NEW REPORT - From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half

[Sapphire Blue]

Taking on Poverty
Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Rangel Join CAP at Event to Release the Task Force on Poverty’s New Report
April 25, 2007

Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Charles Rangel spoke at the Center for American Progress today at an event highlighting the release of “ From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half,” a report by the Center’s Task Force on Poverty that outlines a strategy for cutting poverty in half in the next 10 years.

“The goal to cut poverty in half over the next {10} years is not an overly ambitious task when you look at what other industrialized countries are doing,” Kennedy said. Pointing to the minimum wage, he showed how Great Britain and Ireland have achieved great results in reducing poverty as a direct result of raising their minimum wages to $9.78/hr and $9.60/hr respectively.

In the United States, Kennedy said, “education and health care have an enormous resonance ... we have to tie those into poverty.” This means increasing funding for each of these policy areas. The 2.5 billion dollars a week being spent on the war in Iraq, Kennedy said, may be causing some barriers to progress in the areas that affect poverty.

Rep. Rangel, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, also spoke passionately about the goals laid out in CAP’s poverty report. “I came to the conclusion that poverty is a threat to national security,” Rangel said. “Poverty is expensive, poverty causes {such national disasters as} Katrina.”

“With the exception of getting the hell out of the Middle East, I can’t think of anything more patriotic that Americans can do than to eliminate poverty,” he said. This is why we need to fund poverty reduction with the same vigor with which we are funding the Iraq war, the congressman said.

(snip)

Blackwell explained that the Task Force was established when Hurricane Katrina forced Americans to face the socio-economic injustices persistent in this country. “From Poverty to Prosperity” lays out a viable strategy, said Blackwell, because it introduces a multi-faceted approach in order to address the multi-faceted nature of poverty. The report, she said, calls for both personal and social responsibility, and urges that action be taken at the local, state, and national levels.

Continued @ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/poverty_event.html

From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half
By The Center for American Progress Task Force on Poverty
April 25, 2007

Read the full report (PDF): http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/pdf/poverty_report.pdf

Executive Summary (PDF): http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/pdf/poverty_execsum_web.pdf

Research Model (PDF): http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/pdf/poverty_report_research_methods.pdf

Watch Task Force members discuss the report: http://www.americanprogress.org/projects/poverty/video.html

Thirty-seven million Americans live below the official poverty line. Millions more struggle each month to pay for basic necessities, or run out of savings when they lose their jobs or face health emergencies. Poverty imposes enormous costs on society. The lost potential of children raised in poor households, the lower productivity and earnings of poor adults, the poor health, increased crime, and broken neighborhoods all hurt our nation. Persistent childhood poverty is estimated to cost our nation $500 billion each year, or about four percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. In a world of increasing global competition, we cannot afford to squander these human resources.

The Center for American Progress last year convened a diverse group of national experts and leaders to examine the causes and consequences of poverty in America and make recommendations for national action. In this report, our Task Force on Poverty calls for a national goal of cutting poverty in half in the next 10 years and proposes a strategy to reach the goal.

Our nation has seen periods of dramatic poverty reduction at times when near-full employment was combined with sound federal and state policies, motivated individual initiative, supportive civic involvement, and sustained national commitment. In the last six years, however, our nation has moved in the opposite direction. The number of poor Americans has grown by five million, while inequality has reached historic high levels.

Consider the following facts:

One in eight Americans now lives in poverty. A family of four is considered poor if the family’s income is below $19,971—a bar far below what most people believe a family needs to get by. Still, using this measure, 12.6 percent of all Americans were poor in 2005, and more than 90 million people (31 percent of all Americans) had incomes below 200 percent of federal poverty thresholds.

Millions of Americans will spend at least one year in poverty at some point in their lives. One third of all Americans will experience poverty within a 13-year period. In that period, one in 10 Americans are poor for most of the time, and one in 20 are poor for 10 or more years.

Poverty in the United States is far higher than in many other developed nations. At the turn of the 21st century, the United States ranked 24th among 25 countries when measuring the share of the population below 50 percent of median income.

Inequality has reached record highs. The richest 1 percent of Americans in 2005 held the largest share of the nation’s income (19 percent) since 1929. At the same time, the poorest 20 percent of Americans held only 3.4 percent of the nation’s income.

It does not have to be this way. Our nation need not tolerate persistent poverty alongside great wealth.

