One of the most saddening topics to read about while studying poverty is the number of children who are suffering under circumstances they have no control over. As far as developed nations go, America has not been doing well at keeping their youth from struggling under the poverty line. Nearly one out of five (17%) children in America live in poverty, and that must be taken with a grain of salt as the actual numbers could be even worse. Jeff Madrick writes in his article Handouts Are Often Better Than a Hand Up on the issue and what needs to be done to fix this ongoing problem.
There are a plethora of serious matters that revolve around children being raised in poverty including unhealthy diets, overwhelming amounts of stress, decrease in self-worth, and consistently lower IQs than children living above the poverty line. Madrick mentions two welfare programs that were created in the 90’s to help pull children out of poverty. The first was the Aid for Families With …show more content…
Without all the eligibility obstacles it is much easier to be a possible receiver of the welfare. This is not a new idea, other countries have already implemented programs such as a Per-child allowance to their lower income citizens, This includes Canada and many areas of Europe. Canada giving as much as $230 a month per child. The studies have shown to help increase students graduate and reduce the amount of criminal behavior by teenagers.
Given an allowance of $2,500 a year to all children in our country would be able to bring around 5.5 million out of poverty. This could be a great accomplishment towards beating poverty, an accomplishment that has been unobtainable for the last half of a century. Researchers estimate we would need $200 billion a year to cut the amount of child poverty in half for our nation, which is possible to achieve through cuts in other budgets such as Social