Now, Congressional Republicans are trying to make it even harder for the frailest, poorest, and most vulnerable Americans to access food assistance. They seek to impose harsh new work requirements that will force some of the most marginalized Americans to run a convoluted labyrinth of wage and hour verification paperwork over and over again.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

It is a transparently cynical move to chop the program and take food from people who are hungry. Even those who do everything the system demands will be denied assistance—and I am absolutely certain of this, because it almost happened to me.

A few years ago, I was sick and getting sicker. I was not yet sick enough for surgery but far too sick to work.

I have Crohn’s, a chronic, incurable inflammatory bowel disease that causes my immune system to shred portions of my own small intestine. On a certain level, it’s a simple plumbing problem: the small intestine is like a long flexible pipe that brings food from the stomach to the large intestine, winding and twisting back and forth in the abdomen. When scar tissue builds up, it constricts the pipe, making it too narrow for most foods to get through. And then the pipe can clog.

Those clogs are called “small bowel obstructions” and, unlike a backed-up sink, they’re a potentially life-threatening medical emergency. I’ve experienced the special hell of having a tube shoved up my nose, down my throat, through my stomach and into my small intestine. I’ve watched as that tube sucked small bits of almond out through my nose. And, with some of the finest professors of surgery Harvard Medical School has to offer, I’ve discussed the odds that I’d live through emergency surgery if suction didn’t work.

After the almond incident, my physicians prescribed a strict low-residue and low-FODMAP diet. I was highly motivated to adhere to it; I understood the stakes. But as I got sicker and became unable to work, I could barely afford any food, never mind the diet my physicians prescribed. I didn’t have any income. So I applied for SNAP.

First, I faced an extensive application. But, more importantly, I was told that a face-to-face interview was required, and that the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), the state agency charged with administering SNAP, scheduled the interview on their timetable. As an applicant, you showed up when they told you, where they told you—or no food for you.

My life at this point consisted of debilitating symptoms: constant diarrhea, severe abdominal pain, nausea that even powerful prescription anti-emetics barely controlled, anemia, arthritis, and crippling fatigue. But despite my failing health, I had not been declared disabled by any government agency.

Under the current SNAP eligibility rules, an “Able-Bodied Adult Without Dependents” (ABAWD) between the ages of 18 and 49 can only receive 3 months of SNAP benefits in any 3-year period if they do not meet the existing SNAP work requirements. Yes, there are already work requirements for SNAP, but Congressional Republicans are pushing for still more draconian rules. They assure us that just as disabled folks are supposed to be exempt under the current rules—an exemption that has proven elusive—they will be exempt under the new regulations, too.

However, proving disability to the government is exceedingly difficult. First, it virtually requires ongoing, meaningful, affordable access to comprehensive medical care. Without medical records, government agencies are loathe to find an applicant disabled. (Yet, conservatives are also working to roll back access to health care at every turn, including by imposing work requirements on Medicaid, making care even more of a challenge to obtain.) Proving disability also often requires the cooperation of overworked health care providers in completing legal forms they’re not trained to deal with. Doctors are taught to diagnose and treat, not judge someone’s capacity to work against specific, highly technical legal criteria. And it means a lot of work for the applicant—work they may be too sick to do.

When I was eventually healthy enough to apply for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), it took dozens of hours of work from me to gather, review, and collate my voluminous medical records (over 500 pages). It took even more time to complete the application forms Social Security sent me. I approached the work and writing that formed the basis of my SSI application like it was an appellate case before the Massachusetts Supreme Court. In total, just applying for SSI took me more than two months of working whenever I was medically able. I was fortunate enough to get approved for SSI at the initial application stage. Many people my age don’t.

Because I was so sick, I asked DTA to conduct the interview for my SNAP application via telephone. I also asked that the call be in the afternoon because my symptoms were a bit more manageable then. As an attorney, I had the benefit of knowing that the Code of Massachusetts Regulations, part of the law that governs SNAP applications, required that DTA grant my request. But DTA didn’t reply—or at least, I thought they didn’t reply.

Despite giving DTA my full, complete, and correct address, that’s not where they were sending letters. They failed to include my apartment number on the mail they sent me. (As if I lived in a house, when I couldn’t even make the rent on my half of a tiny one-bedroom apartment.) DTA screwed up, I never got their mail, and I wasn’t receiving SNAP.

I called my DTA caseworker, just as I was supposed to do. I would call and then wait on hold for 30 to 45 minutes. An operator would then answer, and transfer me to a voice mailbox. (I wasn’t given the option of directly dialing the extension.) If the voice mailbox wasn’t full, I would leave a message. If it was full, which was usually the case, I would have to start over. After another 30 to 45 minutes on hold, I’d ask the operator for a different case worker, and leave that person a message. I repeated this process daily.

While waiting for DTA to return my many messages, I could never, ever allow the phone to go unanswered—they simply wouldn’t try calling again. No matter how sick I was, no matter if I was vomiting or toileting or running a 103° fever, if I missed a phone call from DTA, during my next interaction with them, they’d accuse me of “non-compliance.”*

Usually the person returning my desperate messages was someone who didn’t “know the file” and whose only reply to my desperate questions like “What do I need to do in order to schedule the formal interview?” was “Sorry, can’t help.” I was slipping through the cracks.