The United States should set a national goal of cutting poverty in half over the next 10 years...


Please read the rest @ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/poverty_report.html

Transformational Change For America And The World - JOHN EDWARDS 08

"I'm proposing we set a national goal of eliminating poverty in the next 30 years." - JOHN EDWARDS 08

Silence is Betrayal - JOHN EDWARDS 08

[aquart]

1. Is good-paying jobs creation somewhere in this?

Is penalizing outsourcing somewhere in this?

[ProgressiveEconomist]

3. Think of the TRILLIONS in Social Security Trust Fund money Republicans

have transferred to "tax cuts" for the top few percent of the income distribution over the last 25 years, and the millions of jobs that money could have created if invested in economically-depressed areas. Reagan and his "Social Security Reform Commission" Chairman Alan Greenspan engineered a 25 percent hike in FICA to finance a two-thirds reduction in the highest marginal income tax rate.

When Dubya came on the scene, Bill Clinton had staunched the bleeding of the last positive years of FICA cash flow to the super-rich. But Dubya used a political machete to open it up wide again.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other Democrats who were on the Reagan SS Commission are responsible for this situation. They suggested, but did not insist upon, a Social Security Trust Fund that could not be used for any purpose other than paying SS benefits, and would have had to have been invested by impartial experts in real assets. Had such a fund been established, just think of the trillions of dollars in investments that could have been steered to Detroit and other scenes of massive disinvestment over the past few decades.

Even now, it's still not too late to force Congress to turn SS IOUs into a real-investment Trust Fund. During the administration of Dubya's successor, or at the latest during the presidential term after that, the FICA cash flow will turn negative, and simply stealing FICA money and giving it to the rich without gypping current beneficiares no longer will be possible.

And it's still not too late for aware Democrats to insist that State pension boards devote some portion of their funds to the "ETIs" (Google "economically targeted investments") Greenspan despised, despite the lack of any credible evidence that they provided any smaller returns than other investments. A few State funds already are doing this, but there are many opportunities for investing in depressed areas in EVERY state.

[waiting for hope]

2. Always happy to give

a little K&R!

Thanks for posting! Hope you are doing well. O8)

[Sapphire Blue]

4. Thank you, waiting for hope!

:hi: The CAP Task Force seems to be on much the same track as John Edwards, don't you think?


(I'm doing okay today; thanks for asking.)

[waiting for hope]

7. Did you see how many

of their staff worked for the Kerry-Edwards 2004 campaign?

http://www.americanprogress.org/publicsearch?text=Edwards

I wonder if they will come out and support Edwards?

:hi:

[Sapphire Blue]

8. No, I hadn't seen that, but it doesn't surprise me at all!

I'm hoping that they will encourage all of the candidates to address the issue of poverty, just as Edwards already does. 37 million plus people are entirely too many people to continue to ignore. Come on Dems, follow John Edwards lead!

[NorthernSpy]

5. the ONLY effective anti-poverty measures are good industrial jobs & well-designed direct-benefits...

... like Social Security (which dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly, an achievement that those idiotic "War on Poverty" programs never came close to matching). Nothing else has worked.

Anti-poverty programs that claim to help the poor by hiring legions of social workers do not actually help the poor. The real beneficiaries are the social workers themselves, and the humans services bureaucrats who manage the programs.

Funding for education does not really reduce poverty, either. Education can help the social mobility of individuals (which is great), but it won't change the macroeconomic causes of poverty for the working class as a whole. An anti-poverty program that focuses on hiring more teachers and school administrators is a program that primarily aids teachers and administrators, while having little effect on the prevalence of poverty either now or in the future.

[pitohui]

9. while this is true, creating some jobs is better than creating no jobs

i don't think we're going to see any big re-investment in infrastructure or manufacturing real soon, so creating some jobs for social workers and teachers will at least employ a few people and keep them out of poverty

agreed -- it doesn't address the larger issue or the fact that there are really now more people w. degrees than jobs that require degrees, so getting an education can be a VERY expensive gamble but i guess if a person has the aptitude and personality for it then they can get in on the education racket themselves and help their own family if not the greater good

[Nutmegger]

6. This post needs some good 'ol DU R&K love.

:kick::loveya::kick::loveya::kick::loveya::kick:

[Sapphire Blue]

11. ..

:hi: :loveya:

[Czolgosz]

10. K & R