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Scratching Beneath Surface Of The "Working Poor' Myth.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(VIEWPOINT)
Byline: THOMAS SOWELL
BusinessWeek magazine has joined the chorus of misleading rhetoric about "the working poor." Why is this misleading? Let me count the ways.
First of all, Census data show that most people who are working are not poor and most people who are poor are not working. The front-page headline on the May 31 issue of BusinessWeek says: "One in four workers earns $18,800 a year or less, with few if any benefits. What can be done?"
Buried inside is an admission that about a third of these are part-time workers and another third are no more than 25 years old. So we are really talking about one-third of one fourth -- or fewer than 10% of the workers -- who are "working poor" in any full-time, long-run sense.
Upwardly Mobile
Nevertheless, the personal human interest stories and the photographs in the article are about people in this one-twelfth, even though the statistics are about the one-fourth.
As for "What can be done?" that is a misleading question because the article is about what other people can do for the "working poor," not what they can do for themselves, much less what they did in the past -- or failed to do -- that led to their having such low earning capacity.
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