BAD CHOICES YIELD POVERTY

If you're a poor adult in America, for the most part, it's all your fault.
That's true, at least today, whether you're black, white, brown or polka dot.

According to the definition the U.S. Bureau of Census uses, a family of
four with an income over $18,244 is not poor. The poverty cutoff for a
single-person household is $9,359, and that for a two-person household is
$12,000. With those definitions, the poverty rate was 11.7 percent, or
about 33 million Americans living in poverty in 2001.

The greatest percentage of poverty is found in female-headed households.
More than 70 percent of households headed by females are poor. A large
percentage of poor people are children - 17 percent; fully 85 percent of
black children living in poverty live in a female-headed home.

Is poverty pre-ordained? I think not. A married couple, both working full
time at minimum-wage jobs for $5.15 an hour, would earn an annual income of
$20,600. Keep in mind that few adults earn wages as low as the minimum wage
and those who do earn a higher wage after a few months on the job. If a
married couple both working at the minimum wage had no children, they would
not be poor; if they had two children, they wouldn't be living in the lap
of luxury, but neither would they be below the poverty line.

Let's look at poverty in female-headed households. Divorce and death of the
father might explain a small part of why there're so many female-headed
households. But the bulk of it is explained by people having children and
not getting married in the first place. Having children is not an act of
God. It's not like you're walking down the street and pregnancy strikes
you; children are a result of a conscious decision. For the most part,
female-headed households are the result of short-sighted, self-destructive
behavior of one or two people. They might have bought into the nonsense of
"experts" like John Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, who
said, "It has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly
responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes." The real
issue, Cherlin says, "is not the lack of male presence but the lack of male
income." That's a call for fathers to be replaced by a government welfare
check.

According to a NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School Poll, the leading cause of poverty
identified by both the poor - 75 percent - and non-poor - 65 percent - was
drug abuse. Again, it's not like you're walking down the street and you're
struck with drug addiction; to use drugs is a conscious decision.
Drug-users tend not to be very productive. They drop out of school, abandon
their families, have scrapes with the law and don't hold down jobs. Would
anybody be surprised that poverty is one result of drug usage?

Most middle-class Americans, including black Americans, are no more than
one, two or three generations out of poverty. How did they manage this
feat; what's the secret for avoiding poverty?

I think it's a no-brainer. Finish high school and take a job, any kind of a
job. Today, but not when I graduated in 1954, if a person graduates from
high school, with even a C average, there is a college or some kind of
skills training program somewhere for him, and often financial assistance
to boot. So if a person doesn't take advantage of today's available
opportunities, particularly those during the boom of the 1990s and engages
in self-destructive behavior, whose fault is it?