In this conflicting season of Christmas charity and compassion on the one hand, and the pending extension of vast and unaffordable tax cuts for the nation’s ultra-wealthy, it’s especially appropriate to reflect on America’s standing with regard to our most vulnerable population, the children of the poor. A new report by UNICEF, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, is rather startling in that regard. Among the richest 24 nations of the world, the United States ranks among the worst in its neglect of poor children across each of the broad categories measured.
UNICEF usually focuses on the status of children in underdeveloped and developing countries. In its report, UNICEF looked, for a change, at the status of poorer children in the world’s richest nations. It found a surprising disparity: a greater inequality than it usually finds in less wealthy countries between children considered to have a “normal” life and those whose lives are disadvantaged by poverty.
Among the 24 richest countries, the United States, Italy, Greece, Belgium and the United Kingdom had far larger gaps than their peer countries between children in average, or normal, economic conditions and those in poverty. In Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Ireland, among others, poor children fared far better in most categories across the economic spectrum.
The report measured the scope of disparities between children with normal lives, and those in poverty, in the areas of material well-being, education well-being and health well-being. Material well-being included indices for living space and educational resources. Education well-being measured such aspects as literacy in math and science. Indices for health well-being considered complaints of health problems, healthy eating and vigorous activities.
The United States ranked 23rd overall among the 24 richest countries in disparities in material well-being for children in poverty (19th in educational resources and 22 in living space); it ranked 19th overall in educational well-being for poor children (24th in science literacy and 23 in math literacy); and came in 22nd overall in health well-being for the most vulnerable children (24th in complaints of health problems, 20th in health eating, and 16th in vigorous physical activity).
These are dismal figures compared to the top-tier countries in the gap between the exeriences of children in normal circumstances and those in poverty.
Poor children in America experience a much larger disparity than their “normal” peers in their health, education and home life, than poor children experience in most of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The United States is not only behind rich northern European countries in its treatment of poor children; it’s also behind less affluent countries like Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain and Portugal.
A large part of these disparities owes to the nation’s public policies and aid to families for housing, food and education. In a very real sense, policymakers at all levels of government do not walk the talk they spout about family values.
It reflects, moreover, an increasing level of disinterest among Republican policymakers, who had rather put their muscle behind tax cuts for the nation’s super-wealthy even as they discuss tightening budgets for social programs.
Their preferences are impossible to ignore. The extended Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would give households in the top 1 percent of earners an annual tax cut averaging $72,466 per household — fully a fourth of the value of the tax cuts. Those in the top one-tenth of 1 percent would get an average tax cut of $371,650 per household.
When lawmaker make tax expenditures like that for the ultra-wealthy, while cutting social programs for the poor, we must ask, where are their family values, where is their fairness and compassion. The answers are shamefully obvious.