Is poverty in America becoming normalized? Have 16.4 million children living in poverty become an accepted part of American life? The answer seems to be yes because the conversation in Washington and state capitals these days is not about reducing child poverty but about reducing survival programs for struggling families. We are punishing innocents with federal and state cuts to reduce budget deficits they did not cause while 279 current members of Congress (238 Representatives and 41 Senators) have pledged not to ask the wealthiest corporations and individuals to pay a dime in new taxes to restore some of the hundreds of billions they drained from taxpayer coffers that have nearly bankrupted our nation and torn asunder the lives and hopes and futures of millions of Americans.
Here is one family who is suffering to reduce the budget deficit in the state of Michigan - Kyleigh, 6, and Aiden, 2, of Dowagiac, were cut off welfare on October 1.
Kyleigh, 6, and Aidan, 2, of Dowagiac, Michigan, were cut off welfare on October 1. Their mother, Hope Bundy, has reached the lifetime limit of four years of cash assistance recently set by the Michigan legislature. Hope’s temporary job at a door factory ended about the same time, and she hadn’t worked there long enough to get unemployment. Right now, she has no cash income. More than 11,000 Michigan families lost their welfare benefits in October.
Kyleigh and Aiden may become homeless because their mother, Hope Bundy, reached the new lifetime limit for cash assistance recently set by the Michigan legislature. In a time of recession, when jobs are scarce, the legislature cut the limit from five to four years, ending benefits as of October 1 for more than 11,000 Michigan families. This was done to help balance the state budget. Hope’s temporary job at a door factory ended at about the same time, and she didn’t work there long enough to collect unemployment insurance. As you read this, the Bundy family has no cash income.
Hope has played by the rules, explains reporter Julia Cass, on assignment for the Children’s Defense Fund. For the past four years, Hope has gone regularly to the Dowagiac office of Michigan Works, a workforce development association, to receive job training and job leads and to show the efforts she’d made to get a job or to report having a job. This is a requirement for receiving cash assistance under the federal/state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which replaced Aid to Dependent Children in 1996. The driving idea was to move recipients, mostly single mothers, from a dependence on welfare to work.
It hasn’t worked out that way for Hope. Although she said that the staff at Michigan Works is “really nice. They’re really trying to help me,” Hope, 25, has not held a single job that lasted as long as six months, the minimum needed to be eligible for unemployment, and she has been unemployed for most of the past four years.
Two problems stand out: Cass County, where Dowagiac is located, doesn’t have many jobs. Its current unemployment rate is 10 percent; two years ago it was even higher at 12 percent. And welfare recipients are rarely at the top of the list of candidates companies want to hire. The only workplaces that have considered Hope are fast food restaurants and temporary agencies, which companies use to fill in staff at times of need with no obligation to keep or to provide with benefits. When Hope has had a job, it hasn’t provided a livable wage for her and her children. She receives food stamps, subsidized housing on a flat treeless expanse of land outside Dowagiac, and Medicaid. Her recent temporary job at the door factory paid $10.50 an hour.
Hope has an additional problem – a learning disability that makes it hard for her to catch on and keep up. “I just feel really slow. Just not in place,” she said. On the assembly line at the factory that manufactures doors, she said, “what happened was, I didn’t get enough done within a certain amount of time and six or seven guys had to wait on me. I’ve tried to speed up but every time I did, I screwed up -- like putting in the wrong piece, little things.”
Hope said she applied for disability payments through Social Security and was denied. Kyleigh’s father pays a small amount of child support; Aidan’s father doesn’t work and pays nothing. Her family helps some but can’t support her because “they’re pretty much like me: low income.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Hope said, “We could end up being homeless. That scares me with my kids but I really don’t know….” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t finish the sentence.
Is pushing children into deeper poverty and homelessness while protecting the wealthy the America of fairness, compassion and equality that we purport to be? Beginning today, let’s live up to America’s promise by taking committed action to end child poverty and close the morally obscene gulf between rich and poor in our nation. The rich don’t need any more tax breaks and need to give back some of their unfair share of our nation’s tax subsidies and bailouts to feed and house and educate our children and create jobs to employ their parents.
Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
And..... Sadly,
You're probably right Ms.Edelman......
