Here’s What’s Been Happening to America’s Children Since the Great Recession
The Great Recession was cruel to most Americans. To children, it was arguably even worse. By 2013, the percentage of kids living in poverty in the United States rose to a staggering 22% — that’s 5 percentage points higher than the early days of the Great Recession in 2008.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation revealed these findings Tuesday with the release of its 2015 Kids Count Data Book. The numbers suggest that the economic recovery celebrated in glowing reports of month-over-month job growth fails to illustrate this key part of the story.
Here’s where we are now: Despite an unemployment rate 2 percentage points lower today than in 2013, the year this data was collected, UNICEF reports that in 2014, child poverty in the United States — the country with the most millionaires and billionaires on earth — was higher than at least 33 other developed countries.
Laura Speer, an associate director at the Casey Foundation, told USA Today that even if this rate has gone down in the past two years, it is unlikely to have lowered the number of children living in low-income neighborhoods.
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