It’s astonishing news, when you think about it: our country will lose $1.7 trillion—that’s with a t!—if the current recession drives an additional 3 million children into poverty, as has been predicted.

The figure comes from a recent report from the bipartisan advocacy organization First Focus. The report, The Cost of Doing Nothing addresses clearly the lifetime consequences of poverty experienced during childhood in terms of health, crime, employment, and assesses the economic costs to society.

As I reviewed this ground-breaking data, I felt compelled to make the connection, once more, between poverty and the huge cost of systemic failure in child welfare—foster care, aging out, the absence of early childhood education, and more. It does seem to me that fixing systems, or private intervention to change the odds for these children—most of whom come from low-income families and a disproportionate number of whom are Black and Hispanic—does indeed make a difference in many lives, and the positive multiplier effect of such reforms and interventions, is not fairly measured.

As always, the question is whether legislators, child advocates, and just plain caring adults are paying attention. How do we keep the enormity of a $1.7 trillion loss in the public mind? And what do we want people to do with this information?

In February 2009, I talked with Michael Linden, the author of the report and a senior director at First Focus. Here’s a quick summary of his perspective on my questions:

• “It’s difficult to assess the impact of our press distribution and other mailings, particularly in these troubled times. Press pickup of technical data is not customary.”
• “Sometimes we (child advocates and poverty advocates) focus a little too much on the heartstrings, which can be very effective. But we need to balance it with a brain-focused approach, as in: ‘Listen. Poverty is bad for a host of moral reasons, but poverty is also bad because of hard-nose crunch-the numbers reasons.’ Capitol Hill needs to know numbers.”
• “If everybody who cares about kids and children in poverty would start using this economic impact language in the simplest way, like, ‘You know, [Members of Congress], if we can do something to save our kids from poverty, we could save our country 1.7 trillion dollars’—If legislators heard only that from children ‘s health advocates and citizens and businesses in communities, it could make a difference.
• “The First Focus report covers the 3 million kids who will fall into poverty from this recession, and that’s where the 1.7 trillion comes from. If we could reduce poverty more broadly, the economic benefit would be many multiples of that.”

Important words for all of us—and hopefully some inspiration that future measurements paired with responsible research like that presented by First Focus will do more to capture the multipliers in our successes.

For More Information

• Read the report, The Cost of Doing Nothing.
• Check out other poverty-related resources in the CFK Family Income topic page.