Last week, the Urban Institute released a new survey of child poverty numbers:
Usually such surveys count the number of children in poverty and find that somewhere between one child in five and one child in seven is poor in the United States. Nothing to brag about, but at least we can tell ourselves that four children out of five are NOT poor.
The Urban Institute wants us to think about child poverty in a different way.
They propose we look at child poverty not as a snapshot in time, but as a sequence over time. If we do, we’ll see that more American children experience poverty than we might suppose – and that their odds of escape over time are much lower than we might hope.
* More than 1 out of 3 American children will be poor at some point in their childhood.
* You might imagine this experience as a brief or temporary one: the child on food stamps as his mother seeks work after a divorce for example. In fact, even children who experience poverty only temporarily tend to experience it recurringly: they cycle in and out of poverty, bad years following good.
* Children born into poverty are much more likely to remain poor in adulthood than children who are not born into poverty.
* Race predicts poverty: black children are 2.5x more likely to experience poverty than white, 7x more likely to be persistently poor.
The Urban Institute’s numbers are based on data from 1968 to 2005. We can assume that things have taken a nasty lurch downward since 2007.
This news might seem “dog bites man.”
Yes, there’s a lot of poverty in America, yes it’s hard to escape, yes minorities are more likely to be poor than whites … tell me something I don’t know.
But even if it’s a familiar story, it bears thinking anew for this reason:
America suffers much more child poverty than do comparably wealthy countries – Germany, France, Canada, etc. – for two main reasons:
* Our much higher levels of immigration and especially unskilled immigration, which continually add to the population of poor in this country.
* Our much lower levels of social spending, which mean that poor families receive far less social support than do poor families in other countries.
Many Americans see these two differences between the U.S. and other rich countries as evidence – or at least as a price worth paying – for America’s superior economic dynamism and social mobility.
As Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote in an important statement for National Review about the superiority of the U.S. over the European model:
American attitudes toward wealth and its creation stand out within the developed world. Our income gap is greater than that in European countries, but not because our poor are worse off. In fact, they are better off than, say, the bottom 10 percent of Britons. It’s just that our rich are phenomenally wealthy.
This is a source of political tension, but not as much as foreign observers might expect, thanks partly to a typically American attitude. A 2003 Gallup survey found that 31 percent of Americans expect to get rich, including 51 percent of young people and more than 20 percent of Americans making less than $30,000 a year. This isn’t just cockeyed optimism. America remains a fluid society, with more than half of people in the bottom quintile pulling themselves out of it within a decade.
But what if it turns out that America is not really such a fluid society?
I’ve referred before to this Brookings Institution study, published in 2009.
Pay special attention to this chart from page 5.
Only the UK does worse than the US among the 9 countries surveyed – and the social democratic countries of Scandinavia all do better.
This is not an argument in favor of the European way of doing things. I agree with Lowry and Ponnuru – and Charles Murray too – that American freedom and individualism are important national values to be celebrated and defended.
But let’s not flatter ourselves: Those values exact a social cost – and they would be easier to defend if the cost were less high. And the fact that this cost is not being paid by my children or (probably) yours does not make the cost less real to the one-third of America whose children do pay it.
JohnnyA // Jul 7, 2010 at 9:27 am
Rabiner,
I agree with you in principle and agree we need a better solution that rehabilitates criminals. But the ‘tough on crime’ is there by request. We need some minimum of law and order on the street. If we can’t rehabilitate them (we need to get better at that), we need to keep them off the streets and from causing more violence.
From the mid 80’s – mid 90’s many parts of the town I lived (Baltimore) were a war zone. Calling the police was almost a joke. Repeated violent offenders spent little time if any behind bars and often went right back after the victim the minute they got out. People I’ve met from DC, Philly, Boston, New Jersey, New York, Atlanta, Miami and other places say similar things. People got tired of the violence and demanded a solution.
Agreed that having a criminal record is a stigma, and putting everyone in a neighborhood in jail is not practical. Still, I’ve worked with a number of people that had criminal records that went on to be successful. Anyway, the stigma doesn’t really matter with the violent repeat offenders. From my personal experience, the fastest way to kill a neighborhood is to leave the criminals on the streets – crime begets crime as honest folks with the means move out and only the riffraff stay on. Communities with a zero tolerance policy are more likely to stay crime free in my experience.
JohnnyA // Jul 7, 2010 at 10:43 am
BillCC,
Agreed. One of the strongest determinants of a child’s future economic success is the parent(s)’s economic success and education level. Poor parents will raise poor children.
