Even critics who think that poverty results from a defective character concede that poor children, all 13m of them in America today, are not to blame for their plight. But as soon as they reach the age of 18, many of those children will become poor adults who will then be unceremoniously deemed culpable for their predicament. By the official statistics, nearly one in six American children is poor. By the spm, which takes benefits and cost of living into account, things look only a bit better: just over one in six is poor. They are concentrated in clusters across every state in America. They are found in depressed areas like Cleveland, where half of children live below the federal poverty line, rural South Dakota and central Appalachia. They are also found among immense prosperity—the children living in the Bronx or of the service workers who drive three hours each way to do menial jobs in San Francisco.
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