Mark Winston Griffith
Mid Term Election Survey: How to talk about Poverty
Earlier this week, John Edwards, who will undoubtedly run for President in 2008, called for "eliminating poverty within 30 years by enhancing savings, raising the minimum wage, giving people more access to education, housing and jobs and cracking down on abuses".
That's a pretty tall order and as we head into the elections next week it's a stark reminder of what is decidedly not on the national agenda.
As Edwards himself pointed out in his speech at the Western New York Poverty Symposium, it's a "national disgrace" that the federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour. Not that a higher minimum wage will by itself turn around poverty, but the breakdown in efforts to raise it is a clear sign how the federal government is tone deaf to the demands for structural balance in our economy. Edwards gets extra points for denouncing abusive and predatory financial services and raising this issue to the level of a national priority.
In starker political terms Edward's message boils down to: "It's the economy, stupid. Make it easier for working families to build wealth and make it more difficult for corporations to exploit us."
The trick going forward is to talk about poverty and the redistribution of wealth in a way that is fresh, compelling and can't be so easily mischaracterized or derailed by conservatives.
As the author of this blog, I want to ask you, gentle reader, what are your thoughts? What do you think is a winning formula for framing the dismantling of poverty?
Posted at 9:41 AM, Nov 03, 2006 in Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Comments
The United States is built around a myth of opportunity and social mobility. Since there is an ample body of research showing that in fact, poor Americans are likelier to stay poor than poor Germans, poor Frenchmen, poor Canadians, and poor Swedes, it's possible that playing income-immobility statistics up will help politically.
From a policy viewpoint, I know a lot less. I know what the US is doing differently from all the countries that have 20 fewer points on their Gini indices and 30 fewer points on their intergenerational income regression coefficients. But these countries aren't monolithic; they all have functional welfare systems, but the actual implementations of welfare are very variable.
Posted by: Alon Levy | November 5, 2006 03:47 PM