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The government has launched its consultation on better measures of child pov

游客2024-09-18  30
问题     The government has launched its consultation on better measures of child poverty, but it really has to be asked, better for whom? This is a government that looks set to preside over a truly dramatic increase in child poverty. The Institute for Fiscal Studies projects that after a decade of steady reductions in child poverty rates, 300, 000 more children will be living in poverty in the UK by 2015. Big cuts to tax credits, a three-year freeze in child benefit, uprating out-of-work benefits using CPI rather than the more generous RPI—all will make vulnerable families poor over the course of this parliament.
    So what does the government do about it? Rather than review its policies and ask how it can seek to fulfill its legal commitments under the Child Poverty Act 2010, it launches a consultation on the way that child poverty is measured.
    Poverty is a complex phenomenon and no single indicator can fully capture the condition. The CPA 2010 recognizes this, urging governments to make progress against four specific measures: relative poverty, absolute poverty, material deprivation and persistent poverty. Alongside this, we also track numerous other indicators of child well-being in the UK such as educational achievement, health outcomes and subjective experience.
    Both Iain Duncan Smith and David Laws sought to convince the audience at the launch of the consultation that the government was not in retreat from the income measures contained in the CPA 2010. But in truth, the consultation document is peppered with digs at the relative measure, suggesting that changes to this indicator do not tell us anything meaningful about " real" poverty.
    The consultation also seeks to dilute the relevance of income by developing a "multidimensional indicator" of child poverty. This indicator will blend together measures of worklessness, unmanageable debt and family stability among others to produce a single headline number that can be tracked over time.
    At best, the government is combining poverty with its many consequences. At worst, it is simply changing the yardstick against which they will be measured.
    Consider, for example, the proposal that parental worklessness be a key defining feature of the new child poverty measure. Using current definitions, 60% of children living in poverty today have at least one parent in work. Any measure that insists poverty is about worklessness will simply airbrush these 1.4 million children out of the picture altogether.
    Equally worryingly, the consultation insists that any new poverty measure must resonate with the public. The latest British Social Attitudes survey shows just how widespread negative views of vulnerable groups in society are, but also makes clear that much of this shift in public opinion has been caused by current and previous government policies.
    So, should we expect better measures of child poverty as a result of the consultation? Not better for the children growing up in low-income families for sure. And given the broader costs to society of child poverty, not better for anyone else—except, perhaps, a government that we suspect may be trying to avoid being held to account. [br] The multidimensional indicator adopts the following measures EXCEPT______.
选项 A、educational accomplishment
B、unemployment
C、unpayable debt
D、family stability
答案 A
解析 细节题。文章第五段第二句表明，多维指标将失业、无能力偿还的债务和家庭稳定性的衡量标准结合在一起，从而得出一个可以长期追踪的重要数据。本句并未提及“教育成效”，这一衡量标准在第三段最后一句中有所提及，它是衡量贫困等级时考虑的英国儿童福利指标之一，所以[A]为正确答案。[B]“失业”、[C]“无能力偿还的债务”和[D]“家庭稳定性”在本句中均有所提及，故排除。
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