What if we had a plan to avoid poverty? What if the plan worked 98% of the time? Wouldn’t that be great? That is exactly what Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill from The Brookings Institution had. It caused quite a stir and went all the way to a congressional hearing. No one knew quite what to do with it. Actually, it wasn’t really a plan per se, it was more of a target statistic. A very simple statistic.
This is from Ron Haskins, testifying before Congress on June 5, 2012.
“Young people can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success – complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby.”
It is not often that such a definitive statement is made about how to avoid poverty. The statement is powerful because it is based on Census Bureau data. Mr. Haskins and Ms. Sawhill crunched the data and learned that “people who followed all three of these rules had only a 2 percent chance of being in poverty and a 72 percent chance of joining the middle class (defined as above $55,000 in 2010).”
Individual responsibility to avoid poverty
In his testimony before Congress, Mr. Haskins also talked about the importance of individual responsibility to avoid poverty.
“Call it blaming the victim if you like, but decisions made by individuals are paramount in the fight to reduce poverty and increase opportunity in America. The nation’s struggle to expand opportunity will continue to be an uphill battle if young people do not learn to make better decisions about their future.”
“As polls consistently show, Americans think able-bodied, non-elderly people should earn their own way. Americans simply don’t like welfare, even when someone calls it by a different name (e.g., ‘food stamps’ or more recently ‘SNAP’).”
Welfare Reform
Mr. Haskins testified about his conclusion regarding the welfare reform passed in 1996:
“After the passage of the 1996 reforms, poor mothers entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers. Between 1995 and 1999, for example, there was an increase of more than 40 percent in the number of never-married mothers, the poorest of the poor, who found employment. [34] In large part due to this increased employment of never-married mothers, poverty among all single mothers and their children fell by 30 percent, from a 1991 peak of 47.1 percent to 33.0 percent in 2000, its lowest level ever. Similarly, poverty among black children, who live disproportionately in female-headed families, reached its lowest level ever in 2001.”
“This example demonstrates what is possible if government policy encourages and even pressures adults to go to work and then subsidizes the incomes of those who earn low wages. The combination of work requirements and earned public benefits has the appearance of an approach to reducing poverty that has strong bipartisan overtones.”