This story is part of a series by Daniel Weeks, a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, on TheAtlantic.com. I'm posting it because it shows how our big parts of our economic system are not trauma-informed. That's because, when ACEs drop people into poverty, our economic system helps guarantee that most stay there.
With half of American jobs paying less than $33,000 per year and a quarter paying poverty-line wages of $22,000 or less, even as financial markets soar, people in the bottom fifth of the income distribution now command the smallest share of income—3.3 percent—since the government started tracking income breakdowns in the 1960s. Middle-wage jobs lost during the Great Recession are largely being replaced by low-wage jobs—when they are replaced at all—contributing to an 11 percent decline in real income for poor families since 1979. For the 27 million adults who are unemployed or underemployed and the 48 million people in working poor families who rely on some form of public support, means-tested government programs excluding Medicaid have remained essentially flat for the past 20 years, at around $1,000 per capita per year. Only unemployment insurance and food stamps have seen a marked increase in recent years, although both are currently under assault in Congress.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/poverty-vs-democracy-in-america/282809/
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