Morning Edition; North Carolina Voices:Understanding Poverty; What is Poverty?

Today, we begin a series called North Carolina Voices Understanding Poverty. For the next two weeks, on morning edition, all things considered and the state of things, we'll explore the subject of poverty in detail. We'll be looking back in time to the 1960s, when North Carolina and the nation were engaged in major efforts to find and fight the causes of poverty. We want to know what has changed since then, and why? Today, there are nearly 36 million Americans who live below the federal poverty line, more than a million of them in North Carolina. Who are they? Why are they poor? And what is being done about poverty now? We start our series this morning with a simple question, but one with a complicated answer. What is poverty? Here's Laura Leslie. In 1964, as the war on poverty was getting underway, a researcher named Molly or Shansky invented the federal poverty level. Shansky found that the average American family spent one-third of its income on food, so she took what the government called an economy food plant and multiplied that cost by three,

and the federal poverty level was born. Or Shansky retired 25 years ago, but throughout her life, she has never claimed her number meant that people above it weren't poor. It was only the point below which people couldn't feed themselves. In 2001, she told NPR, she certainly didn't think her calculations would still be used. They haven't changed this in all the time since it was mandated by Congress. Anyone who thinks that we need to change it is perfectly right. I told them that then, but they didn't do it. Today, adjusted for inflation, the country's official poverty level for a family of four is $19,350 a year. Few people think that's enough to get buy-on. In a new poll conducted for North Carolina Public Radio by Elon University, fewer than 15 percent of North Carolinians said it was enough. The Progressive North Carolina Justice Center looked at basic average expenses for rent,

childcare, food, and so on. And so we said, well, how much does it really cost to live? And when we studied it, we found that people needed more than twice the federal poverty level to live on average in North Carolina if they had children. Sorry and Schmidt was one of the study's authors. She says the government isn't doing enough to help families in poverty meet their basic needs. But Robert Rector of the Conservative Heritage Foundation sees it differently. He says the poor have never been better off. I think that the average citizen, the average listener, when they hear the word poverty, they are thinking about individuals that lack adequate food for their kids, maybe lack clothing, lack an adequate apartment or house to live in. And if that's what we mean by poverty, there is virtually no poverty left anywhere in the United States. Rector says the average American who meets the official definition of poverty still has a car, two color TVs, cable, air conditioning, a washer and dryer, and a microwave.

And if you ask them, they will report that during the last year, they were able to obtain medical care whenever they needed it. This poor individual has been able to feed his family throughout the year and the family is not hungry. And they've had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs during the year. It doesn't always look that way at ground level. How many we could put on a cart and I want to start with a pretty work walk. Just in a warehouse in North Raleigh, the food bank of Eastern and Central North Carolina sends out 2.2 million pounds of food every month to 34 counties, mostly through the work of volunteers. Today, it's Daniel Jones and her classmates from Raleigh Charter High School. It is so huge. There's so much food here. It's amazing. It's amazing how many people need all this food. All holiday is the food bank's development director. She says for many of the centers, 400,000 or so clients, poverty still comes down to hunger. And I think the way we define hunger is, is certainly not starvation.

People do mistake that. It is being hunger insecure, not knowing where your next meal is coming from, not knowing what your next meal will be. Holiday says most of the people who use the food bank are working poor families, making tough choices between paying rent, paying bills, or buying food. We are the last resort in many cases. They've tried very hard to make ends meet. When families can't figure out where the next meal is coming from, that's inexcusable in this country. Robert Rector with the Heritage Foundation doesn't deny that some Americans face tough choices, but he says even the poorest Americans are still better off than people in much of the rest of the world. A fact he says we've lost sight of. When we talk about poverty in third world countries, we're usually talking about the world bank standards are individuals that have an income of less than $100 a year per person. The federal poverty level in the United States is about 20 times higher than that.

So right off the bat, we can see that we're not talking about even remotely the same thing, and that most people that are identified as poor here in the United States in fact would be considered upper middle class in most third world countries. On a rude Krishna says Rector is right, up to a point. Krishna is a public policy professor at Duke University. He spends a lot of time studying poverty in Kenya, Uganda, and India. Oh sure, you take the poorest person in America and transfer them with all the dollars they possess to a Ugandan community that I study, and they would not be poor in terms of the sheer number of dollars they possess. But in terms of where they stand when they're back in the United States, they're poor. They're definitely poor. Krishna says different communities see different things as basic and essential. Food, clothing, and education for one's children are on everyone's list. But beyond that, what you need and whether you're poor depends on where you are. Poverty is a relative concept.

It cannot be absolute, right? It's relative to one's needs, it's relative to what one owns and does not own. But it's also relative to how other people live and how one is oneself expected to live in a particular situation. Krishna's favorite example is a car. In most of the foreign communities he's studied, a car is a sign of wealth. But in rural North Carolina he says, a car is a basic need in order to get to work. So just because a poor man in North Carolina would be a rich man in India doesn't mean he isn't poor at home. In our poll, while most North Carolinians thought people needed much more than the official poverty level to get by, only about 15 percent said they themselves are poor. And that, it turns out, is just about how many of them actually are living at or below that official poverty level. Sauri and Schmidt of the North Carolina Justice Center says defining poverty is tricky, even among poor people themselves. There's a lot of people who can't meet their families' needs every month and know that

they can't, but wouldn't call themselves poor. And that's fine. You don't want to be labeled. No one wants to be labeled. But it goes back to this discussion, should you be working full time and not have enough to have a child with your spouse or two children? And is that the society we want? Anna-Rude Krishna has a different set of questions. He wants to know not just what it means to be poor in North Carolina, but how many people here are permanently poor, as many are in the third world, and how many move into and out of poverty. Mobility could explain a lot, and Krishna is hoping a study in North Carolina this summer will provide some answers. I'm Laura Leslie, North Carolina Public Radio, W-U-N-C.