Because I am a lawyer, I knew that if I could somehow hang on long enough, I could eventually get my case before an administrative law judge. And, because I am a lawyer, I knew how to keep a log of every single SNAP related phone call I had in a way that a judge would understand and likely find credible. I knew which conversations I was legally allowed to record, and which I wasn’t. I knew what was important to include in the notes I took during every call. Or I did sometimes. Other times the pain, the fatigue, and the brain fog from the methotrexate—a chemo drug used to treat autoimmune diseases—was too much and I couldn’t think straight. I could only hope they didn’t call then.

And then one day, after weeks of waiting and dozens of hours spent trying to fight my way through the red tape, I finally got a piece of mail from DTA. I opened the letter outside. It was summer, and I wasn’t supposed to be in the sun because of one of the medications I was on. They denied my application because I didn’t attend the “in-person interview.” I sat in the street and cried—and I wasn’t supposed to cry, either. After choking down homemade oral rehydration solution, I got to work on this:

What you’ve just read is, essentially, a legal complaint and a motion for a hearing before an administrative law judge. Although the letter is just two pages, dozens of hours of research went into drafting it. Not to mention four years of college, two years of public health graduate school, and three years of law school that enabled me to research the pertinent state and federal statutes and regulations, as well as find and analyze all the relevant legal rulings. In response, DTA reversed the denial and awarded benefits retroactive to the date of my SNAP application. The entire process had taken 10 weeks.

My question for Congressional Republicans is this: Could you—while in constant pain, malnourished, dehydrated, and terrified of eating the wrong thing because it could kill you—have done better? Adding more punishing work requirements for nutritional assistance will harm some of your most vulnerable constituents.

In the wealthiest country in the world, you shouldn’t need to be a lawyer to get a little help with food.

* Editor’s note: A DTA spokesperson says that subsequent to the author’s applying for benefits, the agency has made numerous “reforms,” including: a “simplified SNAP application,” a mobile app for smart phones, a web-based portal for clients “to self-service and view their information,” and allowing any available caseworker to assist an applicant.

Apply Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson’s latest plan and you’ll see just how brainless public housing policy could become.

Last week, Carson unveiled a plan that would, among other things, triple the minimum rent for the poorest public housing residents—from $50 to $150. The change would affect an estimated 1.7 million people, 1 million of whom are children.

His prediction is that higher rents will encourage tenants to earn more money.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

“Instead of [public housing] being a stepladder it’s become a mode of life and, in many cases, for generation after generation of individuals and I don’t think it’s their fault,” Carson told the conservative online news outlet Townhall. “I think it’s the fault of the system that has basically sapped the incentive for people to work.”

There’s no doubt that HUD needs fixing. Less than a quarter of families who qualify for housing assistance actually get it.

But Carson misdiagnoses the problem when he pretends that public housing residents don’t work. Many do, just at jobs that pay too little to make ends meet.

The system that truly needs an overhaul is the American economy, which operates on the labor of millions of low-wage workers who earn too little to keep a roof over their heads without help.

“Rent Is Affordable to Low-Wage Workers in Exactly 12 U.S. Counties,” blared the headline on a 2017 CityLab story that detailed the glum findings of a National Low Income Housing Coalition study. To afford the average one-bedroom rental home, a minimum-wage worker would need to put in 94.5 hours a week, every week. Imagine working from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. seven days a week, 52 weeks a year to afford your one-bedroom—and you’ll understand just how cruel and clueless the former brain surgeon’s plan to make housing even less affordable for struggling families is. Carson proposes that public housing residents pay either 35 percent of their gross income, or 35 percent of their income from working 15 hours per week at minimum wage—whichever is the higher amount.

“This is a particularly good time because the economy’s improved quite a bit, there are a lot of jobs now,” Carson has said—as though the line between a job and economic independence was straight and true.

It is not, as anyone who’s dealt with low-wage work—not to mention unpredictable scheduling, irregular hours, or wage theft—can attest.

Carson seems to have confused the quantity of jobs with the quality of jobs. In fact, 6 of the 10 occupations that will add the most jobs between 2016 and 2026 pay less than $30,000 per year. Number one on that list—personal care aides—accounts for more than 777,000 new jobs, but at a median pay of just $23,100 a year.

But back to the impracticality of Carson’s plan. Earning that additional $100 in monthly rent will take about 14 hours of minimum wage labor. (Of course, if the federal minimum wage were $15 an hour, as advocated by the Fight for $15 movement and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival, that drops to less than seven additional hours of work per month.)

And that assumes the public housing resident can get more hours at her current job. Or that she can find another job—and has transportation to get there. In cities like Memphis, where I live, the public transportation system is pitifully inefficient. It’s a two-hour bus ride from my neighborhood to the retailer IKEA, which pays a living wage.

Then, assume that the worker can find child care for these additional hours she’s working—and that she can afford to pay for it and the rent increase.

