Poverty in the United States and the Democratic 2008 Presidential Candidates

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Sat Apr-14-07 08:19 PM
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Poverty in the United States and the Democratic 2008 Presidential Candidates

When history judges us, as a nation and as individuals, it will ask: what did we do to end poverty? How we answer this call will forever define us as a nation � John Edwards

If I believed, as many do, that poverty in the United States is mainly caused by deficient character traits of individual poor people, rather than by the structure of society, then I wouldn�t think that it should be an important political issue. But I don�t believe that, and I DO think that poverty should be an important political issue in our country.

Children who are born into poverty have relatively limited access to a good education, as demonstrated by a study that showed that parental income predicts 80% of the variance in college entry exam scores. This facilitates a vicious cycle of poverty, whereby deficient educational attainment leads to low wage jobs and subsistence living. A related issue is the strong correlation between race and poverty. According to the 1999 U.S. census, 33% of black children lived in poverty, compared to 13.5% of white children.

Anti-union policies promulgated by government, which accelerated under Ronald Reagan and have broken modern records under the George W. Bush administration, play an important role in the creation and maintenance of poverty by keeping down wages and benefits for the working poor and middle class. For example, only 11% of union workers lack access to health care benefits, compared to three times that many non-union workers.

The widening income gap in our country itself facilitates poverty. I�m no economist, but common sense shows how a huge income gap can facilitate poverty. Take housing, for example. Many wealthy individuals in the U.S. today own not one, but several huge homes. This drives up the cost of housing to the point where many can�t afford to own a home, so that there were 3 million homeless people in our country as of 2002. How can huge wealth gaps NOT drive up the cost of housing? As long as a large pool of people are willing to spend several hundred thousand or millions of dollars for a home or several homes, what does that do to the incentives for builders to build affordable housing for low income families?

Many Americans, especially Republicans, say that the wealth gap is natural and good. They say that the wealth gap is the due mostly to the fact that the wealthy �create� wealth, and therefore they deserve to keep all the wealth they �create�. Thus, the average CEO, who makes 431 times the income of his average employee, makes that much money because he has �created� it. But that explanation doesn�t seem consistent with the fact that most CEOs get to determine their own salary. Do they carefully determine how much wealth they�ve created before deciding on their salary level � or do they make that decision based on other considerations? Nor does that explanation account for the fact that the wealthy have very disproportionate influence on the enactment of legislation in our country, which they utilize to enhance their wealth and power even further. For example, they utilize their political (i.e. economic) muscle to persuade legislators to relax restrictions on their �right� to pollute our environment in their quest for greater profits. Does that lead to the creation of wealth � or is its main effect the subtraction of wealth through the deterioration of our environment?

This is how one of our greatest Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, explained the causes and consequences of record breaking poverty in our country during the Great Depression:

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living-a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor-other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Current status and trends in poverty in the United States

The poverty rate in the United States declined during every year of the Clinton administration, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Following that decline to a rate that hadn�t been seen since the Carter administration, poverty steadily increased during the administration of George W. Bush. As of 2004 there were 37 million Americans in poverty, which was 12.7% of the U.S. population. Almost half of all Americans have experienced poverty for at least a year of their life by the time they�re 60 (and after 60 the poverty rate goes up substantially.) And most families living in poverty contain at least one working person.

Furthermore, the above noted figures, based on the �official� poverty line in the United States, substantially underestimate the poverty rate in the United States. Although the official bar for �poverty level� in the United States is $20,000 annual income for a family of four, the basic needs for a family that must pay for child care and health care is in the range of $30,000 to $40,000.

The politics of poverty in the United States

Despite its importance and the large numbers of people affected by it, poverty is almost a taboo subject in American politics today. An American politician can hardly talk about it without being accused of �class warfare�. And it is widely considered to be bad political strategy to talk about it.

Why? Because the poor, and those who consider themselves susceptible to poverty, have relatively little political clout. In contrast, the wealthy fuel the campaigns of Presidential (and other) candidates, with the result that most politicians feel dependent upon their campaign contributions. Consequently, time and again we find that policies which are favored by the good majority of American citizens do not get enacted into law. One of the best examples of that is universal health care, which has been consistently favored by a clear majority of American citizens, and yet has never been enacted into law.

There have been some great leaders who have dared to make the P word into a major political issue: I�ve already mentioned FDR�s thoughts on the matter; Lyndon Johnson declared a �War on Poverty� and devoted a large portion of his Presidency to fighting that war (though I believe that LBJ did great damage to our country by getting us involved in the Vietnam War, I have to give credit where it�s due); Martin Luther King spent the last years of his life fighting against poverty as much or more than he fought against racial bigotry and discrimination; and former Senator and Democratic Party nominee for President, George McGovern, has devoted much of his post-political life to fighting against world hunger.

Nevertheless, it is rare in today�s United States to hear major political figures talk about our poverty problem. And that is why I so much admire those politicians who have the courage and the decency to do that.

The positions of the Democratic 2008 candidates for President on poverty in the United States

I looked at the presidential campaign websites of the eight declared Democratic Presidential candidates in order to assess their views and intentions regarding poverty in our country. I didn�t assess this issue with regard to the two major undeclared candidates (Clark and Gore) because the absence of a comparable website made that a much more difficult task � although Clark did emphasize poverty during his 2004 campaign for President.

