Poverty by the Numbers
JoeUser Forums
As i have begun studying poverty in the United States, I have been compelled by the stats to look deeper. I have heard the number "40 million" tossed out as the number of Americans in poverty in the US; a recent article on the afl-cio's website (Link ) puts the number at 37 million.
Either way, the interesting fact is that that represents about 13 percent of our nation's population. That is substantially below the world bank's estimate of the global percentage of poverty at 20% of the world's population. The world bank's standard for poverty is also FAR below the US standard of poverty; the 1.1 billion its figures profile make an average of less than $1 a day, an amount that can easily be exceeded by anyone with a pair of legs and a pair of arms in this country.
That 13 percent of our nation lives in poverty should not alarm us; after all, it signifies that 87 percent live ABOVE the poverty line, which is a pretty decent figure if you think about it. What should concern us all is that some 140 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the poor are disproportionately minority. And this despite sincere attempts to bridge the divide.
The reasons for poverty among the minority are not the focus of this discussion. The remedies for those problems aren't the focus, either. I believe, however, that we need to be aware that there IS a problem before we begin discussion. Discussion about what TO do should be the topic of another thread.
While we chastise individuals like U2 frontman Bono, or Tim Robbins or susan Sarandon for their political ideologies, we are doing a very poor job advancing our own solutions to these problems. While precious few outside the American left are doing so (Walter E. Williams and Bill Cosby come to mind), even their opinions often get silenced among a vocal front that insists their IS no problem to be addressed. I submit that 1) there IS a problem; 2) in order to achieve an equal and free society, we need to address that problem; and 3) the solutions to those problems should fall on us as individuals and NOT on the government. The dominance on the left in the MSM has a simple source: that the left, for all their faults, are acknowledging the problem and offering solutions.
We cannot expect that the American poor perfectly represent the makeup of the American population at large. That's unrealistic and actually rather absurd. But we CAN, and SHOULD, address the fact that when certain ethnic groups are FAR MORE disproportionately represented among America's poor, something should be done. While we may disagree on precisely WHAT should be done, we should at least agree that there's a problem.