In an April 10 USA Today op-ed, Carson conceded that the housing discrimination Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fought—and that the 1968 Fair Housing Act was designed to correct—persists. But while he lauds King, he ignores what King said.

“We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished,” King told the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967.

The solution to poverty?

Money. If you have more money, you’re not poor. (It really is that simple.)

Since most people make money through their jobs, the cure to the sickness of poverty isn’t higher rents for the families struggling hardest to make ends meet.

The cure is a sizable increase in the federal minimum wage, which remains at $7.25 an hour.

Again, King’s words are instructive: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

“If you’re well off, great, if you’re not—too bad,” he said.

McGovern is right. The congressional GOP tax bill, which is expected to win final approval today, is effectively a bid to weed out people struggling to make ends meet. It could have dire consequences for the social safety net—and for the 70 percent of us who will turn to a means-tested program like Medicaid or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at some point in our lives. And it could impact millions who expect to rely later in life on Medicare and Social Security.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Think of it as a two-step project. A deficit-exploding tax giveaway to the very wealthiest corporations and individuals is step one. You cannot invest in the strategies that have been proven to help lift families out of poverty—we’ll get back to that in a moment—without adequate revenues. Not only will revenues take a hit at the federal level, but it’s expected that local and state governments will roll back investments in necessities like schools, drug treatment centers, pensions and more to lessen the tax burden on residents who will no longer be able to take the same federal tax deduction on property, state, and local income taxes.

Then, by adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit, the tax plan sets in motion the second step: in the name of deficit reduction, congressional Republicans will move to cut the programs that help Americans experiencing financial hardship have at least some shot at affording basic necessities like food, housing, health care, education, and a little dignity in our later years. Indeed, according to The Hill, House Speaker Paul Ryan intends to fast-track so-called “welfare reform” in 2018, in a bid to push it through with a simple majority. President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order reflecting similar priorities.

The skids for these cuts have been greased by decades of lies about anti-poverty programs and their effectiveness. Conservatives usually refer to cutting the safety net as an attempt to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse,” or end a “culture of dependence”—but in reality it’s simply looking squarely at our neighbors, demonizing them, and then turning our backs. The only thing missing is a spit in the eye for emphasis. The underlying problem is that Americans often buy into conservative rhetoric about “welfare” and an all too often complicit media. A long history of racially coded language has painted people with low incomes as undeserving of assistance, and there is a persistent lack of education about what our safety net is, and who it benefits. How many Americans know that more than 1 in 2 of us will experience at least a year of poverty or near-poverty during our working years?

While conservatives say that people are living off their food stamps, few Americans know that the average benefit is $1.40 per person, per meal. The notion of supporting a family on that is absurd. The public also envisions extensive subsidized housing—it has no idea that only 1 in 4 families that qualify for federal rental assistance actually receive it, and that their average income is approximately $12,500 per year. They think people are getting “free cash,” but cash assistance (TANF) only goes to 23 of every 100 families in poverty nationwide, and the program is virtually nonexistent in many states.  (It’s little surprise that a gutted TANF “block grant” is the model for what congressional Republicans would like to do with nutrition assistance, Medicaid, housing, and more—watch it lose value with inflation over the years, and watch fewer and fewer people receive it.)

It also doesn’t matter a whit to conservatives what the evidence says about the kinds of things that make a difference in people’s lives. It doesn’t seem to matter that our antipoverty programs cut poverty in half—that poverty would have been as high as nearly 30 percent in recent years without them; or that girls who had access to food stamps (SNAP) saw increases in their economic self-sufficiency as adults—including less welfare participation—compared to their disadvantaged peers who didn’t have access; or that a little assistance for children up to age 5 is associated with boosted educational performance, and increased work and earnings as adults; or that children under 13 who were able to use a housing voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood were 32 percent more likely to attend college and earned 31 percent more annually as young adults, compared to their peers in families that didn’t receive a voucher.  Or even that expansion of Medicaid eligibility has reduced infant mortality and childhood deaths, and that children eligible for Medicaid are more likely to go on to graduate college.

You’d think some of these data would make an impression on Speaker Ryan, who is constantly clambering about the need for evidence. The fact is he simply doesn’t like the evidence he sees. When he wrote a report on the “War on Poverty” in 2014, concluding that our antipoverty investments have failed, numerous academics came forward to say that he had misrepresented their work; apparently that was the only way Ryan could support his fictitious thesis.

Ironically, despite Ryan and his conservative brethren’s concern with “dependence” on government assistance, rewarding work just doesn’t seem to register as a key antipoverty strategy. In the late 1960s, the minimum wage was enough for a full-time worker to lift a family of three out of poverty—now that same family is about $5,000 below the poverty line. But Republican leaders vote against raising the minimum wage every chance they get. (Ryan himself has voted against raising it at least 10 times since he’s been in office.) The Trump administration is also making it harder for low-wage workers to unionize, collectively bargain, enforce labor standards, or even collect the tips they receive to supplement their $2.13 an hour tipped minimum wage.

