Poverty and why the issue is important to me

I chose to study poverty for the last month for a project for school but why did I choose this topic? I am personally a witness to people in poverty every day that I have work. I work in a doctors office in a poor community and see people suffer financially. Patient come into our facilities who are often poorly nourished, Some patients are homeless and almost all of the patients are receiving some form of government assistance. For those patients who are just above the poverty line, the practice offers the option of a "Sliding scale." This gives patients free or reduced price care from out practice. Witnessing these people since I began my job in august inspired me to inform myself as well as inform others of this issue. If you are interested in becoming informed about this issue, please visit sites.google.com/site/povertyinamericatsuter.

Poverty and children in first and third world countries

Poverty effects children and adults both. Children are effected because if their parents are in poverty, their parents cannot afford proper shelter, food and clothing for the child. Living in a first world country, poverty is not nearly as bad as for children in third world countries. Luckily for first world countries, children can still go to public school for free. In fact, if a child does not attend school or misses a lot of school, child protective services can be sent to a home to check on their level of care. In third world countries, child do not have the opportunity to attend school. Another difference is the children in a first world country can go out in public and have a clean drinking fountain. For children in third world countries this is not an option.

Poverty Percent by state

 
The image above shows the percent of people in poverty in each state in 2010. Based on this map it can be seen that in 2010 the southern states were those with the greatest percent of people in poverty. Other then southern states we can see that big states such as California and New York were also greatly in poverty. 

Poverty of each race

The following statistics are taken from "Talk Poverty" and are the percent of people of each race that fell below the poverty line in 2014:

• African Americans: 26.2%
• Hispanics: 23.6%
• Caucasians: 10.1%
• Native Americans: 28.3%

These numbers, although appear low, are actually significant  number of people. 14.8% of people were in poverty in the year 2014, that is 48,100,000 Americans.

Take into consideration that America is a first world country therefore we can assume that third world countries have an even greater percent of citizens in poverty.

Federal Poverty Income Guidelines

The Chart above comes from www.winnetworkdetroit.org/ and is a chart of the poverty guidelines.