Today’s Good News: America DOES Have Anti-Poverty Plan
Recently I told you about Canada’s ambitious plans to reduce poverty. Come to find out, there are SOME Americans kicking around some ideas too, however quietly. I stumbled across this campaign called “Half in Ten,” aiming to cut poverty in half in ten years. It was spearheaded recently by John Edwards and also involves ACORN, the Center for American Progress, the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, and the Coalition on Human Needs. With little fanfare, CAP released a strategy report last year called “From Poverty to Prosperity.” It has a lot of the same ideas that Demos has been putting forth. While I don’t see any poor people named in these ideas and plans, they are good ones.
CAP lists four principles and 12 steps:
- Promote Decent Work.
- Provide Opportunity for All.
- Ensure Economic Security.
- Help People Build Wealth.
The 12 steps:
- Raise and index the minimum wage.
- Expand EITC.
- Enact the EFCA.
- Child-care assistance and early childhood education.
- Housing vouchers and fair urban development.
- Expand youth programs.
- Make college more affordable.
- Help ex-offenders.
- Give unemployment benefits to low wage workers.
- Expand food stamps and modernize similar means-tested programs.
- Reduce the high cost of being poor
What they don’t talk about, of course, is how to build political will to make these changes. That’s the hard part, especially since giving all these goodies to poor people means that rich and/or middle-class people will have to give something up.
The economy is tanking and the rich are plundering the government more and faster than ever before. Yet politicians aren’t talking about real change. I can only hope the people at CAP, ACORN, etc., who are no doubt well-intentioned, will look in the mirror and ask themselves what political change they are really willing to fight for. And I hope that the poor themselves will start feeling they have nothing to lose by fighting, and fighting for allies.
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Umm, you should probably know that ACORN was the driving force behind all of the minimum wage raises on the city and state levels and more than any other organization created the political will for the Congress to raise it nationally last year.
I think they know what they are fighting for and how to make it happen. Part of that is an unprecedented voter registration drive this year that will assist 1.5 million folks in filling out VR cards. This is the biggest non-partisan effort in the history of the United States. Believe me, they know how to win.
http://www.acorn.org