In the coming months, the fight against conservative proposals that target struggling Americans should transcend the specifics of the policy debate, much as the electoral contest between Doug Jones and Roy Moore transcended the candidates. This is a fight about who we are as a nation, and who we want to be; whether we are comfortable treating people as disposable, or whether we invest in human potential and dignity; and whether we’ll accept conservative charlatans as serious leaders on decisions that have such high stakes. All of the evidence suggests we should reject them.

This article was produced in partnership with The Nation.

If Lucy lived in New York, where I was born and now live, she would have access to health care. But her home state of Georgia had the second-highest percentage of uninsured residents in the country and did not plan to utilize the Medicaid expansion subsidized through the Affordable Care Act. As the summer of 2012 came to an end, she had difficulty getting her children signed up for Georgia’s Medicaid program and could not afford to pay for the immunizations required to enroll them in school. Adding to this, Tiffany, her eleven-year-old daughter, had a severe case of asthma, so Lucy placed a moratorium on all outdoor play. When Tiffany protested, Lucy regretfully explained, “You can’t go outside and play now, I don’t have Medicaid… if something happens and you have an asthma attack, I don’t have the medicine to give you.”

Lucy’s narrative is not unique. I have interviewed many Medicaid beneficiaries who recounted similar struggles. The details differ but the theme is clear: for Americans who live in poverty, the public benefits available to them are contingent on where they live. Your state legislature determines whether your kids are left without braces, whether your third degree burns remain untreated, and whether your illnesses go undiagnosed.

This is not an accident. Rather, it is a direct product of our nation’s enduring commitment to federalism, a political system that divides power between the national government and subnational entities, giving states and localities significant discretion in shaping policy outcomes.

Consider the perspective of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, whose silver-bullet solution to poverty is to “consolidate many of our federal poverty programs into flexible programs that go to our states to customize a welfare benefit for a person’s particular need.” Ryan’s ideas are widely shared. When conservatives recently gathered in South Carolina for a forum on poverty, their devotion to increasing the power of states was on high display. Common proposals involved converting Medicaid and SNAP into block grants, which give states broad flexibility to design and distribute public assistance programs—with little oversight. While conservatives reason that states could leverage this increased control to tailor anti-poverty policies to the needs of local populations, evidence suggests that such grants are harbingers of retrenchment: dramatically decreasing the resources directed to the most needy and removing any guarantee of aid.

In addition to promoting harmful budget cuts, block grants are simply unnecessary. States already have plenty of power over anti-poverty programs like TANF and Medicaid and, in some cases, an infamous proclivity for misusing it. States decide whether to offer certain medical services to the needy, like dental benefits and eye care. They set income caps for various forms of assistance. They choose how often beneficiaries need to re-enroll, how burdensome application processes will be, and much, much more.

What it means to be poor in Mississippi is very different in Maryland and starkly divergent from Maine. It is clear that, in the realm of poverty, states already dominate. And to what end? There is scant evidence that local control is an effective way of alleviating poverty. Instead, research demonstrates that it undermines racial and gender equality and exacerbates geographic disparities. In short, unbridled federalism takes us down an inegalatarian path.

But perhaps most troubling, such a road leads us away from a robust democracy.

For Lucy, the first word that came to mind when I asked her about politics was, “dirty.” After nearly an hour of discussing how sharply Medicaid differed across states, I asked her if she thought this was at all connected to the political system. She deftly declared:

“Instead of sitting up high and looking low, they sit high and look higher… I don’t even know who my politician is, I don’t know who half of who the higher-ups are because they don’t branch out, they don’t make themselves known. …To us, sitting down here looking at those up there, it’s like our voice, what is my little voice going to do?”

Political scientists have already shown that citizens’ experiences with the government have profound consequences for democracy. When states use their considerable authority to retract services or limit benefits, struggling Americans’ views of government are negatively affected, and they exhibit decreased willingness to engage in politics. In particular, when individuals who bear the brunt of harmful state policy decisions become aware of geographic inequities in assistance, they can begin to view the political system as arbitrary and unfair. For instance, after John, a chronically ill Medicaid beneficiary from Michigan, discovered that he could not move with his family to Arizona without risking the loss of life sustaining treatment, he began to see the government as an oppressive force in his life. Similarly, when Terrie’s grandmother visited from out-of-town and Medicaid refused to cover her prescriptions, Terrie wondered, “what kind of government” would punish you for crossing state lines? People like John, Terrie and Lucy do not experience social policy in a vacuum, but rather within a multi-tiered political system.

Devolving power to states serves many purposes and can sometimes be quite beneficial. But when it comes to anti-poverty policy, federalism has too often been used to harm those who are most vulnerable. Policymakers must take care to limit those harms and ensure that they do not imperil democratic citizenship.

State residence is a basic condition of birth and circumstance.  Why, then, should it determine access to potentially vital resources like food or medical care? We cannot fully grapple with economic and political inequality unless we ask this question and press for better answers. There is a sordid history that links race, class and federalism in the United States. Learning from our past means listening to people like Lucy and challenging both the retrenchment and the ballooning geographic inequities that accompany block grants. It also means interrogating any policy that empowers subnational governments while disempowering low-income Americans.

