No child chooses to be poor

Our news is driven by scandal, crisis, and tragedy.

A bridge falls in Florida. Trump insults someone in a tweet. Stormy Daniels sues the president, and his lawyers file motions against her. Facebook allows the personal data of 50 million people to be used without their knowledge. And so on.

What gets lost in the noise is often what is most important. Think about the future of this country. Surely the fact that nearly one in five children is in poverty is a stunning and terrible portent.

We are one of the richest countries in the world, but we rank 36 out of 41 countries in the number of children in poverty among developed nations, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Only Greece, Mexico, Israel and Turkey are worse. Nearly 40 percent of children will spend one year in poverty before they turn 18.

Children in poverty experience housing insecurity, inadequate health care and food deprivation. That leads to lower achievement in school, more illness, more mental and emotional health problems and more obesity.

Poverty is a choice, not a fate. The U.S. spends less than 10 percent of its federal budget on kids, a fraction of what other industrialized countries spend. Public investment in family benefits rank among the lowest as a percentage of GDP. We give tax cuts to billionaires and choose not to provide universal preschool to all.

Poverty is shameful. We’d rather not look at it. We prefer to blame those who are in poverty than act to erase it. Even if they are children under the age of 6.

This is a scandal, but it doesn’t get headlines. It is a horrible human tragedy, but it gets only infrequent attention. It is a crisis of the children who suffer in poverty, but simply business as usual for a wealthy country that has learned to ignore it.

Across the world, countries have learned how to erase childhood poverty. Most developed countries give a child benefit to parents. Most guarantee universal preschool. Health care is universal and comprehensive. Child care is public and affordable. Affordable housing is available. Food security is guaranteed.

In the U.S., these programs are starved for funds. The poor are stigmatized. They must be poor because they don’t try; they are accused of being lazy, of failing. Yet, since the federal minimum wage was last raised in 2009 to the current $7.25 per hour, it has lost about 9.6 percent of its purchasing power to inflation, according to the Pew Research Center.

Our society has used zoning and redlining to ensure that the poor are shuffled into impoverished neighborhoods. It uses unemployment to ensure that inflation doesn’t get too high.

It prices college out of the reach of the poor, or forces them into debt to reach for it.

Poverty is a choice that children cannot make. Poor children are simply unlucky in the lottery of birth. We could choose to give them a decent start. Children go without adequate food, shelter, health care and education in America. We choose to leave one in five in poverty.

Want to Make America Great Again? Start with the most vulnerable in the springtime of life.

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