A report newly released by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that between 2009 and 2010, the percentage of New Yorkers living below the official federal poverty line increased by 1.4 percentage points, representing 75,000 citizens who were pushed into poverty in a year's time.
This leaves the city-wide poverty rate at 20.1 percent and, contrary to the popular narrative, many of these New Yorkers are employed or hold multiple jobs, but are unable to get ahead. A family of three with an income under $18,310 would fall below the poverty line, according to 2010's federal guidelines. The childhood poverty level has grown three percentage points, to a city-wide level of 30 percent, while 1.8 million New Yorkers, or approximately one in five households, are dependent on food stamps. The Bronx remains the poorest urban county in the country.
Children have been hit particularly hard by the recession, as families not only lose income, but often health benefits as well, leaving them more vulnerable than ever. Sharp cuts to public education compound the problem. This recession will have long-term costs, as cuts to education, nutrition and health care all provide significant barriers to the ability of children to flourish.
These statistics — which are proof of a failure to address systemic social inequalities — should spur soul-searching on the part of citizens and public officials in New York City.
Poverty serves to marginalize individuals and families, and the gap between the poor and the rest of society is greater than ever. Poverty serves as a disadvantage at every turn and every step. It poisons American lives.
One of the few proven remedies to the poverty and inequalities that exist and persist in our society is education. An effective step is one that may not seem obvious: the expansion of early childhood education. Quality education is the most reliable tool to escape poverty, and without early childhood education, many children never have that opportunity.
James Heckman, economist and Nobel Prize winner, has shown that investment in early childhood education ends in a return of seven percent, more than paying for itself. By the time children enter kindergarten, performance gaps exist between wealthy children and their less-privileged counterparts, a result of unequal opportunities from birth to age five.
These gaps are only multiplied as children move through the education system. Early childhood education serves to give children an equal starting point, so that all American children will have the skills to compete.
Amid the rhetoric of class warfare, the idea of "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps" resurfaces again and again. The truth is, however, that far too many people start out poor, work hard and stay poor. In the face of those speeches and diatribes, keep these numbers in mind: Of the children born into the bottom quarter of income distribution, half will stay there; if they are black, those hard odds grow to two-thirds.
There are 56 billionaires in New York City; their combined net worth is more than twenty-seven times greater than the combined annual income of all New Yorkers who live in poverty. These billionaires (as well as the multi-millionaires and all the corporations which have received government bail-outs) have experienced decades of tax cuts and tax breaks from federal, state and city governments.
These are advantages that the poor — as well as the middle class — have done without; they only receive assistance from government when they are so poor that they need assistance simply to eat or to survive, and the way that they use that assistance is regulated far more than any corporation.
The argument that free market forces account for these injustices is unconvincing and disingenuous. To blame the plight of the poor on the poor, or on a culture of poverty and not on the social structures that hold them down, is to distort the facts. Those who deny this can keep their Horatio Alger narrative, keep their rhetoric and keep their bootstraps, because this is the cold, bitter truth.