*Name has been changed to protect confidentiality

Shay,* mother of 17-year-old Lamar and a participant in my research with low-income African-American mothers in Washington, D.C., reminded me of this. A few months before I interviewed her, she had called the police to take her son away. “He looked at it like I had set him up because I had to get him to the house for them to get him,” Shay explained. “He was being a disrespectful child, talking back and being aggressive, not listening.”

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Shay had grown increasingly alarmed by Lamar’s behavior in recent months. He was hanging out with friends who committed petty crime, and he had even gotten a few court summonses for minor offenses, appearances he usually skipped. Despite Shay’s distrust of police—a skepticism honed growing up in one of D.C.’s most violent housing projects—she reached out to them. She hoped they would link Lamar with resources he could use to avoid criminality, such as effective counseling and expanded educational and employment opportunities—resources she had not been able to provide.

Lamar wound up in a youth detention facility out of state. The statistics on long-term outcomes for teens who spend time in juvenile detention are not especially promising, but Shay insists that she made the best decision. “He knows now that mommy saved him,” she said.

The conventional wisdom is that poor African-Americans have nearly universal disdain for police, seeing them only as an occupying force. Yet research shows that African-American women living in high-poverty neighborhoods are part of groups most likely to report crime and disturbance to the police, even when researchers control for the higher crime rates they tend to experience. The key, though, is that when these women (especially mothers) call the police, they aren’t calling because they have faith in police officers’ crime-solving prowess or trust that police have their best interests at heart. They make the difficult choice to rely on police because they are one of the most readily available providers of social support—help that police are actually ill-equipped to furnish.

Of course, mothers are well aware that calling the police, especially on teenage sons, is risky. Those risks have gained national attention only recently, but nothing that Black Lives Matter activists brought to light is news to them.

Pam, another mother I interviewed, rattled off grievances against the police, including the shooting of an unarmed boy in a high-poverty, predominantly African-American neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C. some years ago. “There’s a lot of police brutality going on out there, a lot of crooked stuff. What can we do?” she lamented. Yet she reports calling the police on her drug-addicted son several times, hoping he could take advantage of a diversion program and get into drug treatment. Much to her chagrin, he’s now incarcerated instead.

For mothers living in poverty, the stakes of choosing not to contact police when a child is truant, addicted, or out of control can be high. Child welfare investigation is a regular occurrence for poor mothers, especially if they are African-American and living in central cities. Although calling the police can trigger a child welfare investigation, it can also serve as a gesture of diligent parenting. Thus the risk of reporting can seem worth taking to avoid the appearance of child neglect, a charge that could put the entire family in jeopardy.

Raising children is a tough task for anyone, particularly when those children are prone to misbehave. But when wealthier kids misbehave, their parents have better options for seeking help. They can redirect their children’s energy toward organized activities. They can find private counseling, or they attend schools where good counseling is more readily available. And, because child welfare agencies rarely investigate their homes or assume the worst about their parenting skills, they need not worry that one child’s misbehavior will threaten custody of all their children. When poor kids misbehave, these options are harder to come by. The social safety net, toilsome to access and often punitive in its own right, leaves mothers with few alternatives to the police department.

Against the backdrop of police bias and misconduct, police organizations have taken to publicizing dancing, jumping rope, and making music with children of color as if dance-offs will render forgettable the legacy of violence. These displays of goodwill are positive initial gestures. But long-term delivery of effective and respectful policing, coupled with a more robust and more usable landscape of non-criminal social services, is what’s really needed for violence reduction and police legitimacy. A dual strategy of police reform and safety net reform can ultimately aid in the fight against poverty by stemming the tide that inexorably pushes poor parents and kids toward penal entanglement, which tends to exacerbate hardship.

This moment invites deeper questions about the functions and scope of police work. It beckons us toward reconsideration of how police regulation fits into a broader reform agenda. Body cameras and use of force standards are reasonable places to begin, but it will take more than police-specific reform to recast the work of police in communities. The Ferguson Commission, for example, integrated child well-being and economic opportunity into its agenda for change. Other proposals have suggested that multidisciplinary teams that include social workers respond to police calls, a helpful proposal even though it still operates in a crime control framework. Most towns and cities aiming to avoid becoming the next Ferguson, the next Baltimore, have turned their attention to police regulation, but they have not simultaneously sought ways to make social support more accessible in heavily policed communities beyond the criminal justice system.

As governments redefine the contours of policing, they can also tackle the deeper challenges of parenting in the toughest communities. They can make decisions like Shay’s and Pam’s less necessary.

*Name has been changed to protect confidentiality

These commenters are representative of the all too common assumption that someone is choosing to stay poor because they are lazy. But being poor and qualifying for government assistance is not an easy life. I think that, given the choice, most if not all people would choose to have a job that supports their basic needs and affords them a vacation once in a while. This idea is borne out by the evidence; four out of five participants in the food stamps program are either working or not expected to work due to their age or because they have a disability.

