The percentage of children living in poverty is perhaps the most global and widely used indicator of child well-being in any nation. And child poverty is not an act of God. It is only a reflection of society's political, economical and value choices. What can be said of a nation that does not assume responsibility to take care of the most vulnerable among its young citizens? America is such nation.

The poverty rate among children in America today is enormous. Malnutrition is unbelievably high and just getting worse and worse. The same is true with infant mortality. It's unique in the civilized world. According to the latest statistics on poverty in the United States, released in 1996 by the U.S. Census Bureau, 14.3 million children in America are living in abject poverty. Most of them do not have a future, and they know they do not have a future...

And it is the direct consequence of the official U.S. social policies. The steadily rising trend of child poverty in this country first of all is the fruit of a capitalist economic system itself, but also it is the result of society's inadequate spending on children. Less than 5 percent of the U.S. federal budget is devoted to programs that in some way benefit children, whereas all other rich countries give children a much higher priority. For example, overall spending on child well-being is about $230 billion a year in France, compared with only $146 billion in the United States. In fact, most Western European nations spend two or even three times as much as the U.S. on families with children, which explains why so many more American than European children live in poverty. "Industrialized countries vary in their level of generosity toward families with children, but the U.S. is the least generous of all," points out Elizabeth Duskin, chief social policy economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based economic research center.

This lack of generosity is why poverty, hunger, homelessness and ill-health are the lot of millions of youngsters in today's America. Compared to other industrial nations, the United States has by far the highest percentage of children living in poverty: 20.8 percent in 1995. In most other rich countries, child poverty rates are only a small fraction of the U.S. rate. In Western Europe those rates typically hover between the 2 to 7 percent level. So, the United States today has a child poverty rate that is four times the average of Western European countries. America's extraordinary high child poverty rate is not some unavoidable attribute of a modern industrial society that cannot be escaped. This is highly unusual and represents unconscionable choices that this society has made and misguided priorities Americans have set. Other advanced nations with fewer resources and often similar economic and social problems have placed a much higher priority on protecting and investing in their children.

Therefore, by comparison with all other rich nations, the United States lifts a far smaller proportion of low-income families with children out of poverty. Actually, the U.S., France and Britain would have almost a similar percentage of children who are considered poor if based on parents' income -- somewhere between 24 percent and 29 percent. But after receiving tax breaks and all the social benefits, only 5.7 percent of French children and 7.3 percent of British children are still considered poor, while nearly 21 percent of U.S. children still suffer in severe poverty. American children are twice as likely to be poor as Canadian children, three times as likely to be poor as British children, four times as likely to be poor as French children, and 7 to 13 times more likely to be poorer than German, Dutch, and Swedish children. Thus, compared to children of all other advanced rich countries, American children are doing, I would say, extremely badly today.

More than that, child poverty rates in the United States rose rapidly during the 1980s and 1990s, while they sharply declined elsewhere in the industrialized world. The reality is that the United States of America is the only rich industrial country where the number of poor children has increased significantly in recent years. During the last few decades child poverty became entrenched here on a scale unprecedented in the postwar period and unmatched in the advanced world. The 20-year growth of the number of American children actually living in deep poverty is amazing. It climbed from 15.4 percent in 1974 to 20.8 percent in 1995. More than 14 million American children -- the equivalent of a medium-sized country -- are now despairingly poor. They live in families that lack the money to pay the rent for decent housing and put food on the table. Hundreds of thousands of American children are homeless today, and many more than that are hungry. This gives us an idea how "well" American society is treating its youngest members. The very fact that in one of the world's richest countries 14.3 million of children live in abject misery says how "advanced" this society is...

As a matter of fact, one out of every five children in the U.S. lives in destitution today. For children under six, the group most vulnerable to all the negative impacts of poverty, the rate is even higher: one in four. A study released recently by the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University’s School of Public Health reports that 6.1 million American children under the age of six -- almost the population of Chicago and Los Angeles combined -- lived in severe poverty in 1994. It has almost doubled since 1979 when the number of children under age six living in poverty in the United States was 3.5 million. The poverty rate for children under age six in this country is now higher than for any other age group of the U.S. population. It was well over double the rate for adults or the elderly in 1994. Actually, nearly half of all children under age six (a shocking 45 percent) lived in poor or nearly poor families in 1994, according to this report. In addition to those 6.1 million who lived in actual poverty, another 4.8 million children under six lived in near poverty, which means the family's income is at or below 185 percent of the official federal poverty line. Furthermore, according to the Children's Defense Fund, more than half of all poor children in America now live in extreme poverty, in families with incomes below 50% of the official poverty line. This proportion has also risen steadily and doubled -- from 6 percent in 1975 (the first year for which data on extreme poverty in the U.S. is available), to its present record-high level of 12 percent in 1994.

Further, many American cities now have child poverty rates of over 35 percent, or even over 50 percent for black children. Nearly 600,000 people or one family out of five, for example, are living far below the official poverty line in Chicago. The child poverty rate stands there at 33.3 percent, one child out of three. But in the Oakland area of Chicago 84 percent of all children live in poverty. In New York City - the richest city in the world, there is inequality greater than in Guatemala, and 40% of the children in NYC are now living below the poverty line.

Many Americans still believe that poor people don't work or that those people who work are not poor, and that people who are poor just need to work... But the truth is that more than a third of poor children in America today live in working families where at least one parent works year-round, says the 1996 Kids Count Data Book, a compilation of statistics on the well-being of children released annually by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In 1994, the United States had 5.6 million poor children living in families with incomes way below the official poverty line despite parents working full time 50 or more weeks that year. This is up from 3.4 million two decades ago. The Baltimore-based foundation points out that children of the working poor is the fastest-growing segment of the nation's children who live in severe poverty. Besides, a majority of all poor children under the age of six -- 62 percent -- lived in working families, contrary to the commonly-held belief that a parent's job will keep children out of poverty. In the years since 1989, the number of youngest children living in these so-called working-poor families has jumped 30 percent. And we continue to see expanding millions of desperate American families who are unable to protect their kids from poverty. More and more children in the United States are growing up despairingly poor regardless of their parents' work efforts.

It must be said that the reality of young child poverty in this country extends far beyond the stereotypical image of the poor minority child in an urban setting. The fact that nearly half of all America's children under age six live in poverty or near poverty manifestly demonstrates that young child poverty here is a mainstream occurrence affecting children from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, from all types of residential areas, and from all regions of the United States. As a matter of fact, during the last few decades the young child poverty rate in the U.S. has grown at a much faster pace in the suburbs than in cities and twice as fast among whites as among blacks. Contrary to stereotypes, more poor children in America today live outside cities -- in suburbs and small towns or rural areas -- than in cities.