August 30, 2015
At
the height of the financial crisis, 18 percent of U.S. children lived in
poverty, as defined by federal guidelines. That figure is shockingly high for
the wealthiest country in the world. Today, however, well into the so-called
economic “recovery,” fully 22 percent of American children live in poverty, an
increase of 3 million, according to this year’s edition of the Kid’s Count Data Book,[1] an annual report of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. This is just
one more piece of data that reveals the recovery as a fiction of the
establishment elite and demonstrates that capitalism is failing to meet the
most basic needs of the people, even of children.
The
number of American kids now living in poverty, even as defined by inadequate
federal standards, is 16.1 million. On top of that, 14 percent of US children
lived in high-poverty neighborhoods as of 2013, a 3-percent increase since the
period 2006 to 2010. As the report authors note, “high-poverty neighborhoods
are much more likely than moderate and upper-income communities to have high
rates of crime and violence, unemployment and other problems.”[2]
And “at the same time, the steady increase in children growing up in
high-poverty neighborhoods is troubling. The gulf continues to widen between
children growing up in strong, economically secure families that are embedded
in thriving communities and children who are not. . . . large numbers of
children of all racial and ethnic groups are facing economic conditions that
can impede long-term success."[3]
These
numbers are averages, of course. Let us look briefly at some specifics. Perhaps
surprisingly, given its status as a world economic powerhouse, California had
the highest child poverty rate among U.S. states at 27 percent. (This shows the
notion that there is some sort of connection in a capitalist society between
economic output and the well-being of the citizenry is absurd.) The Deep South
remains a center of child poverty and poverty in general, while the position of
children in the Midwest is worsening. In Detroit, a victim of globalization and
decades of treasonous betrayal by outsourcing American capitalist owners, fully
59 percent of children live in poverty, while an astonishing 81 percent live in
high-poverty neighborhoods. The situation becomes even worse in light of the
well-known fact that, as the Kids Count
authors write, “at a minimum, families need an income of at least twice the
federal poverty level to cover basic expenses.”[4] When this more accurate measure is considered,
almost half of American children are victims of poverty.
These
appalling figures are not accidental. They are a predictable feature of an
economic system oriented toward individual accumulation and based upon only a
few in the society owning the means of production while everyone else must sell
their labor to them in return for what they need to survive. The master rarely
cares for the slave, or even for the children of the slave. Using their
superior position economically and politically, the ruling class naturally
works to accumulate more and more, and so gains an ever more secure grip on
power. We see this in the skyrocketing rates of inequality, the imposition of
devastating austerity on working people worldwide, the attacks on worker’s
rights in the name of global competition, and the destruction of jobs and
living standards as the capitalists insatiably seek profits at the expense of
ordinary people and families.
Nor
is the deteriorating position of the most vulnerable in society a temporary
phenomenon, it seems. Financial pundits, other spokesmen for the financial
elite, point to low unemployment as a sure sign that we really are in a
recovery and so should expect to see improvement in areas like child poverty.
But we are now several years into this supposed recovery, and it is clear that
the recovery has amounted to no more than a recovery of the asset values of the
1 percent. As Patrick McCarthy, president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation
said, “Although we are several years past the end of the recession, millions of
families still have not benefited from the economic recovery. While we’ve seen
an increase in employment in recent years, many of these jobs are low-wage and
cannot support even basic family expenses.”[5]
Nor
does the real economy (as opposed to the Ponzi-scheme “economy” of inflated
stock prices and corporate profits) seem poised to start delivering results for
working families. All of this might strike us as more obvious if our news were
not brought to us every night by millionaires and corporations.
But
the fact is that decades of experience with a social-democratic system of
ameliorated capitalism beginning with FDR has shown itself wholly incapable of
giving us an economy that does what it is designed to do—to meet human needs
and allow for the integral development of each
and every member of our society. Not one person should have to experience
the degradations of poverty in the richest country in the world, but at the
very least this should be true of children. The moral state of this country
challenges us all to think about what a workable alternative would look
like.
—Doran Hunter