OPINION

Children in poverty: The world's richest nation should be embarrassed

The United States likes to boast that it's the most powerful nation in the world. But you would never know it from the child poverty rate. While children in Nordic countries are the least impoverished among the developed nations, America's children, to its disgrace, are among the poorest.
Adding to the humiliation is that few strides are being made to pull our children out of poverty. While Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden provide generous public benefits for families, this nation is reducing services that benefit families, plunging children more deeply into poverty.
Worldwide, a shocking 40 million to 50 million children in advanced nations live in poverty, according to a study by UNICEF's Innocenti Research Center in Florence, Italy. The center based its estimates on the number of youngsters in households with an income less than half the national median. In America and Mexico, one of every five children lives below the poverty line.

The United States is, in fact, much more like Mexico than Scandinavia in this regard. In Denmark, 2.4 percent of its children live in households with an income less than half the national median. In Finland, that rate is 2.8 percent; it's 3.4 percent in Norway, and 4.2 percent in Sweden. In Mexico and the United States, however, the rates are 27.7 percent and 21.9 percent, respectively.
Moreover, Nordic nations take strategic steps to keep their children out of poverty. They are committed to providing family allowances, disability and sickness benefits, day care, unemployment insurance and other social assistance.
It's obvious that when government spends more, child poverty levels drop. Philip O'Brien, a regional director for UNICEF, underscores the point: “Higher government spending on family and social benefits is very clearly associated with a lower level of child poverty.”

The simple answer is to provide families more government support. But given federal and state budget constraints — and the prevailing ideology in Washington — that won't happen soon. Not when something as necessary as affordable health care for all seems only a dream and our war-driven debt just keeps growing.
The richest country in the world should be embarrassed.

15 March 2005

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05074/471419.stm

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