How can the United States—still the richest nation on earth—tolerate one of the highest child poverty rates in the industrialized world? This is not inevitability but failure: we have the wealth to end it, yet lack the will. The same is true of widening inequality since the 1980s—it is a political choice, not an economic inevitability.

Child poverty is not a natural phenomenon, like an earthquake or a hurricane. It is a social condition for which we are collectively responsible, brought into existence and maintained for decades due to the economic policies we have pursued and supported. “That our society tolerates this violent indifference to the life experience of millions of impoverished children remains a profound failure and abdication of our most fundamental responsibility to future generations. It does not have to be this way,” Academic Pediatrics, the journal of the American Pediatric Association, notes.

Eleven million children, out of the 74 million children residing in the United States, live in poverty. One in six children under the age of five (which is to say, three million children) are poor – that is the highest rate of any age group. In short, children constitute the poorest age group in the United States. The Children’s Defense Fund has shown that the burden of poverty falls disproportionately on children of color, as well as those under five years of age, those belonging to single mothers, and those living in the South, which is home to roughly 47 percent of the children in this country who live beneath the poverty threshold.

In 2023, Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native children were about three times as likely as white children to fall below the poverty line. Child poverty fell to a record low of 5.2 percent in 2021 – an achievement which was largely attributable to the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which lifted over 700,000 Black children and 1.2 million Hispanic children out of poverty. However, lawmakers opted not to extend the expansion of the CTC, and essentially all the gains in poverty reduction vanished the following year, pushing millions of Americans into poverty in 2022. Since 2021, the child poverty rate has more than doubled, standing at 13.4........

© Blitz