Jumping through hoops to receive assistance is exhausting and further stigmatized by legislators who introduce laws that limit access to resources. For example, Kansas State Senator Michael O’Donnell—who successfully advocated for legislation to ban people from using cash assistance to see a movie or go to a swimming pool—is eager to take his place as an arbiter in determining which poor person is “legitimate.” Who is the “real” victim and who will turn around and take advantage of the assistance, using it toward, heaven forbid, a leisurely activity once in a while. Who has made poor decisions and who has found themselves without a home due to causes beyond their control. It’s as if these legislators are looking only to help the poor person who fits an ideal mold, the one most like Oliver Twist.

At Christmas time, the search for Oliver Twist goes into full gear. Many people get into the holiday spirit of giving and maybe tip their waitress a little more, drop some change in the bucket next to the Santa Claus outside the department store, or go as far as organizing food, clothing, and toy drives for needy families. But although a majority of Americans say the government should do “a lot” to fight poverty, many will confine this support to people they view as the “deserving poor,” like children or veterans. As a friend said to me recently: “You are probably a part of a small percentage of moms and dads who are legitimate in their need and how you are getting by.”

And in their rush to judge who is legitimate, other acquaintances have told me that I’m not “really” poor. They assume that since I’m white and educated, I’m broke but not living in poverty. And now that I am on my way to making a pretty decent living that is close to putting me over the federal poverty line, I’ve thought about this a lot as well. What is the difference between being impoverished and being temporarily broke?

Artist Toby Morris’s comic in The Wireless brilliantly illustrates this difference. Individuals who are “broke”—the archetype of the student from a middle-class family eating ramen noodles comes to mind here—can draw upon family assets or social capital to support taking risks or to mitigate economic hardship; by contrast, millions of Americans are impoverished by setbacks, like the loss of a job or a sudden illness, from which they lack the resources to recover. I was born into a poor family that had been living on very little for generations. My parents were 20 when they had me, and when I was in the eighth grade, my mom was the first in our family to graduate from college. I wasn’t able to participate in a lot of extracurricular activities, and my parents encouraged me to work and make my own money from a young age. The lack of money was a source of constant stress in our home.

Disadvantage accumulates over time. Over the years, I have not been able to turn to family or any hidden assets for support. My parents couldn’t afford to pay for my college education, and I had to take out loans in my own name to pay for it. So when I was faced with debilitating hospital bills in my early 20s, I had to declare bankruptcy despite working 12-hour days, six days a week. Ten years later, the bankruptcy has been wiped from my credit report, but the debt I accrued in college will still keep me from accessing the funds I would need to purchase a decent vehicle or a house.

In a country where we trumpet equal access to opportunity, poverty and the stigma that comes with it present barriers to self-actualization. After trying to be a paralegal and a counselor, I chose to pursue my dreams of being a writer. But unlike my wealthier peers, I felt like I was hurling myself through college, spiraling wildly and uncontrollably into debt, in pursuit of a fantasy I’d had since I started writing at the age of ten. The guilt that comes with pursuing writing as a career is not necessarily shared by an upper- or even middle-class person. Writing and the arts in general are often reserved for wealthy people, who don’t blink at the costs of attending retreats or investing time to create something that is not guaranteed to generate a lot of cash. By contrast, to avoid judgment, the poor must be able to point to a steady paycheck to demonstrate that they are “legitimate,” meaning that they have in fact been working and contributing to the formal economy.

I have to wonder: who isn’t legitimate in their need for help? Take the act of parenting, which is difficult even in the best of circumstances. Parenting on your own, without family to fall back on or even a supportive co-partner, often feels impossible. I can’t think of anyone in that situation who wouldn’t be legitimate, yet it’s still a common reaction to blame people who are struggling for their circumstances.

People don’t choose to be poor. They are often handed a life that only affords them that.

Social Security works. No one runs out of benefits, and payments don’t rise and fall with the stock market. Despite scare tactics from Republicans in Congress, the facts are clear. Social Security has a $2.8 trillion surplus. If we do nothing, Social Security will be safe for the next 18 years, and after that will continue to pay three-quarters of benefits through the end of the century.

Of course, we don’t have to sit by and to do nothing. Since its beginning, Social Security has been adjusted from time to time, and that’s what we need to do now. With some modest adjustments, it is possible to keep the system solvent for decades more, even while increasing benefits.

For the millions of Americans who rely on Social Security, the situation got worse this year. For just the third time since 1975, seniors who receive Social Security—along with many who receive veterans’ benefits, Social Security disability benefits, and other monthly payments—aren’t receiving any annual increase from their cost of living adjustment (COLA). CEOs at the top 350 American companies received, on average, a 3.9 percent pay increase last year. But seniors and veterans? Not a dime more.

That’s why a group of us in Congress have introduced the Seniors and Veterans Emergency Benefits Act (SAVE Benefits Act). This bill would give a one-time payment of $581 to those people who aren’t receiving a COLA this year—a raise equal to the 3.9 percent pay increase the top CEOs received.

Social Security payments average only about $1,340 a month—and millions of seniors who rely on those checks are barely scraping by. A $581 increase could cover almost three months of groceries for seniors or a year’s worth of out-of-pocket costs on critical prescription drugs for the average Medicare beneficiary. That $50 a month is worth a heck of a lot to the 70 million Americans who would have just a little more in their pockets as a result of this bill. In fact, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, that little boost could lift more than one million Americans out of poverty.

