{"id":105,"date":"2012-10-05T14:55:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-05T14:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/2012\/10\/05\/why-isnt-poverty-issue-in-america\/"},"modified":"2016-10-29T05:49:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-29T05:49:00","slug":"why-isnt-poverty-issue-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/2012\/10\/05\/why-isnt-poverty-issue-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Why isn&#8217;t poverty an issue in America?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t watch the American Presidential Debate the other night. But I did see the coverage and I was struck by how shallow most of the commentary seemed.<\/p>\n<p>The first debate was about domestic issues but I didn&#8217;t hear anything about poverty. It may have been raised, but it didn&#8217;t grab the attention of the commentators or those writing about the debate.<\/p>\n<p>It struck me as strange that a topic for which the President was so passionate about in his first presidential campaign &#8211; the plight of inner city children living in poverty &#8211; was not on his agenda any longer. But why not? Are the problems that were so prominent four years ago all better now? I doubt that.<\/p>\n<p>This morning, I remembered seeing an article a few weeks ago about Chicago&#8217;s inner city neighbourhoods &#8211; specifically two that Obama worked in as a community organizer. I had noted the article then, but sent it off to Instapaper without reading it and hadn&#8217;t gotten back to it. So I went and looked it up.<\/p>\n<p>The article is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/08\/19\/magazine\/obama-poverty.html?_r=2&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;&amp;pagewanted=print\">What Does Obama Really Believe In?<\/a> from <i>The New York Times Magazine.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>It shares the tale of a youth worker who lives in the same area as Obama once worked in, and who is trying to help the children in his neighbourhood escape the poverty cycle they&#8217;re trapped in.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not a happy tale. Along the way, we learn a lot about the nature of extreme urban poverty and about how American thinking about helping the poor has evolved since LBJ&#8217;s famous War on Poverty in the 1960s.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a fascinating, well-written piece, well worth the time it takes to read through. I still don&#8217;t know why poverty is never mentioned these days on the campaign trail. But at least I know there are some very good people who are still dedicated to finding a way to alleviate it. There are no easy answers, which is probably why we don&#8217;t hear more about it. Sound bites and extreme poverty don&#8217;t go well together.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/08\/19\/magazine\/obama-poverty.html?_r=2&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;&amp;pagewanted=print\">Link to <i>What Does Obama Really Believe In?<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t watch the American Presidential Debate the other night. But I did see the coverage and I was struck by how shallow most of the commentary seemed. The first debate was about domestic issues but I didn&#8217;t hear anything about poverty. It may have been raised, but it didn&#8217;t grab the attention of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p88Hib-1H","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":846,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions\/846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davetraynor.com\/wp2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}