Too Many Americans Are Sliding into Poverty

In Frontline’s “Poor Kids,” we find that poverty is more widespread in the United States than people think. Maybe the people in the United States should start focusing inward on its own poverty issues rather than helping other countries.

Today one in five children lives in poverty, and the US has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world according to “Poor Kids.” This is due to poor family economic situations a lack of job opportunity in the US. Families who are raised by a single parent are nearly always living in poverty, and the kids are responsible for helping raise money and dealing with a seemingly hopeless future for themselves and their family.

According to feedingamerica.org, about 49 million Americans live in food insecure households. That means that they struggle to put food on the table for meals and have to skip some and go hungry. Of those 49 million, about 16 million of those people are children. Those children are skipping breakfast and going to school on an empty stomach, and often times going to sleep hungry. We should put more money into poverty and world hunger, a lot of time we put money into animal abuse, we’re not saying that isn’t a problem, but human poverty and hunger should come first.

The U.S. is a very prosperous compared to others but we are clearly facing economic crisis ourselves.  So why is it that we feel like we need to help others when we thousands of families struggling to survive here? Our acts of altruism are admired, and appreciated but imagine the things we could do if we focused on aiding our country by building a thriving economy.  After helping ourselves we would be stronger and more able to help other struggling countries.

Countries need to be stimulating their own economy to become successful. When the United States sends clothes to another country, that is taking money away from people that make clothes in that country thus making the economy more weak. So if we focused on making our economy strong here, that will actually help other countries become prosperous with their economies.

One another solution is taking back help that we have sent and redistribute it among the poor in America. America has the highest budgeted military in the world. If we cut the military spending by 85%, only allowing 15% of the previous to be spent, we would still be the largest funded army in the world. Also, if we have undeployed or returning veterans to locate and distribute sustenance and needs to the poverty stricken in America, then we would solve more problems of work for vet.s, under staff and resources in order to help those in poverty, and insure that shelter and storage for food cannot be robbed of it’s supplies. With solutions that vary in origin and area affected we can mix and shift on how to end child poverty.