Poverty

The stark irony of your recent editorial ("The nonworking poor," Sept. 18) appearing on the same page as a Doonesbury comic strip noting that 400 families control more wealth than 50 percent of Americans' combined was inescapable. Thank you for your thoughtful, balanced analysis of the reality of poverty across our nation. Clearly, the recession is not over for more than 46 million poor Americans. When nearly one in eight Americans is officially poor, we must examine whether a family of four can exist on $22,351 year.

A recent letter in The Sun claims the rich pay more than their due in taxes ("The wealthy pay more than their fair share," May 14). To support this, Thomas M. Neale writes that "the top 1 percent pay 38 percent of all gross U.S. federal tax revenues. " Wow! But wait, they own 40 percent of U.S. wealth, so by Mr. Neale's logic, we should raise their taxes proportionately until they pay the full 40 percent. Well done! Thank you for supporting the Democratic assertion that the wealthiest are not paying their fair share.

Thank you for Patrick Whelan and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's deeply moving remembrance of one of Maryland's finest sons ever, Sargent Shriver ( "Living the faith," Jan 23). His incredible legacy of service and selflessness includes even more than the Peace Corps, Head Start, Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, Upward Bound, Foster Grandparents and other programs Ms. Townsend and Mr. Whelan cite. Forty-seven years ago, Mr. Shriver also created and provided the groundwork for the Community Action Programs — agencies that work to help low-income and other vulnerable people and families attain economic security.

You couldn't tell from the Republican primary season so far, but education, as a campaign issue, should move to the forefront of voter concern as we approach the fall election. A College Board poll last month reported that two-thirds of voters in nine swing states felt education is extremely important to them personally. About the same time, a task force report from the Council on Foreign Relations declared, "Educational failure puts the United States future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk.

The Census Bureau has estimated that 9.9 percent of Maryland's population and 13.5 percent of the country's population lived in poverty in 1990. Figures show the number of poor Americans grew to 33.6 million last year, the first increase since 1983.The Evening Sun wants to know if you think Maryland, even with its current budget problems, should be doing more for the state's poor. Should the United States declare another war on poverty to help people improve their lives? Do you think taxes should be raise to provide more money for the poor?

When I learned that single motherhood was the lowest rung of the prosperity ladder 40 years ago, I asked myself, "Why would I choose that?" Is that still the problem today? Where are the fathers? Where are the husbands? Must fathers live apart from mothers and children so that the government at all levels can give them money? Is it working? Are Baltimore, Maryland, and the federal government proving themselves good parents? Can we reverse this? Are kids so accustomed to having government buy food and shelter that they only have to pay for iPhones?

Here's something to get everyone in the back-to-school spirit, something that might seem like a complicated math problem, but turns out to be a simple equation: chs + wft + wuy> 21amthc = ∞

"China is lifting a million people a month out of poverty." It is just one statement in an interesting new book titled The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford. But it has huge implications. I haven't checked out the statistics, but they sound reasonable. If so, this is something worth everyone's attention. People on the political left make a lot of noise about poverty and advocate all sorts of programs and policies to reduce it, but they show incredibly little interest in how poverty has actually been reduced, whether in China or anywhere else.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and other members of the congressional "supercommittee" created by this summer's federal deficit ceiling law are charged with making a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit. That's a daunting task. But as new Census Bureau data shows, kids in Mr. Van Hollen's 8th District and in Maryland as a whole face an even more daunting one: staying afloat as more and more of them sink into poverty. First Focus, a national bipartisan children's advocacy organization, has crunched the numbers, and the Census figures show that an alarming 16,000 children in Mr. Van Hollen's district lived in poverty in 2010.

Poverty is always relative, but that does not make it less real. True, Americans whose food stamps give out before the end of every month don't suffer the severe malnutrition and marginal existence that defines poverty in many parts of the world. But that's little comfort to a hungry child, or to a desperate parent trying to rock that child to sleep.For years, conservatives have claimed that government definitions misstate the extent of poverty in the United States. If the formula accurately reflected the effect of government benefits on household benefits, they argued, the poverty level in this country would drop dramatically.

