Child poverty costs America between $800bn and $1.1trn annually, a new report suggests
of Inez, the tiny seat of Martin County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, can still vividly remember the day the president came to town. Fifty-five years ago, while stooping on a porch, Lyndon Johnson spoke at length to Tom Fletcher , a white labourer with no job, little education and eight children. “I have called for a national war on poverty,” Johnson announced immediately afterwards. “Our objective: total victory.
Child poverty often leads to adult poverty and all of its problems: psychological distress, exposure to crime and lost productivity. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, in a new 600-page study on the subject, estimate that child poverty costs America between $800bn and $1.1trn annually because of lost earnings and greater chances of criminality and poor health.
Because of this, the politics of poverty have become stuck. America is bogged down in the interminable exercise of separating the deserving poor from the undeserving. Treating the poor as responsible for their predicament is callous; treating them as victims of social structures and bad circumstances robs them of agency and dignity. Fair-minded people can find themselves anywhere in between.
When a better tool is used—the supplemental poverty measurement . In 1967 safety-net taxes and transfers barely dented poverty: 26.4% of Americans were poor before, and 25% remained poor after. Without a safety net, nearly the same proportion of Americans, 24.6%, would be poor today as were 50 years ago.
Each new social problem compounds the others. Individual choice and social structure co-mingle, yielding a Gordian knot of pathology difficult for policymakers to cut. The national economy has evolved to one that prizes education, leaving low-skilled workers behind. Deindustrialisation and incarceration have particularly decimated the prospects for black men.
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