"Eight Facts about Poverty That Will Blow Your Mind"
By: Steve Grumm
Lists are all the rage among journalists, bloggers, and publishers these days. Everybody loves a list. They are 1) simply organized and 2) easy to read. Some people – and these are typically college literature majors – get a bit snooty and talk of the death of longer-form writing. Pish-posh. Law school re-trained my brain to think in outline form, so lists are fine by me. I still know when to go to the treatises if necessary.
At the Huffington Post, Heartland Alliance president Sid Mohn (cool name!) lists eight mind-blowing facts about poverty in the U.S, including (and the below parentheticals are my own editorializing):
- Our kids are poor. (This one I already knew but the latest census data are still astonishing.)
- Too many of our workers are poor. (This is related to one of the worst mistruths that gained currency during the mid-1990s welfare reform efforts. Some AFDC reform was needed, but there was a mischaracterization of welfare recipients as being (largely) lazy system-manipulators content to live on the dole. In fact welfare recipients were (largely) the working poor who cycled on and off of benefits as work came and went.)
- Our building blocks out of poverty are weak.