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And, yes, I DO take it personally: Letting Mexico show us the way to fight poverty
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Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Letting Mexico show us the way to fight poverty



this is from a story in today's nyt about nyc mayor bloomberg's trip to mexico to see first-hand how mexico is dealing with its huge number of people living in poverty... i could care less about bloomberg, but i did find the details of the mexican program fascinating... particularly since bushco's concerted attack on any form of implied or explicit social contrast and its championing of social darwinism and the bogus "on-your-own(ership)" society, the u.s. has turned a blind eye to poverty...
If the women and their children have kept all their medical appointments, and if their children have stayed in school, the money is theirs to use as they wish. The awards range from 360 to 3,710 pesos (about $36 to $370), enough to buy food or shoes or other necessities. The size of the award depends on how many children they have and what level of school the children are in.

The program is 10 years old, has a budget of more than $3 billion a year and covers almost a quarter of all Mexicans.

[...]

Outside evaluations have found that the program, called Oportunidades, has been successful in raising school attendance and nutrition levels. The percentage of Mexicans living in extreme poverty has fallen by 17 percentage points since 1996, when it reached 37 percent.

Those results have spurred some 30 countries to adopt some version of the program.

meanwhile, back in the richest country in the world...
  • In 2005, 16 million people -- 5.4 percent of all Americans -- had incomes below half the poverty line. The number of Americans living in such extreme poverty grew by over three million [PDF] between 2000 and 2005, and the share of poor people living in extreme poverty is now greater than at any point in the last 32 years.
(u.s. poverty statistics courtesy of the center for american progress...)

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