Teaching about Poverty

Exercises:

Facilitator's key to exercise 3:
Debunking Myths Using the Poverty Quiz

printable version

Hand out the corresponding true/false quiz (exercise 3) to participants, and give them two minutes to mark their answers.

Now debrief them:

A. Say: Raise your hands if you answered “true” to one of the statements, two of the statements, three of the statements, four of the statements, five... and so on.

B. Tell them: All the statements were false! (If there is some rumbling in the crowd over this, assure them that you will be discussing why they are all false.)

C. Assure them that most Americans would think most of the statements are true. In fact, this quiz was specifically made up of the top 10 myths Americans have about poverty.

Specifics that debunk each statement on the quiz:

Myth 1: Very few people in the U.S. are ever poor because there is so much opportunity to succeed.
A study performed by the University of Michigan, tracking the fortunes of a representative sample of U.S. families for 25 years, found that fully 25% of these families at some time in the 25 years, became poor, as defined by the official poverty line. This means your family also has a one in four chance of becoming poor.

Myth 2: People become poor by making bad choices and/or living an immoral life.
Poverty is most often caused by forces beyond the control of the individual. Loss of a job, cutbacks in wages, and/or loss of a wage-earner in the family due to death, divorce or disability are the main paths to poverty for many families. For families living on the edge of the poverty line, an illness, accident, or loss of transportation or affordable child care also can result in loss of their job, and thus, poverty. The rich, on the other hand, can make many bad choices in their lives (i.e., drinking alcohol, gambling, divorce, etc.) without it necessarily resulting in poverty. The simple fact is that people are poor because they don’t earn enough money

Myth 3: Most of the poor are lazy and don’t want to work.
Most people found below the poverty line are either too old or young to work, or are workers but just don’t earn enough to join the ranks of the non-poor. As wages and benefits have gotten smaller, and part-time and temporary jobs became more common, the ranks of the working poor was enlarged. A minimum wage worker with two kids and no spouse, by working full-time throughout the year, (under the new minimum wage) would still be below the poverty line. Recently HUD released the statement that, in the year 2000, there is no county in the U.S. where a minimum wage worker can afford an apartment.

Myth 4: Most of the poor are receiving welfare, so they are in fact not poor anymore.
Most of the poor are not eligible for assistance. States set the eligibility levels for welfare much lower than the poverty line. In Alabama, for example, a family of three would have had to have less than $2,000 in earned income last year in order to be eligible for a TANF block grant. Many eligible poor never apply for assistance due to the stigma attached to getting “welfare,” or because they do not know they are eligible. And, in no state does welfare bring recipients up to the poverty line. In Alabama, receiving TANF would bring a recipient’s income up to roughly 15% of the poverty line. As this indicates, there is plenty of room to be poor and yet not eligible for aid in this country.

Myth 5: Most Americans on welfare are black.
The largest group of people receiving welfare (AFDC, food stamps, Medicaid, or SSI) are white. True, black Americans are disproportionately likely to be poor and therefore more often eligible for welfare; but the largest group of welfare recipients are white women. The social group that gets the most aid dollars, however, is the elderly poor who are the majority of Medicaid recipients, Medicaid having the largest share of the welfare spending.

Myth 6: Welfare pays women to have illegitimate kids, while the rest of us can’t afford to have more kids because our taxes are so high.
In Alabama, the per-child monthly stipend is, on average, $27 per child on TANF. For a full year, that would total $174 in welfare payments per child. It is not much incentive to have more children while on welfare. Comparing this amount to the $2,450 income tax exemption per child, we can see that tax-payers have a much greater incentive to produce more kids than do welfare families whose per-child subsidy is roughly 7% of the tax exemption. Not surprisingly, the fertility rate for women on welfare is lower than the fertility rate for all American women in those ages groups; average family size of welfare families is lower than the national average. Most children on welfare were conceived before their parents were poor, and single-parent moms are a smaller part of the welfare rolls than are women whose husband divorced or deserted them and women whose jobs make them poor.

Myth 7: Our government does more for the poor than it does for the rest of us.
See the above answer in #6. In addition, much more is spent by the government on “wealthfare” or subsidies to the non-poor. We just don’t think of them as welfare: FHA home loans, student loans, GI Bill, agricultural subsidies, business subsidies, etc. Most of what government does, it does for the non-poor. Aid to the poor is one of the smallest pieces of the budget pie, both at the Federal and at the state level.

Myth 8: Folks on food stamps eat better than we do; if they managed their money better, they wouldn’t be poor.
While we often get nosy about what someone is buying when we see them preparing to pay with food stamps, we also make assumptions based on limited data. The most generous food stamp allowance provides recipients with roughly $1.26 per meal per person. Recipients getting these stamps once a month tend to do one large grocery purchase for the month, and hope to make those items stretch through the month. So, when we see all that someone is buying, and we assume they shop as often for groceries as the rest of us do, we are in error. The problem with being poor is that you do not have enough money to manage.

Myth 9: The welfare state doesn’t work; instead of curing poverty, it has made poor folks dependent on handouts.
The welfare state we have known for the last 20 years began as the War on Poverty under LBJ. As a result, programs like Medicaid have supplemented Social Security and Medicare with the result that true poverty among the elderly has become more rare. If we were willing to provide as well for poor children and their mothers as we do for the elderly, all the programs would be counted as successes. The welfare programs do exactly what they are intended to do: provide poor support to the needy, lower than the lowest prevailing wage in the region, so that the poor will always have incentive to take the meanest possible work, even when it provides less than a basic subsistence, because it is still better than welfare.

Myth 10: Private aid organizations are better able to provide assistance to the truly needy than is the government.
Private aid and other charitable societies are already overloaded and unable to keep up with expanding need in the poor community. Groups such as Volunteers of America, the Salvation Army, and others estimated that they would have to be 10 times more prosperous than they currently are to be able to begin to substitute for the welfare state. And every cut in the welfare state results in private charities becoming swamped with the needy.