For too long in Washington, Social Security has been under assault. We’ve heard over and over that we supposedly need to gut the program in order to “save” it. But for the 21 million Americans whose Social Security benefits are the only thing keeping them out of poverty, Social Security isn’t a luxury—it’s a lifeline. The absolute last thing we should do—at the very moment that Social Security has become so essential to millions of our seniors—is to allow the program to be dismantled inch by inch.

This isn’t just an argument about math, though. This is about our values—about how we protect each other, our families, and ourselves. In an uncertain world, protection against long-term disability and a guaranteed income for the families of survivors are core parts of the anti-poverty safety net that our Social Security system provides. And, equally important, after a lifetime of hard work, people deserve to retire with dignity—and that means protecting and expanding Social Security.

It’s by paying them fairly for their labor.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that raising the federal minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would lift wages for more than 35 million workers nationwide and generate about $17 billion annually in savings to government assistance programs.

This report shouldn’t come as a surprise. In contrast to the stereotypes and lies about people with low incomes, the reality is that a majority of public assistance recipients either have a job or have an immediate family member who is working. In fact, 41.2 million working Americans—or 30 percent of the workforce—receive means-tested public assistance. Nearly half of them work full-time.

Not surprisingly, workers who receive public assistance are concentrated in jobs that pay low hourly wages, like the retail, food services, and leisure and hospitality industries. A majority (53 percent) of workers earning $12.16 per hour or less—or the bottom 30 percent of wage earners—rely on public assistance. As wages go down, the percentage of workers relying on public assistance gets higher: 60 percent of workers earning less than $7.42—only slightly higher than the $7.25 federal minimum wage—receive some form of means-tested public assistance. Overall, 70 percent of the benefits in programs meant to aid non-elderly low-income households—programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credits—go to working families.

The fact is that the people we expect to work are working (if they can find employment), but they are not being paid enough to make ends meet. While big corporations are achieving extraordinary profits and executive compensation continues to rise, often these same corporations and CEOs are paying such low wages that workers must rely on public assistance.

That means taxpayers are effectively subsidizing wealthy companies to cover the gap between what workers earn on the job and what they need to support themselves and their families. If we want low-income families to have a decent life and the opportunity to thrive, we need strong government assistance programs, but we also need to take a close look at what workers are being paid and how we expect businesses to treat them.

There are many things we can do to stop subsidizing wealthy corporations for paying lousy wages. One obvious solution is to raise the minimum wage. Congress hasn’t lifted it since 2009—today it’s worth 24 percent less than in 1968, adjusted for inflation. The average minimum wage worker is more educated and more productive than in 1968, but she is paid less for her labor.

Even raising the wages of the bottom 30 percent of workers by just $1 per hour would result in $5.2 billion in public assistance savings each year. And the $17 billion in annual savings realized by raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 could be used to strengthen anti-poverty programs—such as expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to childless adults, or improving access to childcare and preschool for children from low- and moderate-income families, or make long-overdue investments in infrastructure.

A fundamental part of the American dream is that if you work hard, you should be able to get ahead. When we let the minimum wage and other labor standards erode to the point where hard work is no longer enough to provide families a decent life, we don’t live up to the promise of that dream.

Subsidizing those who are responsible for non-livable wages only adds insult to injury.

SNAP reduces hunger and hardship for millions of Americans. The vast majority of those who receive SNAP are seniors, children, people with disabilities, or are working. For millions of others, many of whom may have lost a job through no fault of their own, SNAP provides an important stepping stone to help them look for work and get back on their feet.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Despite this, 23 states around the country are beginning to implement a harsh time limit on SNAP that will cut off assistance for over half a million of some of the poorest Americans. Federal law limits these individuals, ages 18 to 49, who are out of work and deemed able-bodied and not caring for children, to just three months of SNAP out of every three years—unless they are working or in a work training program for at least 20 hours per week.

While some claim that this harsh time limit is a “work requirement,” the policy applies regardless of how hard someone is looking for work or whether employment or job training is even available. And the reality is that states have no obligation to help those who are struggling find work or provide a work training slot. Unsurprisingly, most don’t.

The individuals who will be impacted by these cuts are a diverse group that includes not just unemployed workers seeking a job or job training, but also part-time workers who may not be able to find enough work to meet the 20-hour threshold. It also includes people facing significant barriers to work: A study conducted by the Ohio Association of Food Banks found that one-third of those subject to the time limit have disabilities or serious health conditions, 40 percent lack access to reliable private or public transportation, and 13 percent report being caregivers for a parent, relative, or loved one. Many of these individuals also do have children they are trying to support, the children just aren’t living in their homes. Many are also military veterans. Most of those who will be cut off don’t qualify for any other form of assistance, and struggle to get by on an average income of just $2,000 a year.

States that have already implemented such time limits have seen dramatic reductions in the number of people receiving SNAP. But cutting hundreds of thousands of struggling Americans off of nutrition assistance—which averages just $1.41 per person, per meal—won’t make it any easier for them to find work; instead, it will only mean more strain on charitable institutions that are already having difficulty keeping up with rising need. While food banks, soup kitchens, and churches play an enormous role in helping to reduce hunger, they simply cannot do it alone.

