Mark Shriver: “Before President Johnson and my dad started making deep investments in anti-poverty programs like Head Start, about one quarter of all children and the elderly lived in poverty.

Ten years later, that number dropped to about 15 percent for both groups.

The elderly poverty rate kept decreasing and is now at a historic low of nine percent. But the percentage of kids living in poverty today has returned to mid-1960s levels. I believe that’s so because kids don’t have access to the political process the way other Americans do.

Childhood poverty doesn’t just cause misery for the most vulnerable of us, it sets them up for failure in school, in their health and, frankly, for the rest of their lives.”