If you caught the news in between the stories of Michael Vick’s concussion and the mass outrage over facebook’s news feed change, you might have heard that THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS LIVING IN POVERTY HAS REACHED AN ALL-TIME HIGH. As young invincibles, we might be inclined to wave off this sad state of affairs as having nothing to do with us, but that’d be a mistake.
Published in Slate on Wednesday was an illuminating Eliot Spitzer article that explains the disproportionate impact our nation’s slow economic growth is having on our generation and the ramifications of that for everybody else. With income data fresh from the 2010 Census, the results are unsettling. Here are a few noteworthy highlights for your digestion:
> Income for households headed by someone under 24 fell an astounding 15.3 percent between 2007 and 2010.
> For those 18 to 24 the poverty rate is 21.9 percent.
> The stated unemployment rate for whites aged 16 to 19 is 23 percent, and for blacks of that age it is a staggering 46.5 percent.
Spitzer concludes: “We are facing a moral dilemma. We have actually done a reasonably effective job preserving the income of seniors. Medicare and Social Security have worked, future financing issues notwithstanding. But we are failing abysmally in investing in the next generation. How can we do both in a financially viable manner?”
He asserts: “If we resolve the current fiscal crisis by cutting more deeply the investments we need to make in the young, we will be making a grave error. This makes it more urgent that the administration do something dramatic on the jobs front…It is time for the president to channel Franklin Roosevelt, to create modern versions of the CCC and WPA for those under 25—not an entitlement program, a work program.”
Ruminate, discuss with friends, post in the comments if you’re feeling bold-What would we want such a program to look like?