In her commentary on teen pregnancy ("Teen pregnancy is poverty's offspring," April 16), Susan Reimer perpetuates the justification that poverty is the primary reason teens engage in sex and become pregnant. This begs the question: Why, when we have always had poverty, did we not see the rate of unwed teen mothers in the past that we witness today? I grew up in a section of Baltimore City that had its share of immigrants, blue collar workers and other individuals who would be considered poor by today's standards.

There is good news - and some familiar bad news - in recent research into the stubborn question of why our babies have babies when it is such a spectacularly bad idea for both mother and child. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that teen births have hit an all-time low. In 2010, there were 34.4 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19, a 9 percent drop from the year before. What makes this news even more welcome is that the birthrate among teens ticked up in the mid-2000s after 20 years of declines, and researchers were at a loss to explain why. Researchers are cautiously attributing the decrease to the public service campaigns that urge kids to delay sex for a while, and then to use contraceptives the first time and every time.

To make ends meet in Baltimore County, a family of three that includes an adult, a preschool child and a school-age child needs to make nearly $62,000 to cover basic needs, a new study finds. That is more than three times the federal poverty level. The 2012 Self-Sufficiency Standard, created by researchers at the University of Washington School of Social Work in cooperation with the Maryland Community Action Partnership, calculates the basic costs for Maryland families by looking at the price of such necessities as housing, food, transportation, child care and taxes.

From 2008 to 2011, average monthly applications for food stamps in Baltimore increased by 66 percent, and applications for temporary cash assistance rose 35 percent, according to the Maryland Department of Human Resources. These numbers are the most dramatic of many that all tell the same story: The recession has hit middle- and low-income Baltimore residents hard. "We are seeing a whole new demographic of people: formerly middle-class people living middle-class lives who've lost their jobs and now are struggling to put food on the table," said Deborah Flateman, chief executive officer of the Maryland Food Bank.

Mitt Romney's ill-considered remark about the destitute, "I'm not concerned about the very poor," and his subsequent awkward explanation of it represented something more noteworthy than a rich man's gaffe. The question raised by the episode is not simply whether the candidate can articulate his views more clearly but whether the dire economic circumstances of tens of millions of Americans are truly understood, or can even be acknowledged, by the GOP. "We have a social safety net," Mr. Romney told his CNN interviewer Wednesday.

Without a ride to work, it would have been a lot more difficult for Ronika Ford to get her first part-time job working at the Arlington Echo Outdoor Educational Center a few miles from her Annapolis home. Ford, 18, worked for two summers mulching trails and testing water quality in the West River as part of a youth summer jobs program at the Anne Arundel County Community Action Agency. She didn't have a car, but the program provided training, transportation to and from the work site and free lunches — offerings that Ford said were essential to her success at the Millersville job. Officials at the agency, which has traditionally relied on government funding, have grown concerned over the past few years about their ability to maintain that range of services.

Though the poverty gap between blacks and whites in Maryland narrowed significantly during the 1980s, the latest Census report shows blacks are still three times more likely to live in poverty than whites. The persistent economic gap between blacks and whites appears to be an intractable problem, affecting debate on issues from school funding and health care to welfare dependency, drug abuse and crime.No single factor is responsible for the gap. The loss of low-skill manufacturing jobs from urban areas, the increase in single-parent households over the last generation and the continuing legacy of racial discrimination all have contributed to the present crisis.

Here's the biggest reason Baltimore's property tax rate is the highest in the state and twice that of the surrounding counties: We have most of the region's poor people. About one in four Baltimore residents is officially poor, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. From 2006 through 2009, Baltimore's poverty rate was around 20 percent. But the Census Bureau's survey for 2010 put the rate at 25.6 percent. And that being 15 percentage points higher than the poverty rate for Maryland, and poverty being related to a thorny array of other problems, it follows that taxes would be higher in Baltimore.

An optimist might want to raise a glass as 2011 winds down. U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by New Year's Eve. The global AIDS pandemic is ebbing. And the U.S. unemployment rate dropped by nearly half a percent in November. But an optimist would have to totally ignore one really important number to maintain the cheer. That number is 11. It was tossed out by scientists and economists at the international climate talks that just ended in Durban, South Africa. If we human beings continue to torch fossil fuels - oil, coal, natural gas - without any serious limitations in the next few decades, our planet could warm a full 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.