor Americans can own a 3 bedroom house, and still be considered to be living in poverty. The reason is the Census Bureau disregards wealth when creating these reports and only uses current year income. For example, a recently retired executive who earned $250,000 last year, owns a home and 2 cars, and has savings and investments totaling over $1 million would be considered poor by this report if he had no reportable income for the current tax year.

They also reiterated a point I made back in July when I wrote about the root causes of poverty:

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.

To most Americans when you speak to them of living in poverty they envision empty cupboards, hungry children, and rundown homes. As unfortunate as it is that there are indeed some Americans that live in this type of poverty, the truth is they are the exception and not the rule. In fact “today, the expenditures per person of the lowest-income one-fifth (or quintile) of house­holds equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation”.

Americans classified as living in poverty today have a relatively high home ownership rate, generally own at least one automobile, and less than 2 percent claim they do not have enough food to eat. Comparing our poverty to that of other countries should make you proud to be an American, because Americans do not know of true poverty.

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Politics, Taxes