For many people, the number of children living in poverty is a measure of the success of a society. If a community can’t raise young people with the material possessions that they need, then it is a sign of failure, particularly if that society is otherwise affluent.
In the US, the figures on child poverty appear shocking at first blush. In 2014, more than 20.4 percent of children in families were below the poverty line. This is a contributed post and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Meet The Harris Family.
When you delve a little deeper, however, you find that things aren’t so bad after all. For starters, that same figure was 26.9 percent in 1959, showing that we’ve made substantial progress over the last seventy years to cut down on child poverty. Furthermore, the statistics that we do have are probably biased upwards. Current accounting practices mean that statisticians only look at the monetary incomes of households in the US to determine their level of poverty. They don’t take into consideration benefits-in-kind, like medicare or food stamps. When you include these, rates of poverty among children across the nation go down even more.
The work to eliminate poverty in the US, however, is not yet done. There’s still a long way to go, as the following infographic makes clear. However, data suggest that government programs have substantially contributed to the fall in poverty that we see today. More than 22.1 million Americans avoided falling into poverty because of social security, and more than 10.3 million avoided it through nutritional programs. Read on to find out more.
Infographic by Norwich University
