I typically seek out inspiring and encouraging news to share because our work is hard and we need all the positive energy we can get to keep moving forward against long odds. But it’s also important to know when those odds get longer and that’s what we learned last week in an analysis published by the Congressional Budget Office.
The study found that since the great recession those who were well off have recovered and those who were not are in even worse shape (evident in contrasting stock market growth with the number of Americans on SNAP not going down materially.)
Wealthy families and average families both had more wealth than when before the recession hit, but the wealthy saw theirs bounce back at a much faster rate. In 2007 8% of American families had debt averaging $20,000. By 2013, 12% had debt averaging $32,000. Now the wealthiest 10% of Americans hold three-quarters of the nation’s wealth, as opposed to the two-thirds they held in 1989.
Imagine not only being poor in the richest country on earth, but being left out of the recovery our government worked so hard to achieve. For some. It’s not fate, accident, or bad luck. Policies and political choices create such a dynamic. The hunger we fight is a symptom of this deeper problem.
Even if you listened very carefully, you would not have heard anything from either political party about this new report on growing inequity. Instead, giving voice to that falls to us and others. It’s not technically what we do day to day, but it is inescapable morally. If you’d come to the scene of a tragic accident that injured kids, called for help and learned the emergency responders were distracted doing something else, you would do the best you could whether you were trained to do so or not. So must we. That’s a tall order given all we have going on, but it’s the only path to preventing recurring tragedy and damaged kids.
Billy
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