That headline may be shocking to many of you. But consider -- nearly 12 million children live in poverty in the United States (the richest nation in the world).That is not true because we cannot afford to correct it. It's because we don't seem to want to fix that problem, or at least our leaders don't seem to want to fix it. They would rather gives tax cuts to the richest Americans instead of helping those children in poverty.
How can we call that anything but child abuse? Like me, you may say that's not what we want. But if it's not, then it is up to us to elect leaders that will solve the problem instead of ignoring it. Until we do, we will remain a nation of child abusers.
Here's just a part of an excellent article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times:
Imagine you have some neighbors in a mansion down the road who pamper one child with a credit card, the best private school and a Tesla.
The parents treat most of their other kids decently but not lavishly — and then you discover that the family consigns one child to an unheated, vermin-infested room in the basement, denying her dental care and often leaving her without food.
You’d call 911 to report child abuse. You’d say those responsible should be locked up. You’d steam about how vile adults must be to allow a child to suffer like that.
But that’s us. That household, writ large, is America and our moral stain of child poverty.
Some American children attend $70,000-a-year nursery schools, but 12 million kids live in households that lack food. The United States has long had one of the highest rates of child poverty in the advanced world — and then the coronavirus pandemic aggravated the suffering.
Now we could have a thrilling breakthrough: President Biden included a proposal in his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that one study says would cut child poverty by half. We in the news media have focused on direct payments to individuals, but the historic element of Biden’s plan is its effort to slash child poverty.
“The American Rescue Plan is the most ambitious proposal to reduce child poverty ever proposed by an American president,” Jason Furman, a Harvard economist, told me.
A couple of decades from now, America will be pretty much the same whether direct payments end up being $1,000 or $1,400. But this will be a transformed nation if we’re able to shrink child poverty on our watch.
So the most distressing part of 10 Republican senators’ counterproposal to Biden was their decision to drop the plan to curb child poverty. Please, Mr. President, don’t budge on this.
And senators, what are you thinking? Is the supposedly “pro-family” party battling to preserve child poverty? . . .
Maybe you think this is unaffordable? One prominent estimate suggests that child poverty costs the United States about $1 trillionannually in reduced adult productivity, increased crime and higher health care costs — so the question isn’t can we afford to help children, but can we afford not to? . . .
Now we can make it our priority, too, helping children and our country alike. As Furman says, “investments in children are not just a handout but a hand up.” Let’s empower our nation’s children, and stop abusing them.
