End Child Poverty NOW!

It all sounds so worthy, doesn't it? Won't somebody think of the children?

But what does it mean? Well, "child poverty" seems like such a bizarre concept, really. When I was a child, I had fuck all money. Did that make me poor? I don't know. I didn't feel poor, despite not having all the latest toys and a wardrobe full of clothes. I was fed, clothed, I got to school, I lived in a manner much like everyone else in my neighbourhood. Consequently, I'm moved to think that "child poverty" is actually an emotive term to cover overall poverty, but make it sound more dramatic and important.

Personally, I reckon pensioners relying on the state for their existence are probably the most poverty-stricken among us, but who gives a fuck about them? They're all addled and going to die soon anyway, and have you seen how ugly pensioners are? You're never going to get an emotional, doleful advert out of them.

No, kids are where it's at. They are the future, and more importantly, they are the future voters. So, lets dress up our pretend concern for poverty as concern for children.

The definition of child poverty is:

Households Below Average Income (HBAI) statistics is derived from an analysis of the Family Resources Survey. It uses relative incomes on both before housing costs and an after housing costs basis and adopts a 60% of median income as a proxy for the poverty line.

So, given that the best figure I can find for median income is £17,100 per annum and so the "poverty line" is £10,260 per annum.

Now, I don't know about you, but some of the places I've visited in my brief time on Earth would class an annual income of £10,260 as pretty fucking spiffy, especially when you consider that there are no direct health care costs and that the NHS provides a lot more coverage of third-world standard health care than you get in the actual third world. I wouldn't personally want to live on less than a grand a month, but it can be done. But my main point here is that the definition of poverty is entirely arbitrary.

And it's also been extended into some rather peculiar areas:

Although the official definition of child poverty includes both an absolute and a relative factor, the test of 'material deprivation' is controversial because it stipulates, for the first time, a range of social factors contributing to child poverty - including owning a bicycle, going swimming at least once a month and being able to invite friends to tea once a fortnight.

What happens if you're a spacker or a flid and can't ride a bike or go swimming at all? Are you then permanently defined as below the bread line, even if your dad is a City bonus multimillionaire?

You then move on to the argument of "should you have kids if you can't afford them?" Well, in this area, the government provides perverse incentives for people to have more kids to get more income. It's not a lot of income, but given the low expectations of the people living off the state, is it any wonder that they have more and more sprogs? And all of these children will then further be contributing to a higher level of child poverty, so the Benefit Society is encouraging more child poverty!

And finally:

In the UK, the Government's stated objective is to halve child poverty by 2010 and to eradicate it by 2020. The Government failed in its aim to reduce the number of children in poverty by 25 per cent by 2004-2005 from 1998-1999 levels, but insisted it could still meet its final target.

Now, given that the definition of child poverty is an arbitrary statistical one, based on a median income, surely the only way that you could ever hope to eliminate child poverty entirely, is to ensure that the population all earns the median income?

In other words, under the guise of "thinking of the children", the government is actually saying that they're going to make us all earn the same salary by 2020.

Won't somebody think of the children?