But if the World did not have Poverty and the Poor, what would all our generous Philanthropists and their Foundations do.....?? What other cause would give them such diverse reasons and the ability to party on without guilt and so elegantly?? What would happen to the marketing strategy of CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility?? They'd have to invent some thing else to sharpen up their good guy images, no.....
Unless we first start callin a spade a spade and not an instrument, and certainly not a derivative, it's going to be impossible to resolve any of the problems the World faces today.
The reason so many children live in poverty is that irresponsible people like Hope choose to have children so they can collect welfare, food assistance, housing assistance, free medical care, etc. Find the fathers and make them support their kids.
To truly help the poor, both in the United States and around The Whole World, we need a different monetary system and a worldwide, central bank that is democratically controlled, one-person, one nontransferable voting share.
This World Bank would have *ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD*. No more banks.
Now, you don't need TAXES at all, to pay for social services, you just let the bank pick up the tab.
You need a Basic Income Guarantee, no problem, the bank will pick up the tab.
You need Universal Healthcare, the bank will pick up the tab - without TAXES.
You need clean running water and electricity and cell phone service in your village, the bank will *GRANT* you the money to build up that infrastructure to bring your village into the 21st century.
If you run out of money, you electronically generate more. But really, you never run out of money.
If the scientists and academics around the world were tasked with designing a better World Order that served the majority of the Earth people, they'd start by consolidating the banking industry and getting rid of governments.
Personally, I think if the U.S. Government had its way, it would eliminate itself in favor of a global nonprofit banking system.
If a billion people want a 55" L.E.D. flat panel TV and fiber optics to their homes, then the bank buys SAMSUNG and all of it's parts suppliers, then releases the designs for all the 55" L.E.D. HDTV manufacturing processes so they can be replicated all over the world and supply can keep up with demands.
This model of Manufacturing is called Open Manufacturing. Basically it's the Linux Open Source software model applied to material goods.
The citizens, controlling all the world's money, could buy all the World's oil companies, and make gas FREE.
The citizens could buy all the power companies, and make electricity FREE.
Same with telecommunications, gas, etc. We simply buy all the manufacturing infrastructure for the *BEST*, *HIGHEST QUALITY*, *LONGEST LASTING* products in all common categories. Microwaves, Refrigerators, Beds, Lawnmowers, Electric Cars, Solar Farms, Windmills.
The goal is FREEDOM, not INFLATION.
Then you go BALLS-TO-THE-WALL worldwide and get rid of OIL except maybe gas for the long-distance trucking companies and trains that move our goods around. Everybody else gets electric cars.
Most people drive less than 100 miles a day. A lithium battery in an electric car holds 100 mile charge and can be recharged over night.
If you need to go on a cross-country or interstate trip, you can rent a hybrid.
How much would it cost to rent a hybrid? I don't know, what do to citizens want to charge themselves now that they own Hertz and Toyota?
I'm willing to pay for a) vocational training for those who don't have the intellectual capacity for college work and b) effective, long term birth control (ie. Depo shot, IUD) for women who cannot afford children.
I'm willing to pay for temporary assistance to help families who have fallen on hard times get through it. A civilized society needs a safety net. "Hard times" means you lost a job you depended on, or you got cancer, or your house burned down, or your SPOUSE died or abandoned you and left you with children. Gaining no job skills and willingly having two kids out of wedlock does not count as "hard times" - that is "bad choices".
I have a very, very hard time just paying to perpetuate the cycle of dysfunction, with no end in sight. In a modern, industrialized nation with free education and effective birth control there IS NO EXCUSE for a 25 year old woman to have absolutely no job skills and 2 kids out of wedlock. NONE. It is robbery to ask our hardest working taxpayers to fund such lives in perpetuity.
The biggest concern, however, must be given to the children. They are our greatest resources and must not be allowed to remain a part of this cycle. We can't afford to simply disregard the Einstein's and MichaelAngelos of tomorrow.
We should be encouraging ALL people to delay child birth responsibly until the time, if and when it occurs, that they can afford to have and support children, by at least modest means in the moment, although so few of us can actually claim financial "security" these days. The GOTP more than anyone should be celebrating these ideas and promoting all the free reproductive health care and birth control that anyone could possibly want or need.