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Writer's pictureMatt Torres

Poverty and Unemployment

Updated: Apr 17, 2020

As of 2018, the average unemployment rate of the us was 3.9%, although now during the covid-19 pandemic, the unemployment rate hovers around a whopping 4.4%. While this number may seem small, that’s more than 14.5 million people in the US alone.


Effects of Unemployment:

Aside from the obvious poverty that occurs as a result of the lack of income that unemployed persons receive, there are some other, less direct effects that it can have on the economy. For example, when people are put into poverty by unemployment, they are also forced to dig into their savings and/or or borrow money. This increases the amount of money that the government has to put into retirement funds itself, which can lead to a lower budget in other things. Another side effect of unemployment is how it affects the education of children in households with jobless parents. If a parent is unemployed, this often means that the children will have to drop out of school to pick up a job to support their family. This leads to lower educational attainment for the child, and as income rate is inversely proportional to educational attainment, this can lead to poverty. It is also worth noting that the unemployment rate for children who never graduated high school was 5.6% as of 2018, and the average earnings a measly $553 per week. This can lead to a cycle where the children eventually grow up to become unemployed parents, causing their children to have to drop out early to support them, and so on.


How Can I Fight the Causes and Effects of Unemployment?

Despite all of the problems that arise with unemployment, there is a lot you can do to mitigate it. One way to lower the effects of unemployment is to make sure that children in unemployed households can still attain the quality of education that they need, which can hopefully break the cycle.You can help to benefit children’s education by supporting organizations such as https://childrenincorporated.org/, which will take donations and use them to support households in poverty as well as to create projects of their own that provide for children’s educational and nutritional needs. Poverty is another cause of unemployment, because when people live in poverty, they often can’t afford the transportation, education, and materials they need for getting employed. Because of this, it is also a good idea to donate to organizations like https://outreach-international.org/, which organizes several projects and programs that work to fight poverty and help people to break the cycle.




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