War On Poverty

What makes the issue even worse according to Dr. Dreyer is that “people are hungry, and when they get food, they are going to try to eat a lot of it” (Dreyer 2016). A study done by Harvard in 2013 found that eating healthier food costs about $1.50 per day (about $550 per year) per person. While that may not sound like an outrageous amount, it is worth noting that the highest amount of money a family of four in poverty could make annually that year and still be considered impoverished was $23,550. For that family of four to eat healthier for a year, it would cost $2,200 – almost 10% of their entire income. On top of all of these terrible realities, when there is simply not enough for families to eat, parents will skip meals altogether so that they can feed their kids. In impoverished neighborhoods, infrastructure is poorly maintained, if it is maintained at all. Dr. James Duffee, a community pediatrician, states that “as the infrastructure deteriorates, lead is released in some of the older pipes. There’s no safe level of lead exposure” (Duffee 2016). Lead exposure can cause lifelong damage to the body and to the brain that is irreparable. Dental coverage is also considered quite a luxury in impoverished communities, leading to a significant increase in cavities in terms of frequency and severity alike, particularly in children. Similarly, vision coverage is hard to come by, and if someone is lucky enough to get glasses in the first place, if they break them, it is very unlikely that they can afford to replace them. This can have a negative impact on adults’ job performance and kids’ education.

The part of the body affected the worst by poverty is the brain. The human brain is regarded as the most complex thing in the world, yet its basic needs are very simple. It was first proven that poverty negatively affects the development of the brain in the 1960s when a group of researches traveled to rural Guatemala. There, they gave nutritional supplements to families with young children. The children who received them grew one or two centimeters taller, scored higher on tests as teenagers, and eventually completed more education and had higher incomes than the children who did not. After this initial research proved the theory, other scientists began to investigate as well. In 2000, Charles Nelson, a pediatric neuroscientist, began tracking brain development in children who had grown up in orphanages. What he found was that there were physical signs in the brain of emotional neglect. “MRIs showed that by the age of eight, they had smaller regions of gray and white matter associated with attention and language than did children raised by their biological families” (Storss 2017). Even though these kids had proper nutrition, they faced deficits of attention, social interaction, and emotional support. This kind of psychological poverty can have a terrible effect on kids. In fact, Nelson did a similar study on a group of young children who were provided with emotional support, social wellness, and attention, however they have had inadequate nutrition and sanitation. After doing MRI scans on the children’s brains, he found similar volumes of gray matter in the brain. Dr. Nelson said that the differences between children growing up in poverty and children not were “remarkably bad”. Just as serious as the physical effects on the brain are the psychological effects. The ones you cannot always see with an MRI.

The difference in mental health between the rich and the poor is staggering. In 2017, it was reported that 8.7% of people below the poverty line had serious psychological distress between 2009 and 2013. For that same period of time, only 1.2% of those living 4 times above the poverty line reported similar distress. A lot of these people who have mental illnesses also have children in their homes, who are then susceptible to toxic stress. Toxic stress can be caused by seeing violence in the home, abuse, and neglect, and can inhibit brain development and lead to mental illness. Adults with mental illness also struggle to acquire and retain a good job, and without a job, it is virtually impossible to get psychiatric treatment. So now you have an adult who is mentally ill, cannot help themselves or their child, their child grows up to be mentally ill and unable to hold a job, then they cannot help themselves or their children, and the cycle continues like so. As one would assume, access to insurance generally leads to better mental health, so the Affordable Care Act was put in place to help get more people insurance and require insurance companies to cover more mental health. However, many people still struggle with out of pocket costs and finding places that will accept their insurance, causing the National Alliance on Mental Illness to put the spotlight on the government to do more to provide mental health care to all Americans.

Childhood poverty not only affects the wellness of children, but it affects their futures too. A study done from 2008 to 2011 showed a 12.4% difference in earnings of teenagers age 13-15 years old who grew up poor and the same range of teens who grew up rich, showing that “poverty increases the likelihood of being at the bottom of the income distribution and decreases the likelihood of being at the top of the income distribution” (Lesner 2018). With results from the same study, it was found that “one additional year of childhood poverty reduces the duration of schooling…by about two months” (Lesner 2018). This correlation of more time spent in poverty equating to less education causes people who grew up in poverty to have lower earnings lower success rates. It was also discovered that having been impoverished as a child increases the likelihood of someone taking a shorter and more gender-segregated route of education, causing a lower high-school GPA and a lower level of skill formation.

This worse education leads to lower earnings, lower labor market attachment, worse jobs financially, and worse positions within companies. Childhood poverty is also “found to have negative consequences for the probability of marriage, cohabitation, and having children” (Lesner 2018). Those with lower incomes tend to be less attractive than those with higher incomes, and individuals who experienced childhood poverty are more likely to pursue more gender-segregated jobs, decreasing their chances of finding a match and/or marrying. In a different study done in 2016, it was found that children with decreased social-emotional well-being scored worse on cognitive test. In the same study, a relationship was found between poor caregiver health and children’s poor developmental outcomes, meaning that if a parent is forced to raise a child in poverty and has mental health issues, his/her child will suffer for it as well. These children were at a substantially increased risk for expulsion from school, reportedly due to “difficulty regulating their emotions and behavior” (Sharkins 2016). This exemplifies how important of a role cultural and social influences have on a child’s development.

