How can the United States—still the richest nation on earth—tolerate one of the highest child poverty rates in the industrialized world? This is not inevitability but failure: we have the wealth to end it, yet lack the will. The same is true of widening inequality since the 1980s—it is a political choice, not an economic inevitability.
By Dr. Alon Ben-Meir
Child poverty is not a natural phenomenon, like an earthquake or a hurricane. It is a social condition for which we are collectively responsible, brought into existence and maintained for decades due to the economic policies we have pursued and supported. “That our society tolerates this violent indifference to the life experience of millions of impoverished children remains a profound failure and abdication of our most fundamental responsibility to future generations. It does not have to be this way,” Academic Pediatrics, the journal of the American Pediatric Association, notes.
Startling Statistics
Eleven million children, out of the 74 million children residing in the United States, live in poverty. One in six children under the age of five (which is to say, three million children) are poor – that is the highest rate of any age group. In short, children constitute the poorest age group in the United States. The Children’s Defense Fund has shown that the burden of poverty falls disproportionately on children of color, as well as those under five years of age, those belonging to single mothers, and those living in the South, which is home to roughly 47 percent of the children in this country who live beneath the poverty threshold.
In 2023, Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native children were about three times as likely as white children to fall below the poverty line. Child poverty fell to a record low of 5.2 percent in 2021 – an achievement which was largely attributable to the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which lifted over 700,000 Black children and 1.2 million Hispanic children out of poverty. However, lawmakers opted not to extend the expansion of the CTC, and essentially all the gains in poverty reduction vanished the following year, pushing millions of Americans into poverty in 2022. Since 2021, the child poverty rate has more than doubled, standing at 13.4 percent in 2024.
The Impact of Economic Policy
As the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) pointedly notes: “The results of the policy response to the pandemic proved that we purposely choose to tolerate a disproportionately high level of poverty for children of color in the United States.” Children are especially susceptible to the deleterious consequences of poverty – in terms of health, mental and physical development, and education – with ramifications that can easily extend into adulthood.
Moreover, children living in impoverished neighborhoods are faced with significant challenges, regardless of their family’s income; this includes schools that are insufficiently funded and inadequate access to healthcare. The fact is that child poverty and life in disadvantaged neighborhoods present an obstacle to medical care, which can carry “these health harms into adulthood and across generations.”
The Health Implications for Poor Children
Child poverty means lower health outcomes for children – it means greater illness, chronic disease, sickness, and mortality. Reducing child poverty means having healthier children in America, and a sound healthcare policy can, in turn, help to reduce child poverty. To see that requires acknowledging “the role of the US health care system in fostering economic hardship in the first place.”
To begin with, health care policy can address child poverty by lowering the likelihood that medical bills will deplete a family’s financial resources. Unexpected medical bills remain the number one cause of bankruptcy among American families.
Moreover, if we want a healthcare system that reduces child poverty, we need to remove the perverse financial incentives that remain characteristic of a healthcare system that Drs. Joshua M. Sharfstein and Rachel L.J. Thornton observe:
“still earns its daily income through inefficient and high-priced fee-for-service billing. The resulting health expenditures, by far the highest in the world, leave little room for social investments to address poverty. At the same time, with revenue largely dependent on keeping the beds filled, healthcare institutions see few financial rewards from investing in primary care, community prevention, and the social determinants of health.”
The Economic Cost of Child Poverty
Reducing, or rather eliminating, childhood poverty is a moral obligation that we have as a society. Certainly, one can also easily make the economic case for using public resources to reduce the rate of child poverty: an article in the Journal of Children and Poverty pointedly observes that “poverty burdens society and robs it of some of its productive potential.” Indeed, this study shows that “the costs to America associated with the conditions associated with childhood poverty are $500 billion per year – the equivalent of nearly 4% of GDP. In other words, we could raise our overall consumption of goods and services and our quality of life by about one-half trillion dollars a year if the conditions associated with childhood poverty were eliminated.” In fact, this calculation more than likely understates the actual losses that are a direct consequence of poverty in America.
The Failure to Address Child Poverty
For decades, successive American administrations—Democratic and Republican alike—have failed to confront the moral obscenity of child poverty with anything resembling urgency or resolve. This is not a failure of resources, but of will. In a nation capable of allocating nearly a trillion dollars annually to defense and tens of billions more squandered to wars of choice, such as the war with Iran (which has so far cost an estimated $25 billion), the persistence of widespread child deprivation is indefensible. The contrast is as stark as it is damning: limitless funding when it comes to projecting power abroad, and chronic hesitation when it comes to safeguarding the most vulnerable at home.
This abdication reached new depths under the Trump administration, which not only neglected the structural roots of poverty but actively dismantled programs that served as a lifeline for tens of millions of Americans. Cuts to nutrition assistance, housing support, and healthcare access were pursued under the guise of fiscal prudence, even as military spending surged unchecked.
The result was predictable and cruel: families pushed further to the margins, children denied stability and opportunity, and a social safety net deliberately weakened. This is not merely a policy failure—it is a conscious choice about whose lives are valued and whose are expendable.
Yet, in the final analysis, we are heaping shame on ourselves with each day that passes and millions upon millions of children go to bed hungry, or to school with nothing to eat, or have to spend another night in a homeless shelter. We must feel mortified because we are failing to meet our most fundamental obligations as a society: to give future generations a chance to flourish, to realize their fullest potential, and to discover and exercise their talents to the fullest. All of which require access to healthcare, education, adequate housing, nourishment, and neighborhoods free from crime, destitution, and hopelessness.
What Must Be Done to Eliminate Child Poverty
The demand to end childhood poverty is sound economic policy – but it is also a moral imperative of the highest order. Until we see it as such, we are eroding the moral fabric of this society, denying the dignity of millions of Americans, and in the process destroying whatever self-respect this country still retains.
Ending child poverty will not come from rhetoric but from sustained public pressure. Therefore, Americans must demand that their elected officials commit, year after year, the necessary resources to eradicate child poverty, not merely alleviate it. This requires binding budgetary priorities, measurable targets, and political accountability, until no child is left deprived by circumstances that a nation of such wealth has the power—and obligation to eliminate.
This is no longer a problem we can afford to acknowledge in passing or relegate to partisan debate—it demands immediate, collective action. Lawmakers must act with urgency, institutions must be held accountable, and citizens must refuse to accept complacency as a substitute for conscience.
The measure of a just society is not what it proclaims, but what it is willing to confront and change. The time to act is not tomorrow, not after the next election cycle, but now—before this enduring failure becomes an irreversible stain on the nation’s moral fabric.
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is President of the Institute for Humanitarian Conflict Resolution.
