The United States does not have a comprehensive social safety net to fully shield kids from the emotional, physical, neurological, and generational impacts of such instability. Despite cycles of economic growth over recent decades, child poverty rates, calculated using only earned income, have remained high. Income inequality has increased dramatically since the s, and as a consequence, in , the poorest 20 percent of Americans received about 3 percent of total household income, while the richest 20 percent received more than half.
Department of Agriculture report, 93 percent of the rise in rural child poverty between and can be attributed to income inequality. For the millions of low-income children in families with at least one worker, employment is not enough to protect them from economic precarity. More than 15 million low-wage workers are raising children, and 1 in 10 are single parents. If wages had increased at the same rate as broader economic productivity, more than 4 million fewer children would be in poverty in a full-employment economy.
Since the early s, family structure has played a much lesser role in child poverty rates than some experts claim. And in those decades, the profile of unmarried parents has shifted; parents are now more likely to be fathers raising children alone or cohabiting with a partner than in previous years, and the share of single mothers raising children without a spouse or partner now hovers at around 50 percent, compared with 88 percent in Women and people of color—and women of color in particular—are disproportionately represented in jobs with low pay and inadequate workplace benefits and protections.
While 8. This occupational segregation, along with other factors of discrimination, also contributes to racial and gender wage gaps.
For example, Black men, on average, earned 70 cents for each dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men in ; Black women earned 63 cents.
For caregivers, and especially solo mothers, a lack of paid leave and child care support can force people to cut back on the hours they work, leave the workforce entirely, or sacrifice necessary time with their families in order to pay the bills. Nearly half of low-wage workers, meaning those in the bottom quarter of earners, do not have access to a single paid sick day to protect their health or care for a sick family member without risking a paycheck.
Those disparities are exacerbated by a lack of affordable child care, which is one of the biggest expenses for families today. For families in poverty, whose jobs already tend be unstable, inflexible, and inadequately compensated, the decisions surrounding child care can have dire consequences for their family budgets and potential future employment.
Low wages are not the sole factor perpetuating child poverty and making it difficult for families to make ends meet; other labor market factors such as unemployment play an important role as well. Losing a job is one of the leading triggers for falling into poverty. And, once again, discrimination and systemic racism built into the labor market means that Black people face persistently higher rates of unemployment than whites, contributing to racial disparities in the poverty rates among their children.
Formerly incarcerated people and those involved in the justice system even without a conviction , 37 immigrants and refugees regardless of citizenship status, 38 LGBTQ individuals, 39 and people with disabilities 40 often face serious barriers to employment. Widespread discrimination and exclusionary policies that target those communities, paired with the broader issues listed above, leave them and their children more vulnerable to poverty and deprivation.
Savings and assets help people to invest in their own futures and those of their children; they help families endure difficult times, support economic mobility, and have been tied to better outcomes for children. Black and Latino families are twice as likely as their white counterparts to have zero or negative wealth, and almost 40 percent of Black families had negative or zero wealth in Children do not work and cannot earn their way out of poverty, but they face long-term harm because the right to having their basic needs met is not guaranteed.
Yet the social safety net, in its inadequate and fragmented current form, includes burdensome work requirements, excludes those with no or very little income, and leaves jobless people and their families with few stable options. This reality is no accident. It is the result of concerted efforts over the past 50 years to decentralize and defund programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance UI as well as a prevailing false narrative that insists that the jobless and others facing hardship are undeserving of comprehensive government support.
One particularly egregious example is the federal program formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children AFDC , a New Deal-era cash assistance program targeted to low-income children. When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act converted it to a more restrictive—and underfunded—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families TANF block grant to supposedly encourage work, participation in the program decreased dramatically.
Such circumstances exist because economic inequality is inextricably linked to other structural inequities in incarceration, education, housing, health, and more. For example, more than 1 in 10 children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, and African American and American Indian children are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to live in neighborhoods that, due to histories of redlining and chronic underinvestment, are less likely to have job opportunities for parents and safe places to play.
The same forces that created segregated neighborhoods of concentrated poverty have also resulted in the segregation of primarily low-income students and students of color into underresourced schools that struggle to meet their needs. In the absence of a strong federal role, the vast majority of states have distributed educational funds through systems that do not target schools with higher rates of student poverty.
In some ways, the institutions charged with supporting children and keeping them safe have contributed to cycles of criminalization and hardship instead. The authors demonstrated their approach by calculating life expectancy at age 40 in Denmark based on official income and mortality records of the entire population of Danish women and men spanning the period , which approximately halved the difference in life expectancy between people in low and high-income groups: When accounting for income mobility, life expectancy for a year-old man in the upper income groups is The difference is growing Even though inequality in life expectancy now proves to be only half as big as earlier anticipated, the new UCPH-research funded by the Danish National Research Foundation also shows, that the difference in life expectancy between the rich and the poor has steadily increased over the 30 years represented in the data.
Story Source: Materials provided by University of Copenhagen. Role of income mobility for the measurement of inequality in life expectancy.
ScienceDaily, 29 October University of Copenhagen. Rich people don't live that much longer than the poor, study finds: Economists take income mobility into account when calculating life expectancy. Retrieved November 10, from www. What improves health in a community? It includes wide access to social, educational and economic opportunity.
A common thread among many of the places with a smaller longevity gap was population density, with wealthy cities leading the way. New York has a high rate of social spending for low-income residents and has been aggressive in regulating trans fats and smoking. In the area in and around Birmingham, Ala. Because people of different races have different life expectancies regardless of income, the researchers statistically adjusted these local numbers to simulate a world in which all places matched the racial composition of the country as a whole.
These numbers are after these race adjustments. Mark E. Wilson, chief executive of the health department in Jefferson County, Ala.
The county expanded availability of preventive health care like vaccinations and mammograms by opening clinics in poorer neighborhoods in the s and early s though recently it has closed some of the clinics. Although a relatively high percentage of the population lacks health insurance, a portion of local taxes goes to hospital care for those who cannot pay. The county has been ahead of the rest of Alabama in banning smoking in restaurants and workplaces, with a law enacted in And philanthropic foundations backed by old industrial money have funded campaigns to make people healthier in the Birmingham area.
Wilson said. Future Development. The Future Development blog informs and stimulates debate on key development issues. This blog was first launched in September by the World Bank and the Brookings Institution in an effort to hold governments more accountable to poor people and offer solutions to the most prominent development challenges. Continuing this goal, Future Development was re-launched in January at brookings. For archived content, visit worldbank. Figure 1.
Poverty is declining in most countries, not in fragile states Source: World Data Lab projections. Two fragile countries are and will be the focal points for extreme poverty Geographically, poverty is increasingly concentrated in Africa and success in ending poverty globally will largely depend on African fragile states.
Figure 2. By , fragile states will make up five of the 10 countries with the highest number of extreme poor Source: World Data Lab projections. Future Development Over 1 billion people live in poverty hotspots Raj M.
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