Eathan
and Ginnetta were frantically trying to get back their youngest child, Lilly,
born in Yamhill County in 2018 and put in foster care. They made regular trips
to visit her and to meet a lawyer whom they are paying to advocate for them.
Many child-welfare advocates agree with them that the authorities are too hasty
to take children from low-income families and put them into foster care, saying
that kids do best with parents or other relatives, sometimes with intensive
coaching, supervision or support. Foster care costs about $26,000 per child per
year, yet outcomes tend to be poor: only 58 percent graduate from high school.
One-quarter are incarcerated within two years of graduating from foster care at
age eighteen, and they are about six times more likely to end up homeless as to
end up with a college degree.
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Why
did neither Eathan nor Ginnetta have a job at a time of a booming economy when
Help Wanted signs were everywhere? Eathan is smart and has a much-valued skill
as a construction worker, while Ginnetta is pleasant and diligent and struck us
as dependable. Eathan, like some others in Yamhill, blamed immigrants from
Mexico. "I do resent them for the fact that it makes it harder for me to
get a job," he told us. It's true that in places like Yamhill, immigrants
may have taken some jobs from low-skilled workers. Several employers made the
point to us that they would be crazy to hire a white high-school dropout who
was often high on meth, wasn't terribly interested in difficult outdoor work
and would not show up reliably. One employer told us that he had tried to hire
local people but ended up with an all-Mexican work crew because the immigrants
are approximately twice as productive as local white residents.
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The
United States has about I3 million children living in poverty. Of those, about
2 million may live in "extreme poverty" by global definitions (in
households earning less than about $2 per person per day), when looking at
their cash incomes. These kids would be considered extremely poor if they lived
in Congo or Bangladesh, yet they're here in the United States. We don't want to
overstate the comparison - Congolese kids can't typically access food stamps,
hospital emergency rooms or church pantries and soup kitchens - but it is still
staggering that by formal definitions some American children count as extremely
poor even by Bangladeshi standards. The presence of extremely poor children in
America, far more often than in other advanced countries (Germany has virtually
none), is partly a consequence of the 1994 welfare reform that eventually cut
off benefits for some families: it was meant to hit deadbeat adults but has
been devastating for their children as well.
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Welfare
policy is complicated, with good intentions sometimes having unintended
consequences. But there are effective ways to help children, from home visits
to early childhood education programs.? Antipoverty
efforts for the elderly have been a huge success, with the share of seniors
below the poverty line plunging by two-thirds since the mid-1960s. But we
sometimes spend more in public money on hospitalizations for an octogenarian
than on a child's entire education. Let's be blunt: America as a nation is guilty
of child neglect. We have punished children, mainly because they don't vote.
Meanwhile, other countries offer home visitation, paid family leaves and
monthly cash allowances for families with children to reduce disadvantage.
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Angus
Deaton, the Nobel Prize winner in economics who with fellow Princeton professor
Anne Case did the critical work on "deaths of despair" in America,
says that the revelations of extreme poverty in America have led him to
recalibrate his personal giving to donate more at home: "There are
millions of Americans whose suffering, through material poverty and poor
health, is as bad or worse than that of the people in Africa or in Asia."
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It's
perhaps telling that the United States for years was, embarrassingly, the only
country in the world besides Somalia and South Sudan that had? ratified the Convention on the Rights of the
Child. That has now changed: the United States is the ONLY nation that hasn't
bothered to ratify it. Maybe that's a symbolic matter, but here's something
profoundly real: children make up almost one-third of Americans living in
poverty, and on any given night some 115,000 children are homeless in the
world's most powerful country.
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Nicholas Kristoff "Tightrope:
Americans Reaching for Hope" (2020)
