Almost 12 percent of the US population lives in poverty. That is more than one in ten Americans – and the percentage is even higher for children.
If you don’t know the current numbers, the federal poverty line is $12,760 for a single person and $26,200 for a family of four. If those annual incomes sound unbearably low, that’s because they are. And incredibly, the Trump administration has proposed lowering the poverty line even further, which would exclude even more poor Americans from the support they need.
However, debates about the poverty line do not even capture the full extent of Americans struggling to make ends meet. For many people, life is above the poverty line is even higher. These are the people who earn too much to qualify for welfare programs, but not enough to actually make ends meet – a situation faced by millions of American working families.
Amy Jo Hutchison is a single mother of two living in West Virginia. She is a community organizer for West Virginia Healthy Kids and Families and Our Future West Virginia. She has lived in poverty herself and has been part of the working poor. In an impassioned speech before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, she spoke about what poverty really looks like for working families – and even accused Congress of having no regard for what a family needs to live when they spend $40,000 a year on office furniture.
Watch Hutchison’s testimony here (transcript included below):
Statement by Ms Hutchison on proposed changes to the calculation of the poverty line
“I’m here to help you understand poverty better, because poverty is my life experience. And I’m also here to acknowledge the biased opinion that poor people are lazy and poverty is their fault. But how do I make you understand things like: Working full-time for $10 an hour is only about $19,000 a year, even though that’s way above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour?
I want to tell you about a single mother I met who worked at a gas station. Within 30 days, she was promoted to manager. She had to report her new income to DHHR within 60 days. Her rent went from $475 to $950 a month, she lost her SNAP benefits and her family’s health insurance, so she did what poor people have to do all the time. She gave up her promotion and went back to working part-time just so she and her family could survive.
Another single mother I know encouraged her children to get jobs. For her DHHR exam, she had to report their income as well. She lost her SNAP benefits and insurance, so she stopped taking her blood pressure medication because she couldn’t afford it – she worked full time at a bank and part time at a store on weekends. Eventually, the girls quit their jobs because her part time income from the fast food business was literally killing their mother.
Because children cannot escape poverty as long as they are dependent on a poor head of the family. Poverty rests on the shoulders of parents, directly on the shoulders of our children, no matter how hard we try.
I can tell you about my own situation of not having enough food to eat when I went to bed hungry at night so my kids could have a second helping, and I was employed full-time as a Head Start teacher. I can tell you about living above the poverty line, nursing my gallbladder with essential oils and prayers, chewing cloves and eating ibuprofen like they were Tic Tacs because I had no health insurance and couldn’t afford a dentist. I have two jobs and a bachelor’s degree, and I struggle to make ends meet.
I’m not poor according to federal poverty guidelines, but I recently cashed in a jar full of change so my daughter could enter her band in a high school band competition. I can’t go grocery shopping without a calculator. I had to decide which bills not to pay in order to be in this room today. Believe me, I’ve worked my way up on my own so many times that I’ve ripped them off myself.
The current poverty guidelines are completely out of touch with reality. The poverty line for a family of three is $21,720. Where I live, a three-bedroom house costs $1,200 a month because of the oil and gas boom. So if I made $22,000 a year, which could disqualify me from receiving assistance, I would have $8,000 left to support two children and myself. And yet I would not be classified as poor under the poverty guidelines.
I googled “congressman salary” the other day and according to the Senate government, the salary for senators and representatives is $174,000 a year. So one year of work for you is almost four years of work for me. I’m $24,000 above the federal poverty definition. To reach your salary, you would have to employ nine people full-time for a year at $10 an hour. I also read that each senator is approved for $40,000 for government furniture and furnishings and that amount is increased each year to account for inflation.
That $40,000 a year for furniture is $360 above the federal poverty line for a family of seven. And yet, on behalf of the 15 million children living in poverty in the United States – on behalf of one in three children under the age of five, and on behalf of the nearly 100,000 children in my state of West Virginia who live in poverty – I ask you not to change those federal poverty lines until you can make them relevant and reflect what poverty really looks like today.
You have a $40,000 piece of furniture at your disposal. West Virginia has a median income of $43,000 and a little change. People work full time and are hungry. Children will soon be excluded from free and reduced lunches because you want to make changes to the SNAP program, even though 62 percent of SNAP recipients in West Virginia are families with children – the same children who can’t work part time jobs because their parents would die without insurance. People in this country work full time for very little money.
They are not poor enough to get help. They do not earn enough to make ends meet. They work while rationing their insulin and forgoing their medications because they cannot afford food and health care at the same time.
So shame on you. Shame on you, and shame on me, and shame on every single one of us who hasn’t rattled the windows of those buildings with our cries of outrage at a government that thinks its office furniture is worth $40,000 a year, but families and children aren’t.
I’m not asking you to apologize for your privilege, but I’m asking you to look past it. There are 46 million Americans living in poverty making the best of what they have, and we can accept nothing less from our own government for the sake of children and families.”
In addition to Hutchison’s statement, a coalition of 26 patient organizations, including the American Cancer Society Action Network, the American Heart Association, and United Way, wrote a joint letter opposing the proposed poverty line reduction, stating:
“The current official poverty measure (OPM) is based on an old formula that already does not fully capture those living in poverty and does not accurately reflect basic household expenditures of families, including by underestimating the costs of child care and housing. The proposed changes to the inflation calculation would reduce annual adjustments to the poverty measure and could therefore exacerbate existing weaknesses and put vulnerable Americans – including those with serious and chronic illnesses – at great risk. Further lowering the poverty line would also provide policymakers and the public with less credible information about the number and characteristics of Americans living in poverty.”
This article originally appeared on 03.10.20
