Child Poverty in the United States, the Need for a Constitutional Amendment and a Cultural Sea Change

Johnny S. was eleven years old and his homeless mother had his five-year-old sister to worry about. So she left him on a street corner in Ocean Beach, a neighborhood in San Diego. Johnny looked for his mom for four days before he was picked up by social workers. He scrounged for odd jobs and conned a restaurant manager into letting him wash dishes for three hours a night, earning just over $135. When the social workers found him, he had every penny in his pockets. He had confined himself to just one meal at the restaurant because "Mom needs [the money]." Johnny is a bright-eyed boy with above average intelligence. However, he has a slight stoop due to a correctable bone malformation, and his teeth have painful cavities. He has not been to school for two years. He presents a microcosm of child poverty in America: a child with strong potential and admirable character but with health problems, an educational deficit, and likely relegation to group home foster care or to the streets. Regrettably, Johnny is not unique. He lives in our wealthiest state and, until gathered up, was sleeping under bushes by the beach, in the shadows of $5 million homes. For two decades, child poverty has been fluctuating between 10 and 20 percent of the population, with an overall upward trend. It declined somewhat during the late 1990s, and welfare rolls fell substantially. But those hopeful signs obscure three caveats: (1) the increase appears to have resumed since 2000, and in the context of a now-limited and reduced welfare reform safety net; (2) "severe poverty," that is, income less than half of the federal poverty line, has increased (but is not precisely measured); and (3) large numbers of children are living below or near the poverty line. This last grouping now represents 37 percent of all American children, 42 percent of its infants and toddlers, 58 percent of its African American children, and 62 percent of its Latino children. National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University, Low Income Children in the United States-2004, at nccp.org. Child advocates are concerned about both ends of this spectrum: the severe poverty, portending permanent damage, and the imminent creation of a large Third World underclass of intractable poverty. The latter concern is reflected in overall increasing income disparities, with the upper 1 percent of Americans now earning as much as the bottom 38 percent combined. And the concern is underlined by barriers to upward mobility driven not only by childhood poverty but by preclusive real estate and rent inflation; growing energy, gasoline, and healthcare costs; and small increases in the higher education capacity - including community college and technical training - that most will need for employment in the international economic labor niche of the United States. This effective contraction is joined by many years of tuition increases well above inflation. Impediments to mobility for the young include unprecedented economic solicitude for older adults and a record federal deficit for the future taxpayers who are now our children. Add to this deficit more ominous Social Security and Medicare obligations. Harvard Law School's Howell Jackson projects an obligation of more than $30 trillion, $100,000 for each child over the next generation. Unless policies radically change, it will double and perhaps quadruple the regressive and already substantial payroll deductions for the youth who secure employment. Child advocates increasingly decry our unique cross-generational taking. Instead of the long-standing American tradition of older adults investing in the young, which particularly represents an opportunity for the impoverished, we are burdening our children with unprecedented debts and future costs.