I have blogged in the past about the potential connection between the moral impetus of John Edward’s poverty focus and the economic self-interest appeal of a middle class squeeze message as personified by the Democratic Leadership Council’s American Dream Initiative (ADI). In the Great Risk Shift, Jacob provides the basis for making such a link that can serve as the impetus for an attack on poverty that also addresses the heightened economic insecurity faced by working families. Poverty is an increasingly common, short-term destination for more and more families. The recent boom in personal bankruptcies over the past decade should have provided us with ample evidence of this; Jacob’s new book provides further confirmation.

Long-term poverty, writes Jacob, is rarer than we think.  He cites a finding in a recent book on poverty by Mark Rank: less than one tenth of Americans experience five straight years of poverty during adulthood.  In discussing child poverty, Jacob writes that the concluding that one in five children live in poverty doesn’t fully capture the economic insecurity behind this figure.  The fact is that more than half of American children spend at least a year in poverty by the time they reach eighteen.  Over half of Americans will spend at least a year in poverty between the ages of twenty and seventy-five.  This figure does not hinge on the inclusion of cash-poor college students; if people under the age of 25 are excluded from the calculation the likelihood of experiencing poverty by seventy-five is still nearly fifty percent.  For comparative purposes, people in their forties today have more than a 36% chance of ending up in poverty, nearly three times greater than the average forty year-old in the 1970s. 

These numbers remind us that the fate of the middle class is intimately tied to that of “the poor”—at the very least because the amount of movement between the two groups is greater than most of us realize. 

John Edwards has worked to develop a morally appealing message that can serve as the basis for a national movement towards expanding social insurance and alleviating the anxieties endemic to this age of growing financial insecurity.  But in order to connect this moral vision to the interests of today’s middle class voter, he will have to highlight that reducing poverty is in our self-interest as well.  The necessity of strengthening social insurance programs that benefit the poor becomes an imperative in an environment when more and more middle class individuals will find themselves temporarily below the poverty line due to rising income volatility.  In the end, we will not be able to truly eliminate poverty without dealing with the new economic risks faced by average Americans.

Hillary Clinton, Evan Bayh, and others have wisely sought to speak directly to middle class voters through their advocacy of the ADI.  But this platform retains elements of the “personal responsibility” shibboleth wielded by conservatives to justify the evisceration of pools of social insurance in favor of privatized risk bearing.  While the elements of the ADI platform, though modest, would make some headway in both expanding health insurance coverage and increasing savings and property ownership (better preparing individuals to shoulder risk), none of its advocates ground their support of the program by highlighting the increasingly tenuous state of the two income family.  The rhetoric of personal responsibility—and the shift of risk to individual families such rhetoric assumes as given—remains at the center for the leading centrist 2008 Democrats.

Making the final leap and advocating for the expansion of both insurance and personal savings in a manner that acknowledges the growing insecurity felt by middle class Americans will require a marriage of the moral imperatives of reducing poverty and the economic self-interest of working families on the make. 

My instinct tells me that it is easier to get the vision thing down first.  Edwards’s moral vision of a society that takes care of its least fortunate provides a ready foundation for a program of social insurance that receives buy-in from Americans at the top and bottom of the country’s income ladder.  Achieving this synthesis, however, will require acknowledgement that the average American, faced with rising health care, housing, and education costs, is close to the precipice of joining the ranks of the temporary poor than most of us realize. 

The first candidate to achieve this synthesis will be the first to offer a message that speaks to the anxiety borne by average, hard-working Americans.  I believe this will be a winning message, and a first step to reversing the risk privatization so brilliantly explained to us by Jacob’s new book.