While the pandemic has exacerbated and highlighted the economic precarity of too many children and families, the issues that cause such high rates of child poverty in the United States existed long before the public health crisis. And ultimately, joblessness, caregiving responsibilities, single parenthood, and other common life events only put children at risk of economic insecurity because U.
Census Bureau, has long been criticized as narrow and outdated, in large part because it determines the resources a family needs based on a bare-bones food budget from the s. It does not take into account major expenses such as housing or child care, nor does it account for geographical differences in costs of living. Because of this recognized failure in capturing the experiences of people facing economic deprivation, another measure, known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure SPM , was introduced in That measure counts resources such as nutrition benefits and housing subsidies, along with costs such as taxes and out-of-pocket medical expenses; it also determines a poverty threshold using a more diverse set of necessary expenses—not just food.
In , About 6 percent were living in deep poverty, defined as 50 percent of the federal poverty measure, and almost one-quarter were living in poverty or at risk, defined as percent of the official measure.
Children of color across most racial categories are more likely to experience poverty than their white counterparts. And while the broader category of Asian American and Pacific Islander children have lower rates of poverty, disaggregated data from past years show that serious disparities based on ethnicity persist with significantly higher rates for Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Burmese, and Hmong children, for example.
Black, Hispanic, and AIAN children are also disproportionately represented among children living in poverty. For example, while around 14 percent of children in the United States are Black, they make up more than one-quarter of children living below the poverty line. The poverty rate for children also differs by age, with the youngest children most likely to live under the official poverty line. Those differences are due, in part, to the higher expenses associated with younger children, such as child care, and because parents tend to be earning less earlier in their careers, when their children are younger.
Child poverty rates differ greatly depending on their family structure. The causes of child poverty cannot be separated from those of adult poverty.
Expenses associated with raising children are one of the many reasons that families fall into poverty, along with job losses and pay cuts, a transition from a two-parent household to a single one, and a family member developing a disability. Factors that make it difficult for people to meet their basic needs mean their children also grow up with economic instability and deprivation. The United States does not have a comprehensive social safety net to fully shield kids from the emotional, physical, neurological, and generational impacts of such instability.
Despite cycles of economic growth over recent decades, child poverty rates, calculated using only earned income, have remained high. Income inequality has increased dramatically since the s, and as a consequence, in , the poorest 20 percent of Americans received about 3 percent of total household income, while the richest 20 percent received more than half. Department of Agriculture report, 93 percent of the rise in rural child poverty between and can be attributed to income inequality.
For the millions of low-income children in families with at least one worker, employment is not enough to protect them from economic precarity. More than 15 million low-wage workers are raising children, and 1 in 10 are single parents. If wages had increased at the same rate as broader economic productivity, more than 4 million fewer children would be in poverty in a full-employment economy.
Since the early s, family structure has played a much lesser role in child poverty rates than some experts claim. And in those decades, the profile of unmarried parents has shifted; parents are now more likely to be fathers raising children alone or cohabiting with a partner than in previous years, and the share of single mothers raising children without a spouse or partner now hovers at around 50 percent, compared with 88 percent in Women and people of color—and women of color in particular—are disproportionately represented in jobs with low pay and inadequate workplace benefits and protections.
While 8. This occupational segregation, along with other factors of discrimination, also contributes to racial and gender wage gaps. For example, Black men, on average, earned 70 cents for each dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men in ; Black women earned 63 cents. For caregivers, and especially solo mothers, a lack of paid leave and child care support can force people to cut back on the hours they work, leave the workforce entirely, or sacrifice necessary time with their families in order to pay the bills.
Nearly half of low-wage workers, meaning those in the bottom quarter of earners, do not have access to a single paid sick day to protect their health or care for a sick family member without risking a paycheck.
Those disparities are exacerbated by a lack of affordable child care, which is one of the biggest expenses for families today. For families in poverty, whose jobs already tend be unstable, inflexible, and inadequately compensated, the decisions surrounding child care can have dire consequences for their family budgets and potential future employment. Low wages are not the sole factor perpetuating child poverty and making it difficult for families to make ends meet; other labor market factors such as unemployment play an important role as well.
Losing a job is one of the leading triggers for falling into poverty. And, once again, discrimination and systemic racism built into the labor market means that Black people face persistently higher rates of unemployment than whites, contributing to racial disparities in the poverty rates among their children.
Formerly incarcerated people and those involved in the justice system even without a conviction , 37 immigrants and refugees regardless of citizenship status, 38 LGBTQ individuals, 39 and people with disabilities 40 often face serious barriers to employment. Widespread discrimination and exclusionary policies that target those communities, paired with the broader issues listed above, leave them and their children more vulnerable to poverty and deprivation. Savings and assets help people to invest in their own futures and those of their children; they help families endure difficult times, support economic mobility, and have been tied to better outcomes for children.
Black and Latino families are twice as likely as their white counterparts to have zero or negative wealth, and almost 40 percent of Black families had negative or zero wealth in Children do not work and cannot earn their way out of poverty, but they face long-term harm because the right to having their basic needs met is not guaranteed.
Yet the social safety net, in its inadequate and fragmented current form, includes burdensome work requirements, excludes those with no or very little income, and leaves jobless people and their families with few stable options. This reality is no accident.
It is the result of concerted efforts over the past 50 years to decentralize and defund programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance UI as well as a prevailing false narrative that insists that the jobless and others facing hardship are undeserving of comprehensive government support. One particularly egregious example is the federal program formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children AFDC , a New Deal-era cash assistance program targeted to low-income children.
You can see this as you look below at the Note from the report. So, the obvious follow-up question is: Where does that leave me? Into which class do I fall? Income data released by the U. Pew defines the middle class as those earning from two-thirds to double the median household income. Easy, right? Just take your household income and see where you fit, given these numbers. The lives of families making the median income look very different, given the vastly different cost-of-living levels across the U.
This lived experience can make it difficult to determine your income class status. People in the aggregate tend to live, work, and socialize with people of similar income levels. For this reason, we often do not have accurate reference points that would help us gauge our actual class status. If you want to know exactly how you fit into the income class matrix, the Pew Research Center has a recently updated income calculator. You can break down your class status first by state, metropolitan area, income before taxes, and members of the household, then by education level, age, race, and marital status.
State and city taxes vary, access to healthcare varies, city living is expensive, and so are children. All of these factors can contribute to what class you feel you are in, regardless of what national statistics say. It turns out that lower class, middle class, and upper class are tricky terms to box in.
The Pew income calculator is a good start for learning where your income puts you, given where you live and some background factors. However, the class you're in is about more than just how much money you make. Before we leave the topic, it is worth taking some time to think about how other considerations factor into who and where you are. Start with social and cultural capital, a concept debuted in by French sociologist and public intellectual Pierre Bourdieu. He said that in addition to economic capital, there are social and cultural capital.
Social capital is your connections. It is who you know, whom you socialize with, and who is in your circle. It is group membership, according to Bourdieu. This cultural capital includes education level, skills, cultural knowledge and taste, and ways of behaving, speaking, and dressing. This additional influence is due to the existence of other forms of money.
Social and cultural capital offers different kinds of currency and a slightly different kind of class status. The upper, middle, and lower designations may no longer be the best way to look at where you fit. They marry later, are better educated, and have larger and richer social networks.
Reeves argues that this class is essential for understanding inequality for two reasons. In any case, it is more than enjoying comfort. Zero would mean no relationship between parental income and child income, while a result of one would indicate that parental income determines child income entirely. Krueger found that increasing immobility and increasing inequality are not uncorrelated trends.
Some of this depends on awareness. The knowledge and experience of inequality change perceptions and behavior. This awareness has different implications at different ends of the spectrum.
It is not an unfair characterization. It is not uncommon for the narrative around poverty to suggest that people are poor because of their bad decisions, but new research argues that the opposite is true. A review of the book in The Economist summarizes their work well.
When an individual feels that they lack some vital resource—money, friends, time, calories—their mind operates in fundamentally distinct ways. The scarcity mindset brings two advantages:. The scarcity mindset can weaken the mind as well. So, the work in Scarcity would suggest that being poor changes how people think and behave. The wealthy feel some discomfort with this consolidation of wealth, too, but for different reasons.
Class is a complicated question. It involves more than just income. It involves the cost of living, lifestyle choices, and lived experience. It consists of social and cultural capital. So, while the Pew income calculator may tell us where we stand, the experience of class is entirely relative. People deduce their class standing from the cues in their immediate surroundings—their neighborhood, their workplace, their social circles.
Most people tend to think of themselves as middle class. However, the truth is, the middle class includes people with vastly different lifestyles and concerns. People who belong to the lower sections of that quintile may not feel especially wealthy if those around them are far more affluent. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, slightly more than half of the U. Both poorer and richer income classes have increased in size in recent decades.
Since , the number of the lowest-income earners, who make less than two-thirds of the U. One way is simply to look at the range of incomes considered middle class. Census Bureau finds that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown since and hit a new record in Dalio called it a "national emergency" earlier this year — and has called for higher taxes on the rich, like himself, to use toward things like public education and infrastructure.
Self-made billionaire and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates would also like to see higher taxes levied on the top earners. Or if it shows up, it shows over in the capital gains side. Instead, he suggested the government should be more progressive with "the estate tax and the tax on capital.
We can be more progressive without really threatening income generation. During a conversation with hundreds of high school students in New York City earlier this year, the couple specifically spoke out about the estate tax , which is levied on assets passed from one person to another, often from parent to child, at the time of death.
If you're going to give money to your children, "you should be taxed at a very high rate for passing that on," said Melinda, "so that a lot of it goes to the government and some goes to your kids.
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