Some facts on poverty:

 

·        If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as CEO pay between 1990 and 1998, it would now be $22.08 instead of $5.15 an hour.

·        The richest fifth: 

Consume 45% of all meat and fish, the poorest fifth 5%.

Consume 58% of total energy, the poorest fifth less than 4%.

Have 74% of all telephone lines, the poorest fifth 1.5%.

Consume 84% of all paper, the poorest fifth 1.1%.

Own 87% of the world’s vehicle fleet, the poorest fifth less than 1%.

·        Hunger kills. Every day, 34,000 children under five die of hunger or preventable diseases resulting from hunger.                                                                                        

·        100 million people are homeless and 2.5 billion people have no access to proper sanitation.

·        A child living in a wealthy U.S. family is on average, better off financially than the typical wealthy child in any other country. At the same time, the average child in a low-income U.S. family is worse off than the average poor child in 15 other industrialized countries.

·        One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.

 

·        One in five children (14.3 million) lived in poverty in 1991, the highest number since 1965.  The majority of poor children are white; most have a parent that works; and most live outside large cities, in rural and suburban America(U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992).  

·        The United States has the highest proportion of single-parent families; nearly one child in four now lives with one parent (Hobbs, F., & Lippman, L., 1990). 

·        Early childhood experiences contribute to poor children's high rate of school failure, dropout, delinquency, early childbearing, and adult poverty (National Center for Children in Poverty, 1990).

·        Being a woman increases one's chances of being poor by 60 percent.  some time in their lives. 

·        "The combined wealth of the world's 200 richest people hit $1 trillion in 1999; the combined incomes of the 582 million people living in the 43 least developed countries is $146 billion."

·        A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world's poorest 2.5 billion people.

·        "Today, across the world , 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day; 3 billion live on under two dollars a day; 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation; 2 billion have no access to electricity."