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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe numbers are staggering: US is ‘world leader’ in child poverty
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/04/the-numbers-are-staggering-us-is-world-leader-in-child-poverty/Financier and CEO Peter Schiff said, People dont go hungry in a capitalist economy. The 16 million kids on food stamps know what its like to go hungry. Perhaps, some in Congress would say, those children should be working. There is no such thing as a free lunch, insisted Georgia Representative Jack Kingston, even for schoolkids, who should be required to sweep the floor of the cafeteria (as they actually do at a charter school in Texas).
The callousness of U.S. political and business leaders is disturbing, shocking. Hunger is just one of the problems of our children. Teacher Sonya Romero-Smith told about the two little homeless girls she adopted: Getting rid of bedbugs, that took us a while. Night terrors, that took a little while. Hoarding food..
The U.S. has one of the highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world. As UNICEF reports, (Children's) material well-being is highest in the Netherlands and in the four Nordic countries and lowest in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and the United States.
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
jen63
(813 posts)at work. /s
K & R
jwirr
(39,215 posts)month but are eating very little by the end. WIC provides some fruit - enough for two weeks for a child but what most don't understand is that with a couple of siblings it does not last that long. And then there is no more fruit for the rest of the month.
And when summer comes the family has to make what food money they have last for 3 meals a day and it is not enough to last for 1 meal a day in the school year. I often buy for such a family and go without myself. This is the greatest failure of our time.
Once upon a time George McGovern researched this and then helped to start the food stamp program. It worked then. But the cost of food had gone up a lot and the congress have made cuts. We are once again back in the 60s. And all while the rich get richer.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)America decided to embrace greed and selfishness and these are the consequences.
BTW before this, one only had to look at the rich people in third world nations to see how the rich people would be in America if they were fed with so much money via trickle down economics. The Rich in the third world are cruel and brutal. It shows you what money does to people.
Donald Ian Rankin
(13,598 posts)Absolute poverty is defined in terms of some measure of the cost of living.
Relative poverty is defined in terms of a fraction of the median income.
The former is a sensible way to compare societies, the latter - while very widely used - is not.
The reason the USA has so much relative "poverty" is that it has a very high median income. But what it doesn't have is an exceptionally large number of people with low living standards.
a kennedy
(29,728 posts)Cheese Sandwich
(9,086 posts)I was almost going to post this, but did a search for the title and found you've done it. So have this rec.
lovemydog
(11,833 posts)It's easy to become immune to this information. None of us should be immune to the suffering of children.
daredtowork
(3,732 posts)of children raised on a steady diet of highly processed mystery meat WalMart food. They will grow up to be burdens on the medical system because if the nutritional imbalances and deficiencies of their youth (perpetuated into their adulthood if they continue to be poor).