“Everybody should be sticking their chests out and saying ‘that’s my rover on Mars.”
~NASA administrator Charles Bolden

The only reason we haven’t solved the issue of child poverty in America has nothing to do with means or ability … it is 100% because we simply lack the will to do so.  Period.  And it has nothing to do with people failing to take advantage of good opportunities or people making poor decisions.  It’s about kids not being able to eat.  So – while conservatives argue to cut taxes on their donors i.e. really rich people – they’re not only allowing this scandal to persist … they’re actually trying to make it worse.  For example – this year conservatives in the House voted to cut free lunch programs for young kids (source).  Feeding AMERICAN children should never be an ideological thing  … unfortunately – these kids don’t have enough money to contribute to the campaign rolls of these conservative politicians so they get left by the wayside.

And this isn’t an either/or discussion … we can both fund NASA and feed our kids.  So – we can do all of this …

Talking Points Memo gives the details on NASA’s successful landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover HERE:

NASA successfully landed the Mars Curiosity Rover, its largest and most advanced unmanned exploration vehicle on target on the surface of the Red Planet at a time of 1:14 a.m. ET on Monday, August 6.

It was, to be specific, a 13-stage process that required an abrupt slowdown from 13,000 miles-per-hour to zero, with the landing craft housing the rover entering the Martian atmosphere, heating up, deploying a supersonic parachute and then a contraption known as a “sky crane.”

Fortunately, the landing was about as picture-perfect as NASA and observers could have hoped, with the craft touching down only a few hundred feet away from its precise target near a large Martian mountain known as Mount Sharp, around which NASA believes that liquid water might have flowed on an ancient Mars. The area is a prime candidate for discovering traces of minerals that would indicate of mars was ever habitable by carbon-based life, which is the Mars Curiosity Rover’s mission goal.

And we should be able to fix this.  CommonDreams writes HERE:

There are 16.4 million poor children in rich America, 7.4 million living in extreme poverty. A majority of public school students and more than three out of four Black and Hispanic children, who will be a majority of our child population by 2019, are unable to read or compute at grade level in the fourth or eighth grade and will be unprepared to succeed in our increasingly competitive global economy. Nearly eight million children are uninsured. More children were killed by guns in 2008-2009 than U.S. military personnel in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to date. A Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate.

For example, when we looked closely at poor children across the nation, ten states plus the District of Columbia had child poverty rates of 25 percent or higher: Mississippi was the highest at 32.5 percent, followed by D.C., New Mexico, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Only New Hampshire had a child poverty rate of 10 percent or lower. When it comes to ensuring equal chances for children everywhere in our country we have a long way to go. And when we realize that nationwide a child is born into poverty every 29 seconds it should sound alarms from coast to coast.

You can download the entire report on the State of America’s Children HERE.

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