Of the eight declared candidates, most had something to say about education, jobs, and/or health care. The only one whose Presidential website had nothing to say about any of those issues was Clinton�s. I don�t know why that is, especially since her work on health care when she was First Lady certainly demonstrated a great deal of interest in that subject. Perhaps the explanation is that her front-runner status has led her to a high degree of political caution. On the one hand that is understandable. But on the other hand, how do we know that that political caution won�t continue if she is elected President? I�m in no mood for that kind of political caution at this time. But please point out to me if I�ve missed something or if you think I�ve been unfair to her about this.

Of the remaining seven declared Democratic candidates, I think it�s fair to say that Edwards and Kucinich deal with poverty issues to a far greater extent and in much more detail than any of the other candidates. Actually, Kucinich doesn�t exactly mention poverty directly, but he does extensively discuss a wide range of poverty related issues. Edwards, on the other hand, has explicitly described a plan for cutting poverty by a third within a decade and eliminating it within three decades.

I did not check out the websites of the Republican candidates on this issue because that would be like �. uhhhh �. That would be like looking for gold in a pile of cow manure.

Since Edwards and Kucinich are the only ones whose 08 Presidential websites discuss the problem in great detail, I�ll spend the rest of this post summarizing their plans for this issue.

The Edwards and Kucinich plans for dealing with poverty

Health care
Both Edwards and the Kucinich advocate universal health care coverage for all Americans. Kucinich specifically advocates a single payer (federal government) plan to accomplish this, while Edwards� plan works through collaboration with the states. But it is clear that Edwards is not talking about mere access to health insurance, as the introduction to his plan says �We have to stop using words like �access to health care� when we know with certainty that those words mean something less than universal care. Who are you willing to leave behind without the care he needs? �.�

Education
Both candidates would expand access to pre-school programs and invest more in public secondary education. Edwards would expand opportunity to attend college by providing free tuition in exchange for part time work, whereas Kucinich talks about making college more affordable by reversing limits on welfare for college students, for example by declaring home child care to be work activity. Edwards would create second chance schools for high school dropouts.

Jobs
Edwards says that all Americans who are able and willing to work should have the right to do so, and he would create jobs so that all Americans would have that right. Kucinich also speaks of creating jobs, and he is more specific about how he would do it, but doesn�t claim that he would be able to create jobs for all Americans willing to work. Edwards would also improve wages by strengthening labor laws so that all workers are able to form and join unions if they so desire, whereas Kucinich talks more generally about safeguarding workers� rights. Both candidates speak of the need to raise the federal minimum wage. Edwards promises a specific figure of $7.50 an hour, while Kucinich notes that voters would support a raise to $8.00 an hour. Kucinich would pull out of NAFTA and otherwise take aggressive steps to prevent American jobs from moving out of the country.

Housing
Edwards talks about expanding affordable housing by: Making the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) into a �force for economic opportunity�, which would include the issuance of a million housing vouchers to low income families; offering a tax credit to working families who are first time home buyers; and cracking down on predatory lending.

Corporate accountability
Kucinich offers a challenge to unbridled corporate power by stating that �Government at the state and federal levels must reclaim its rightful role as regulator in the public interest�� He would do this by regulating corporations to protect workers� rights and the environment, restoring fair competition, making corporations pay their fair share of taxes, and prosecuting corporate crime.

Taxes
Edwards would provide a new tax credit for low income working Americans of $500 per year. He would also expand the earned income tax credit (EITC) by $750 for single adults and eliminate the marriage penalty on the EITC. Kucinich�s discussion of taxes centers on the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. In order to help pay for the many social programs that he advocates, he would reverse all of the Bush tax cuts on those earning more than $405,000 per year, while maintaining for now current tax rates on those earning less than that amount.

Social Security
Kucinich would make safeguarding of the Social Security Trust Fund a top priority and would restore full retirement benefits beginning at age 65. He would add to the Trust Fund by increasing the interest rate paid to it by the U.S. Treasury, and he is dead set against privatizing Social Security.

Concluding thoughts

A recent editorial in The Nation, titled �Time to Act on Inequality�, dealt with this issue:

Might we hear the candidates address this national scandal and say concretely what they intend to do about it? Republicans, we know, will duck and dodge. But Democratic hopefuls are not exactly speaking out on inequality either. John Edwards is an admirable exception; he has declared unilaterally that income inequality is no longer a taboo subject?

Voters understand what's happening and they are overwhelmingly distressed, as the Pew Research Center's recent comprehensive polling confirmed. Some 73 percent of Americans agree with this statement: "Today it's really true that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer." More striking is the fact that two-thirds of affluent families (incomes of $75,000 and higher) agree.

I certainly agree with that assessment. It is long past due that politicians start speaking out on this issue and doing something about it. The huge levels of income inequality that we see today in the United States are not fair, are not consistent with the principles upon which our country was founded as enunciated in our Declaration of independence, are bad for democracy, and have their origins in bad and corrupt government policy that picked up steam during the �Reagan Revolution� of the 1980s and have reached record breaking and dangerous levels under George W. Bush.

I greatly admire John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich for speaking out on these issues. When strong leaders speak about things like this they gain new legitimacy in the eyes of the American public. John Edwards has shown that he is not afraid to speak directly to the American people about the grave problem of poverty in our country. Dennis Kucinich has shown that he is not afraid to challenge the virulent abuses of corporate power that we have seen, nor is he afraid to state outright that he will reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Other declared Democratic candidates have been much more cautious about what they say about these issues. I am very tired of all the caution shown by Democrats in recent years and months. I believe that most Americans are also tired of that, and that they will respond well to the kind of direct talk characteristic of John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich.