Data as Evidence

            For this blog post, I decided to look at the differences between the county, state, and nation on the amount of children who are living in poverty. This is a sad statistic for anyone to look at. According to dictionary.com, Poverty is “the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor.” When we think of poverty, we often think of the adults who don’t have a job and can’t support themselves, but in many of these cases there is also the children who are dragged down with the adults.

When looking at the national average (See graph below), we can see that the percentage of children who are living in poverty has gone up considerably. In 2011, the average was up to its highest peak in history, at around 22.5%. This may seem like a small percentage, but when you look into the 2010 census and see that at that time there were 74,181,467 children under the age of 18 living in the US. By 2011, that number would have increased, but going with that we get that there is about 16,690,830 children who are living in poverty range.

 

 (http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/Line/43-children-in-poverty?loc=1&loct=1#1/any/false/867,133,38,35,18,17,16,15,14,13/asc/any/322)

Looking at poverty in a little bit smaller scale, we see that our state of Michigan is not better off than the state average (See graph below). According to the national kids count website, we see that in 2011, Michigan peaked at about 25% of children living in poverty. That is one quarter of all the children living in Michigan are at poverty level. Chances are we have gone to school with these children, became friends with them, and knew nothing about what was really going on for them at home.

(http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/Line/43-children-in-poverty?loc=1&loct=1#2/24/false/867,133,38,35,18,17,16,15,14,13/asc/any/322)

Once more we will move down to a smaller picture of the poverty in our country. For this next section, I will be looking at the county that my home town is in, in Michigan. Marquette County. Compared to the state and national averages, Marquette County is doing pretty good actually. According to the graph below, Marquette County has peaked at around 18%. It is still not a very good number, but it better than the 20+% off the state and national average. Marquette County is a smaller County in Michigan, so that could be one of the reasons that it is lower.

 (http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/Line/1765-poverty--all-ages--saipe?loc=24&loct=2#5/3795/false/867,133,38,35,18,17,16,15,14,13/asc/any/13136)

Now, you may be wondering why the poverty level of children is so high right now. That can be caused by many things. The one thing that I think of is the unemployment rate. Right now the rate is up pretty high which means that not as many people actually have a job at this moment. Without a job, they have no way of getting money in to pay for what they need and they are dropped to poverty level. This matters to us on a sociological level because our society is pretty much run on money. Those who don’t have much are seen as outcasts. Without having money, they may not be able to get to college or get a high paying job, and they could be stuck in poverty when they are older because of this. It is my guess though, that like the housing bubble, this will only be a short time. Looking at the three graphs posted above, you can see that the poverty rate has gone up and down throughout the ten years shown. I do think it will continue to gradually get bigger, but in that time it will go down slightly and people will be able to adjust better.

 

 
Sources:

Kids count data center. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2013. Web. 15 Sept. 2013. <http://datacenter.kidscount.org/>.