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Are we really that poor or it is just statistics?

I have to confess it is difficult for me to decide if statistics reflect reality or create a reality. After all, as Mark Twain once said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." But, can statistics help us to understand why in the 21st century in the richest country in the world there are more poor people than ever before?

How can we understand this “American paradox,” as Burton Weisbrod said in the subtitle of his book The Economics of Poverty? And how can we accept that the group most affected by poverty is Hispanics, especially Latinas and their children?

In Colorado, where I live, for the first time ever this year more than one quarter (26 percent) of the one million Hispanics living in this state also live below the federal level of poverty, compared with less than 13 percent of the general population in that situation.

And in several of the counties in Southern Colorado, where most of the residents are Hispanic, the number of people looking for help at the local food banks double during the past year. Part of the reason is the adverse economic situation the country is facing. But the history of poverty is much complicated.

For example, Colorado is the state with the highest increase (72 percent) of child poverty in the country during the past ten years. In some areas of Metro Denver, up to 83 percent of Latino children live in poverty.

In other words, poverty is not the result of the current crisis. In fact, it did not begin with the current President or with his predecessor. It goes without saying that politicians should be held responsible, but there are other causes of poverty.

In 1964, the same year of the Civil Rights Act, the Council of Economic Advisers, created in 1946, presented a report to President Johnson, saying that lack of opportunities and lack of good education were the two main reasons for poverty.

But the report also added that poor people did not have access to opportunities or good education because they were discriminated. Four and a half decades later, the explanation given in that document is still valid. However, there is now a complication: those most affected by poverty (Latino children) are the future of the country.

According to research done by Dr. Carlos Cortes, of the University of California at Riverside, almost 70 percent of children 10 years of age or younger in the United States are Latino or other minority. And 90 percent of those children are American citizens.

And according to recent research published by David Morse, president of New American Dimensions (a multicultural market research firm based in Los Angeles), those Hispanic children will soon be, in less than 20 years, the new mainstream culture in the United States.

Let’s not allow the tree of the current political and economic crisis prevents us from seeing the forest of historical reason for poverty and the dire consequences of negligent inaction.

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