It is politically incorrect to say this (and impractical), but if you are a single, uneducated, poor parent, the best thing you can do for that kid is put them up for adoption. If you are living off welfare, you’ve shown you can’t take care of yourself and you have no business raising kids. If you want to have kids – there’s your incentive – reform yourself and get off welfare. We could do a lot more to reduce the birth rate in these populations, unfortunately certain factions of the republican party have hamstrung some of the programs with faith based initiatives and just say no rather than practical access to birth control methods and education.
The current focus of welfare is to throw money at a problem. The problem is many of these people need more than money to turn themselves around. They need education, job training and likely counseling and physical training. They need a life rehab. Solving the problem costs a lot more up front (and requires more government in your life than most of us are comfortable with) so we have a cheaper program that just deals with the symptoms.
What is working and has worked in other countries is a focus on education. South Korea and Spain have come very far in the last 20 years and much of that has been because of a serious focus on education.
The kids in these poor neighborhoods need more than an education from the school system. These kids show up with more needs than kids from more affluent areas. In high school, I participated in a Saturday volunteer program where we took inner city kids up to our school and provided them with a fun release (sports) and practical support (tutoring and testing). Some kids got counseling. It was amazing that in one Saturday a week, we got to know these kids better (and make more progress with them) than the teachers that spent all week with them. Sadly, programs like that are the exception to the rule. Most school districts insist that school is just for school, their mandate is not to help these kids with their other needs. It’s a fair argument and cheaper up front than making a real difference with the kids, but it costs us more later with more kids repeating the cycle of poverty.
Stewardship // Jul 7, 2010 at 4:21 pm
We must reform our welfare system. Not one day goes by that I don’t see a young woman (17-25) with a toddler or two in her shopping cart and another ‘on the way’ using food stamps. If you cannot affort to have children, or cannot afford the one(s) you have, don’t have any until you can afford them. Since the 1960’s, we’ve rewarded this type of behaviour. Who suffers? Those who make the right decisions and are responsible–we’re the ones who pay for everyone elses’ mistakes and irresponsibility.
It would take just one generation of tough love to turn this self-perpetuating mindset around. I firmly believe that I have the moral obligation to share what I have with others–but I believe I (or my church or local United Way) can deliver that assistance much more effectively than can the federal or state government, without innumerable layers of bureaucracy.
The other side of this coin (necessary because my view is especially harsh to the female/mother side of the equation) is that we must make fathers responsible for child support. Any father who is not living up to his responsibility needs to have an ankle bracelet attached to his leg, led by the nose to the nearest McDonald’s where he will work 8 hours, then led to public service job (cleaning streets, mopping floors) for another eight hours to ‘earn’ the public assistance his child is receiving from us.
Put those two recommendations into practice, and we’d see public spending on welfare drop in a hurry–and the level of poverty in our nation recede.
As an add-on, anyone who has tattoo’s all over his/her face arms, multiple piercings, and wears “pants on the ground” should be rejected from the welfare system automatically. They’ve self-selected to be unemployed for the rest of their lives.
someotherdude // Jul 7, 2010 at 4:52 pm
sinz54 writes:
“You want to fix poverty? Fix illegitimacy, with a combination of sexuality education, easily available birth control–and changing society’s attitudes (beginning with Hollywood) that having a baby is just something the girl does for fun with her boyfriend of the week.”
sinz54,
Do you still believe in Santa Clause?
I’m around very successful and wealthy people…not just your average mundane middle-class hick, but some truly wealthy all-Americans…and they are the most amoral, degenerate, sinners…divorce, prostitution, adultery, gambling, binges in Vegas and underground sex clubs…and this seems to fuel their appetites for sin….if one’s moral virtue is supposed to be reflected in one’s ability to accumulate capital, then…clap your hands harder so that Tinker Bell can come alive.
I still can’t believe folks cling to that fairy tale…working hard don’t mean squat when others are working ruthlessly and amoraly…
joeinqueens // Jul 7, 2010 at 6:50 pm
How was poverty defined in the US?
How was poverty defined in the European nations?
someotherdude // Jul 7, 2010 at 8:33 pm
Stewardship,
The U.S. government spends quite a bit of money on keeping its wealthy, very happy.
Should we send IRS agents into their homes, and make sure their moral virtue is deserving of your tax monies…or is moral virtue only reserved for the poor?
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msmilack // Jul 11, 2010 at 12:10 pm
I’d be curious what the statistics are on immigration and poverty especially compared to other countries. I suspect immigration is not one of the main factors for the poverty numbers since in the big picture, immigrants actually represent the more fluid part of our society in the economy: it’s the American dream to change one’s status in one of two generations. I think the harder part to remedy is the cycle of poverty which is not about immigration but lack of opportunity for certain segments of the population. Otherwise, this article is thoughtful and important.
Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » Stimulus and the states // Aug 10, 2010 at 3:30 pm
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