The topic of poverty and welfare and redistribution of wealth is often a topic of conversation on YA. But a new study shows that America's poor are not so bad off and many of their problems are of their own doing. For example:
There are two main reasons that American children are poor: Their parents don't work much, and fathers are absent from the home.
In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year: That amounts to 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year— nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.
Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.5 million children are born out of wedlock.
Thoughts
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg2064.cfm
2007-08-29
07:02:41
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Politics