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Edwards' Endorsement and Cutting Poverty
As John Edwards left the race to be our next President, he reported that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had “…pledged to me and more importantly through me to America, that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.” Now, it appears he's met with both remaining candidates as expected before an endorsement.
Here’s hoping Clinton and Obama intend to do more than establish a limited and limiting goal of cutting poverty and that neither one makes a promise to adopt Edwards' flawed “cut poverty” goal in order to extract his endorsement.
It was never clear why Edwards made establishing a national goal to cut poverty a feature of his campaign.
After all, Edwards often talked about workers whose household incomes exceed the official definition of poverty. And he was definitely focused on promoting policy solutions to systemic problems in the labor market and our economy. This makes sense, if our goal is a stronger economy and inclusive democracy.
Unfortunately, Edwards got in the way of his own message by putting up the poverty banner.
There are two problems with the goal to end poverty. First – it’s very limited. Moving people above the poverty line won’t do much to strengthen our economy, communities, or families because it was designed to establish the income necessary to avoid material deprivation, nothing more. Moreover, the formula is seriously out of date because it was developed using 1950s household expenditure data. At that time, families spent more on food and much less on housing, transportation, and child care. Yet, the formula—based on the percentage then spent buying enough food to survive-- has never been updated.
Using the poverty measure to judge our success also opens the door to conservative critics who will promote marriage and “hard work” as the solutions to poverty – effectively ignoring systemic causes of income inequality like stagnant wages and declining employment benefits, and other societal shifts that are barriers to economic and social mobility.
Second, merely changing the definition of poverty to fit these policies won't work. It really doesn’t matter who or what the proposal serves. When we target assistance to "the poor", too many people think they know who that is: those people who made bad choices in life by dropping out of school, or getting pregnant at a young age without benefit of a supportive, stable partner. Even the so-called "working poor" are suspect, because Americans believe that if you work hard, you will do well. So, by that definition – people who are working hard won’t be poor. And it doesn’t seem to matter how many research reports we throw at the issue – we haven’t been able to build the necessary public support or political will for the policy solutions we want.
All of which suggests, we need a new way to talk about our goal. Poverty is too limited (by U.S. definition) and limiting (by U.S. public understanding) a notion and opens the door to opposing arguments in a big way.
Defining the problem as “poverty” sets up a losing scenario for policymaking. My crystal ball predicts competing proposals in any Congressional debate over the best way to cut poverty in half:
1) The Law to Halve Poverty Over Ten Years with good schools, universal pre-k, financial education, health coverage for all, expanded child care, increased minimum wage, unions; and
2) Making Poverty History Act with marriage and work.
Conservatives would demolish the first proposal because it goes far beyond the stated goal of raising income above the poverty line (about $20,000 for a family of 4. And the public won’t support such spending proposals because they believe people are poor due to personal failures -- not something they think government can, or should, address.
This debate would feel frustratingly familiar to anyone who followed the evolution of welfare legislation in the last decade. And the compromise would fall far short of the policy John Edwards supports -- if anything passed at all.
Progressives have lost the fight on the issues of poverty and “personal responsibility”.
It’s time to reset the goal as one of economic mobility and social inclusion. We shouldn’t blow this opportunity by sticking to an old – and failed – framework for this debate. The candidates will benefit greatly from developing an alternative lens on the issue, one designed to build broad support for better policy solutions.
Comments (2)
John Edwards did NOT talk very much or very convincingly about "poverty" or "the poor."
He talked about "the middle class." (has anyone else noticed that we no longer have a "working class?" We're all "Middle class" now)
His "protectionist" messages were also feel good/red-meat nonsence. The world is no longer going to pay Americans two or three times as much as they do someone in a developing country for doing the same thing. Manufacturing for all but a very few specialty products is never coming back. He did not have the guts to say this and the people he made feel better by pretending that things could be otherwise are NOT going to be helped by that obfuscation. And, I say this as a born and bred Detroiter.
THAT whole debate needs to change--our culture needs to change when it comes to our expectations about employment and life-long learning/retraining.
I am "middle class" in my education and used to be at the upper end of "middle class" in my occupation and income.
Over the past 5 years I have been impoverished by a chronic illness and the health insurance insanity in this country.
I spent many years making my middle class income working with very poor people and this unhealthy obsession with the "middle class" has always irritatted me.
Ideas of middle class entitlement have made this country the moral and ethical backwater of the developed world--
We are the SUV nation that ignores the meltdown of the planet and goes to war to obtain access to oilfields without regard for the predictable devastation... When we start having to pay less than half what Canada and the EU have for decades paid for gas, we are OUTRAGED...
We are country that sees poor children as unbearable burdens not resources to be cultivated...so we seriously entertain the fiction that the "answer" is to provide "tax breaks" and vouchers that people too poor to file income taxes will never be able to use.
We are a country that spends two to three times as much per captia on health care than does any other country yet is not concerned that most of the people that do the poorly paid drudge work that makes middle class life possible--the store clerks and restaurant workers and fruit pickers and food service workers and cleaning people, etc.. do NOT have access to that health care.
We are so busy nourishing the resentments of the fairly well off that we have lost all sense of proportion and every shred of commitment to the notion of a common weal.
I thought this long before my own economic devastation--30 years of hard work & prudent spending wiped out in 2 years by a chronic illness that might not kill me any time soon but which is never going to go away.
It can happen to anyone.
I've spent the past two years trying to navigate our non-existant safety net and have come closer to homelessness than I ever though possible. I've met a LOT of very poor people. Some of them did, indeed, make "bad choices." But MOST of them -- like most people who think themselves superior but who are really just luckier--really DO make the best decisions they can make given the options they have.
And, if we're going to use "bad choices" as our criterion for deciding whom we help and whom we don't, I have to say I have a real problem with bailing out people who bought houses they couldn't afford at mortgage rates they agreed in a legally binding contract would go up preciptously....Can we talk about "personal responsibility?"
February 17, 2008 10:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your comment.
Here's the thing to remember.
If you want policy that reaches people in poverty (and those people also struggling with income below the mid-point), don't try to get it with a call the "end poverty". This was Edwards' mistake - and the mistake of all who are asking for a "target" to cut domestic poverty.
Whether WE agree or not with how others react to the language of poverty is not the point.
We need a strategy to reach the unpersuaded along. These are the people who say we should act to reduce poverty, but think that the way to do it is increase work effort or marriages.
Many people understand that there are systemic reasons for poverty that government can address. But we haven’t (after 4 decades or so of trying) reached the kind of majority to create the political space for the policy results we propose.
We should have learned by now that speaking of poverty doesn't yield the policy results we want.
Science tells us that using new research and data won't help us persuade the unpersuaded - yet we keep using the same old methods. I'm tired of losing the policy battles. And ready to try something new.
We need a different way to start the conversation with people who aren't listening now, but could be with us pushing the decision makers to act.
Moreover, we should want MORE than an end to official poverty. We should call for a country where everyone participates in our economy, our democracy, and our civic life. This kind of participation requires good jobs and more. See here:
http://www.inclusionist.org/files/socialinclusionusa.pdf
February 18, 2008 9:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
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