Oddly enough, few conservatives have thought to ask a very simple question: Are the "poor" who benefit from all this spending really poor?

Robert Rector, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundatiion, thought to ask. And the answer he found is surprising: The Census Bureau's report "greatly exeraggerates the extent of poverty in the United States."

In a new Heritage study titled "The Myth of Widespread American Poverty," Rector describes three sources of error in the Census report.

Cash Boundary
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If a family's cash income falls below a certain level, the Census Bureau classifies the family as poor. (The 1997 poverty line for a family of four was $16,404.)

"But," says Rector, "these thresholds have been set artificially high. Although families with incomes below the thresholds will face many financial difficulties, they are not necessarily poor in the sense of lacking adequate food, shelter, and clothing."

Ignoring Other Assets
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In focusing on current cash income, the Census Bureau ignores all other accumulated assets in determining whether people are "poor." This can result in drastic errors.

"A businessman who suffers temporary business losses resulting in a negative net income for the year," Rector explains, "will be labeled as 'poor' even if he has a million dollars sitting in the bank."

$2 Trillion Missing
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The most critical error the Census Bureau makes, Rector says, is that it radically undercounts Americans' true annual income and economic resources.

Rector found the error by checking similar computations by the Commerce Department. In calculating the gross national product for 1996, Commerce put the aggregate "personal income" of Americans at $6.8 trillion. But the Census Bureau finds the aggregate income to be only $4.8 trillion.

"The missing $2 trillion of personal income," Rector notes, "exceeds the entire economies of all but a few of the world's nations. Much of the missing income belongs to the middle class and the rich, but low-income families receive a large slice as well."

Rector also notes that the old maxim "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is simply not true.

"Material conditions of lower-income Americans have improved dramatically over time," he writes. "In fact, living conditions in the nation as a whole have improved so much that our society can no longer clearly remember what it meant to be poor or even middle class in earlier generations."

*The average home owned by a person classified by the government as "poor" has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

*More than 750,000 "poor" people own homes worth over $150,000. Nearly 200,000 "poor" own homes worth more than $300,000.

*Only 7.5 percent of "poor" households are overcrowded. Nearly 60 percent have two or more rooms per person.

*Seventy percent of poor households own a car, and 27 percent own two or more cars.

*Ninety-seven percent of the "poor" own a color television. Almost half own two or more color sets. More than 20 percent own two VCRs; half own stereo systems; and more than one-fourth have an automatic dishwasher.

*Two-thirds of "poor" households have air-conditioning. By contrast, in 1968 only 36 percent of the entire population had air-conditioning.

*Eighty-four percent of the "poor" report that they have enough to eat.

*Nearly half of "poor" adult women are overweight.