How do all of these developmental changes affect society? Carina Mood did a study in 2015 to find out exactly that. Mood’s initial findings indicated simply that “poor people have weaker social relations, less support, and lover levels of political and civil participation” (Mood 2015). Similarly, those who become impoverished are at an increased risk of weakening social relations and decreasing societal participation, while those who manage to escape poverty have a decreased risk of weakening social relations and decreasing societal participation. This causal relationship implies that “the negative effects of poverty appear to be reversible” (Mood 2015). This means that once an impoverished group’s financial situation improves, their social outcomes also improve. Mood also found that the negative consequences of poverty are significantly lessened for very close relationships, indicating that unconditional love may really sometimes be truly unconditional. The presence of such relationships decreases risks for mental illness as well as social isolation. However, when these relationships are lost, an individual’s social networks become smaller, which creates less contacts of support for them in situations like finding a job. Social isolation like this also has an impact on democracy, as poor people have less influence and less of a voice in society than their wealthier counterparts. Mood concludes that “economic deprivation…is the strongest predictor of social outcomes” (Mood 2015).

There is a light at the end of the tunnel that is poverty. In a testimony, Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families Isabel Sawhill states that “reducing poverty requires a focus on what the government needs to do and on what individuals need to do” (Sawhill 2007). Sawhill believes that it is not solely up to the government or the people who are impoverished or wealthy to decrease the poverty rate, but a mix of good policies and intelligent behavior. She argues that it is up to citizens at risk for poverty to make a real effort before the government should step in and be responsible for anything. Said citizens should do everything they can to provide themselves with a good education, they should abstain from having children before they are married (single-parenthood increases the risk for poverty) and financially stable enough to do so, and they should be working a full-time job if possible. These are considered norms in our society that Sawhill argues people should be expected to comply with before the government ensures their financial security. To support this, Sawhill did an analysis that proved that people who comply with these norms are significantly less likely to become impoverished than those who do not. Her next argument is that one of the most effective things our nation could do is to ensure a good education.

Sawhill argues that the best way to “ensure that everyone gets a good education would be to provide very high-quality early education to all children from low-income families” (Sawhill 2015). There is supporting evidence from educational program evaluations and pediatric neuroscience that show that preschool educational experiences have long-lasting effects on a child’s development, meaning it could be the most financially beneficial way for our society to ensure that more kids are successful through their K-12 education. This would provide them with a solid foundation for pursuing post-secondary education after high school and earning more as adults. One proposal suggests that the federal government could match state funding to further the goal of high-quality preschool education being implemented in low-income areas for children one to four years of age. On the topic of having children too early, Sawhill claims the solution is in the ‘nongovernmental sector’, meaning that parents, media, religions, and celebrities should be more mindful of the ideas they discuss and/or endorse, being careful not to promote ‘out-of-wedlock childbearing’.

Most of these teens and very young adults that are having children are not only in the midst of their educational pursuits, but they are not prepared mentally, emotionally, or financially to be good parents to a child. What the government can do is endorse policies that encourage childbearing within the bounds of marriage, and also ensuring that policies benefit those outside of the government who are attempting to battle this situation. Another solution would be work requirements for welfare. It should be required that to receive welfare, an individual should have to be working and earning money in the first place if they are able. The welfare would be in addition to health care, higher minimum wages, and child care support.

In an article in 2014 published by the Center for American Progress, authors Rebecca Vallas and Melissa Boteach propose 10 plausible solutions to help decrease the poverty rate and increase the size of the middle class. The authors begin by highlighting the fact that economic growth over the past couple of decades has gone primarily to the highest-class Americans, leaving the poverty rate the same and the level of low-middle income employment increase at a slim to none rate. This norm has created an enormous inequality that is worse than ever before, however they claim that with policies and investments by the government and citizens alike, the situation can be improved. Economic security can be created, and benefits can be had both immediately and in the long run. The first thing we can do is create jobs.

The government should invest in job creation to create the 5.6 million jobs needed in our country to reach prerecession employment levels. The authors claim the best way to do this is to “build on proven models of subsidized employment to help the long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged workers re-enter the labor force” (Vallas 2014). A second solution would be to raise the minimum wage. States who have raised their minimum wage have seen a notable decrease in poverty, and if the minimum wage of the 1960s had risen with inflation, it would be more than 150% of what it currently is federally. A similar idea would be to increase the earned income tax credit for childless workers. While 6.5 million Americans avoided poverty in 2012 thanks to the EITC, and children who receive is are more likely to graduate high school and pursue post-secondary education, childless workers receive a maximum EITC that is less than one-tenth of that which is received by workers with two children. This increase, combined with an increase in minimum wage, would be incredible beneficial in boosting our economy and diminishing poverty. Another beneficial policy would be to require that companies provide paid family and medical leave and paid sick days. This forces people to sacrifice necessary care for themselves or their families or sacrifice necessary income.

The United States is actually the only developed country without these provisions, even though it is an arguably vital anti-poverty policy. One of the most influential reforms we can make would be of the criminal justice system in order to support re-entry. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its citizens than any other nation, causing the label of ‘mass incarceration’. The terrible stigma caused by this makes it nearly impossible for anyone with a criminal record to find employment, housing, and even education. More than 9 out of 10 employers report that they use background checks, and even something as inconsequential as an arrest without a conviction can cause an employer to turn an applicant away. What is debatably worse than the stigma is that more than half of U.S. states have a lifetime ban for convicts seeking certain types of public assistance, making it that much harder for them to get back on their feet and try to provide for themselves and their families. It is necessary, to reduce the poverty rate, for our nation to remove barriers and bans for certain individuals, and to stop the epidemic that is mass incarceration.