Poverty in America: Hope for the future

In my prior posts, the stories I have shared with you from my recent tour of the U.S. bring you up against the realities of the new Gilded Age. They’re the stories of the have-nots in an era in which we glamorize and fetishize the world of the haves.

They are stories that demand a moral response in the same way that 100 years ago, when Jacob Riis spoke about the slums of New York, Progressive Era politicians were goaded into a political response to raise wages, to regulate working hours, and to improve living conditions. In the same way that in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression and millions of people being laid off we had to intervene with creative political thinking. In the same ways in the 1960s the War on Poverty intervened with creative thinking, so today we have a moral obligation to intervene against poverty.

I believe with the political will and political imagination poverty in the U.S. is not just something that we must grapple with but it’s something that we’re eminently capable as a society at dealing with.

We’re not doing it very well at the federal level – we’re not doing very much at all. D.C. is a very stalemate environment. But if you go out into cities and states there’s some extraordinarily creative policymaking going on.

NYC Rally To Raise The Minimum Wage
Herald Square, Manhattan, 24th October 2013

Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Jose,  and Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, have passed higher minimum wages. In 2014, Seattle and San Francisco passed a $15 an hour minimum wage. That’s important and it grows out of the living wage movement that fast food workers and supermarket workers have been fighting for over the past several years. These are movements for jobs with dignity that say “If you work 40 hours a week you should have enough money to feed your family and to provide medical care for your family when your kids get sick, and there’s absolutely no reason on earth you should be on a food line two weeks into the month.”

And city after city is responding to this: New York City, San Diego, Los Angeles, and, again, Chicago are considering passing higher minimum wage laws. A bill was introduced here in Pennsylvania to raise the minimum wage, and your new governor campaigned on a promise to support a higher minimum wage in PA, a promise that he’s sticking to.

A movement towards what works… for all

In New York City there’s been a move towards universal pre-school. We know if we educate children those kids have a better chance in life, so many of America’s big cities are now pushing for universal pre-school access.

We know that if you invest in distressed neighborhoods – in better housing and in job training, not just with public money but with private money – that the end result is a workforce that is more economically vibrant. We know that if we make higher education more affordable that more people will get a university degree and we know that that’s a good thing both in and of itself (because education is a good thing) but also economically because college graduates have access to better-paying jobs.

We know that the food stamps program works. It’s one of the most effective parts of the social safety net. Why not also expand food stamps into programs like gas stamps? If you’re living in a rural area and you’re driving 50 miles each way to a minimum wage job (which many people I interviewed were), if gas spikes by a dollar a gallon suddenly you’re out $30 or $40 a week. If you’re only earning $300 a week there is no way you can afford that. So why not create a subsidized gas stamps program? It’s affordable and easy to implement.

How will you raise the money for it? Many different ways. We could create things like a financial transaction tax. Every single day billions and billions of financial trades occur, most of them none of us are aware of – it’s computers trading with computers. A tiny, tiny, tiny tax – no more than .25% – because of the volume raises billions and billions of dollars.

Why not create that tax and invest it in anti-poverty initiatives? Why not do what many countries like Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden and other countries did during the onset of the recession and create public works funds? That way, instead of cascading unemployment during downturns, we have money available to prop up labor markets and keep people employed.

These ideas are out there – not just in my book and various other books, but at the policy level. They’re being talked about at a community level.

What is needed now is the energy to draw all of those strands together so that instead of it being one attempt here and another attempt here, instead of it being a half-hearted series of half-hearted initiatives, let’s give this the central moral position that it so urgently merits in 21^st Century America.

I do think that we’re at a turning point. After years of it being essentially taboo to talk about poverty, over the last few years it has become a central imperative. Across the political spectrum people are now talking about poverty and talking about inequality.

My hope is that over the next few years that conversation picks up pace and I know that with the work that Just Harvest and many, many groups around the country are doing on this issue that advocates will not let the ball be dropped on this. This is too important in issue.

Michael Harrington – the author of The Other America: Poverty in the United States, the inspiration for my books – had said “if in 50 years poverty still exists in America, someone else will have to write the book.” My sincerest hope is that 50 years from now, there will be absolutely no need to write another book on American poverty.