A recent article on the NYT "most-emailed" list, entitled Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? had a paragraph which caught my attention. It said,
What popped into my mind was the percentage of America's children who are growing up in homes whose income is insufficient to meet the family's most simply defined needs, and what that means for their development and for their adult years -- and for our society.
Those who expect young people who grew up in poverty to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and are critical when they fail to do so are unrealistic. Assertions that plenty of people grew up poor and are fine as adults don't seem to me to be sufficient justification.
What percentage of America's children might be affected? The official poverty rate for children under 18 was 17.4% in 2006. [source: http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/p60-233.pdf]
Nearly 20.7% of children under 6 in 2006 lived below the poverty line, and 43.3% -- more than 2 in 5 lived below 200% of the poverty line and 61.2% lived below 300% of poverty. [Source: my calculations from the 2006 American Community Survey (Census Bureau website -- ratio of income to poverty level tables)] Does 300% of poverty sound like plenty of money? It might be in rural Alabama, but in the New York metro, where far more people live, it won't go far.
As the twig is inclined ... if our twigs are growing up in poverty, in situations in which their parents are stretched to the breaking point ... what do we expect their adult years to be like?
And don't say that we can't end poverty. We can. Not by more programs. Not by well-intentioned conversations. But by tax reform that takes back for workers the privileges that have been so generously given to those who own our most valuable natural and common resources, including our urban land value. We can end poverty. We can create opportunity for all. We can remove the prime reason we have sprawl. We can fix these problems. And we must.
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