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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