Opinion: Who Will Stand Up for the Poor?

(Sept. 28) -- I haven't been sleeping well lately. Not ever since the new poverty statistics came out. With the deep recession, I knew they wouldn't be good -- but I could not have predicted the grim nature of the cold, hard facts.

As a religious person in the Judeo-Christian tradition, I know that there is more in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures about our care of the poor than any other topic.

According to those sacred texts, God will judge us most closely and most harshly on our care for the most vulnerable in our communities. From the looks of things in America, the most prosperous nation in history, we're not going to fare very well with the creator and lover of humankind on Judgment Day.

One in five children now lives below the poverty rate -- and the rates for racial minorities are even worse. Over 35 percent of African-American children, and 33 percent of Hispanic children, now live in poverty, in the richest nation on earth.

These statistics would have been even worse if we had not had the federal Recovery Act's provisions: 6.2 million people were kept above poverty levels by just seven provisions in the (now maligned) act, and 2.4 million children were raised out of poverty by those same provisions. It could have been worse. But the facts are nevertheless staggering.

If the humanitarian emotions of sympathy and compassion are not enough to spur us to action, perhaps the economic and fiscal realities will do the trick.

Even before this latest great recession, the cost of child poverty to our economy was $500 billion due to lost productivity and increased expenditures in health care and criminal justice. We know that kids who grow up in poverty enter the educational system with lower cognitive development, fall behind in school, have higher dropout rates and are less likely to enter the workforce with a level of education that would put them to work in a decently paying job. This costs us billions more.

Still, it all comes back to the children, who through no fault or action of their own are precluded from anything like the American dream. Yet, at the same time we hear these new statistics on child poverty, there is debate on whether we should spend $830 billion over the next 10 years in extending tax cuts to those who make over $250,000 per year, when a 2007 study revealed that roughly the same amount of money could reduce child poverty by 41 percent over the same amount of time.

Ask any American if he or she cares about our children, and you'll get a positive answer. We tend to be softies when it comes to "innocent victims." You'd think the compassion of the American electorate for these kids who have done nothing to deserve their suffering would awaken our sense of outrage at this injustice, and the political will to do something to remedy it. But we don't even hear it being discussed.

These young victims, who have no voice in the political process, need someone to stand up for them and for the idea of America. If not you and me, who? If not now, when?

V. Gene Robinson was elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003 as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. He is also a part-time senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.