Why Being a Poor Kid in America Is Particularly Awful [View all]

[damnedifIknow]

One measure of how much governments prioritize children and families is how much they spend on things like child allowances, daycare, and child-tax credits. Inside a longer report on global child well-being, out this week from the nonprofit Child Trends, lies this surprising tidbit: The U.S. has a higher proportion of children living in poverty than most other high-income countries, and it spends just 0.7 percent of its GDP on benefits for families—a fraction of what other middle- and high-income countries spend.

“Among 21 countries in the study,” the organization writes in an accompanying statement, “the U.S. ranks second-to-last in the percentage of its GDP spent on benefits for families, despite one of the highest relative child poverty rates of the comparable high-income countries.” (Turkey technically ranks last, but only because its data is missing.)

The U.S. comes in near the bottom, devoting less than one percent of its national income to perks for kids and parents. (Child Trends used data from the OECD and other sources.)

At the same time, the report suggests that American children are in dire need of this funding. A higher proportion of them live in poverty than do kids in most other industrialized nations."

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/childcare-spending/407035/