In the U.S. 2.8 million children live on $2 per day
Can you imagine what it is like to have to, in any given month, live on the cash equivalent of a half gallon of milk each and every day?
Well in the United States this is what every day is like for some 2.8 million children that are a part of the 1.46 million households that were living in extreme poverty in 2011.
This is part of the data from a new report that The National Poverty Center has released that studies the the poverty trends between 1996 and 2011. This number is up from the 636,000 households in 1996 which makes for a nearly 130 percent increase.
In 1996, households in extreme poverty represented about 10 percent of all poor households. Fifteen years later, it’s about 19 percent. When SNAP benefits are counted as cash, the rise in extreme poverty is from about 7.6 percent to about 10 percent.
In addition, many of the households in extreme poverty are accessing public health insurance for at least one of their children, and about one in five have a housing subsidy. “These in-kind safety-net programs are playing a vital role, and are probably blunting some of the hardship that American children living in extreme poverty would otherwise face,” said Kathryn Edin, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Still, she said, “it would be wrong to conclude that the U.S. safety net is strong, or even adequate, when one in five poor households with children are living without meaningful cash income.”
via PhysOrg
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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