Whereas poverty is an immoral and economic stain on our Nation and needs to be addressed; Whereas the poverty rate in the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, continues to rank among the highest when compared to other developed nations; Whereas according to the Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody Has the Right to Live , 140 million Americans are poor or one emergency away from being poor; Whereas in 2018, 38.1 million people including 11.9 million children were living in poverty based on the Official Poverty Measure (OPM); Whereas 1 in 6 children live in poverty and more than 5 million of these children lived in extreme poverty, at less than half the poverty level, and nearly 3 in 4 poor children were children of color; Whereas child poverty creates gaps in cognitive skills for very young children, puts children at greater risk of hunger and homelessness, jeopardizes their health and ability to learn, and fuels the intergenerational cycle of poverty; Whereas communities of color face disproportionate rates of poverty and inequality; Whereas approximately 8.9 million Black, 10.5 million Latinx, 2 million Asian, and 2.1 million Native and Indigenous people live in poverty in the United States; Whereas income inequality is the worst it has been in five decades; Whereas more than 21.4 million women lived in poverty in 2018, with women of color, women with disabilities, and older women facing higher rates of poverty than women overall; Whereas the top 10 percent of United States households own 70 percent of the country’s total wealth and those in the bottom 50 percent saw no increase in their wealth over the past 30 years; Whereas in 2018, 37.2 million people, including 11.2 million children, were deemed food insecure, including the 10 million people living in 5.6 million households defined by the Department of Agriculture as very food insecure, a number virtually unchanged since 2017