While researching poverty I came across some eye opening statistics that left me in disgust. Did you know that nearly 49 million Americans struggle to put food on the table every night? Or half of all Americans will live in poverty sometime before they reach 65 years of age. Or even that 1 in every 5 U.S. children lived in homes without food at some point during 2010 and again in 2013. African American children are three times are likely to live in households with incomes below the poverty line as their white "equals". Latinos are double as likely to live in poverty as their white "equals". In 2013 26.4 million (13.6%) of people in poverty were ages 18-64. That is literally people our age to people our grandparents age. In 2011 4.8 million seniors over the age of 60 were food insecure. Nevada is the most food insecure state at 9.8%. New York is 14th of 50 with 7.7% of our population food insecure. The average USA income for 2012 was $51,017. In New York to live "comfortably" you must make a yearly average of about $80,000. The starting teaching salary ranges from $45,500 dollars to $74,000 in New York. Which is both below what is recommended to live "comfortably" and "modestly". Seeing that the family average is a husband and a wife with 2.5 kids. (2 children and a pet) and each child by the time they are 18 have wasted (haha) nearly a million dollars, that sounds unreasonable and unfair to only make $80,000 a year and have a family of your own. Living expenses along with education expenses, health expenses and food expenses are far overpriced and with inflation is getting worse by the year. The average private university has gone up $10,000 in the last five years. Basically what I'm getting at is, living in America is pretty horrible because the value of a dollar is so low and the price of living is so high. Cash LITERALLY rules everything around me.