Young, Poor, and Desperate

Young, Poor, and Desperate

The poverty crisis is devastating young Americans. Here's what the president can do about it.

By Eliot Spitzer 
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2011, at 7:12 AM ET

America excels in dramatic crises: When a bank goes bust, when a tornado strikes, there's no country in the world that rises to the occasion better. But we don't do so well with the accretive and perhaps more widely destructive social shifts that creep up on us, which is why the realization that we have a full-fledged poverty crisis is so troubling.