Policymakers must take action to preserve access to nutrition assistance.

While it is unlikely that Congress will act in time to stop these individuals from losing SNAP, states can take steps to limit the impact of these cuts. First and foremost, any area of a state with sufficiently high unemployment or a lack of jobs can have the time limit waived. Next, states must carefully screen individuals to ensure that the time limit is not incorrectly applied to exempt individuals, such as chronically homeless people. And finally, states can provide job training services that not only allow individuals to maintain eligibility for SNAP, but can also—if well designed—serve as a pathway to a well-paying job. Even with these steps, there are still a great many vulnerable individuals who will be impacted by these cuts. It’s ultimately up to Congress to get rid of this draconian rule.

The facts are simple: limiting how long people can get help putting food on the table will not mean that they will be able to find more jobs or get more hours. It simply means that they will be hungry.

While I disagree with the Speaker’s attempts to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, which partially equalize outcomes by preventing seniors from falling into poverty, I wholeheartedly reject the assertion that trickle-down economic policies would do more to advance equality of opportunity than a middle-out approach.

It is sadly appropriate that the forum took place in Columbia, South Carolina, an area with some of the lowest socioeconomic mobility in the country.  According to the Equality of Opportunity Project, a child raised in the bottom fifth of the national income distribution in the Columbia area has just a 4.2 percent chance of rising to the top fifth, making it one of the worst places to grow up poor in America.  If right-wing policies expand economic opportunity, why hasn’t South Carolina, with right-wing policies prevalent throughout state government, seen the benefits?

The reality is that the Expanding Opportunity forum, while perhaps well-meaning, must not distract from the fact that trickle-down policies—and the Ryan budget in particular—would severely constrict opportunity in numerous ways. Consider the following:

• In order to take advantage of opportunity, one must be healthy. The Ryan budget would cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars and send the funds to the states as block grants, putting life-and-death decisions in the hands of state governments. South Carolina is one example of a state government that has thus far made the choice not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, despite an estimate that such a decision would result in the premature deaths of nearly 200 South Carolinians every year.
• Ryan’s budget would double down on this opportunity-crushing, lethal agenda by repealing the Affordable Care Act, stripping health care away from millions who have gained coverage in the marketplaces or through the Medicaid expansion.
• Similarly, while working one’s way out of poverty is difficult under the best of circumstances, Ryan wants to make it even harder by drastically cutting nutrition assistance so that those striving to rise above the poverty line don’t have enough to eat.
• High quality pre-K expands opportunity for a lifetime. But the House Majority refuses to support universal pre-K and would cut hundreds of thousands of Head Start slots.
• Opportunity is virtually impossible without access to educational resources. But the Ryan budget reduces funding for education by an amount equivalent to 3,600 schools, 13,000 teachers, and nearly 1.6 million students.
• In the 21st century knowledge-based economy, a college education is essential to career opportunities. But the Ryan budget would cut Pell Grants by $370 million, making college even less affordable for poor students.
• For many Americans, job training and employment services are vital opportunities to gain the skills necessary for a productive career and to find jobs using those skills. But the Ryan budget would take these services away from 2 million people.
• The Equality of Opportunity Project found that, by the time they reached adulthood, poor children whose families received a Section 8 housing voucher earned nearly $2,000 a year more than children raised in public housing projects. But the Ryan budget threatens to take this opportunity away from 100,000 families.
• The same Equality of Opportunity Project study found that poor children whose families received an experimental voucher to move to low-poverty neighborhoods earned nearly $3,500 more when they grew up than those raised in public housing. But in 2014, 219 House Republicans, including Speaker Ryan, voted to stop an Obama Administration effort to create similar opportunities on a wide scale.
• Republicans and Democrats agree that children born from unintended pregnancies are particularly likely to struggle for economic opportunity. But the Ryan budget would eliminate Title X Family Planning funding, which averts approximately one million unintended pregnancies every year.

As much as Speaker Ryan might want to talk about expanding opportunity without caring about inequality, it has been shown repeatedly that societies with more inequality also have less opportunity—a relationship known as the Great Gatsby Curve. If Speaker Ryan and the House majority are truly committed to making opportunity more equal, they should take steps to increase the minimum wage, expand paid sick leave, and target resources to persistent poverty communities. We could start with my 10-20-30 proposal, which Ryan appeared to be open to when I testified before the House Budget Committee in 2014.

Even the few positive proposals that some members of the House Majority support—such as bipartisan criminal justice reform—would not come close to making up for their broader agenda, which constricts opportunity for low-income families while cutting taxes for the rich by trillions of dollars.  Forums like the one held in South Carolina are good for gathering input but outcomes are needed to lift people out of poverty.

In some of the worst performing states, almost one in five households don’t consistently have the resources to put food on the table.

Despite performing so poorly, many states on this list have adopted conservative policies that have made life harder for low-income families:

• States like Ohio are restricting access to food stamps for unemployed residents—even if they live in regions with few job opportunities. Governor Kasich’s administration has opted to reinstate a three-month time limit on nutrition assistance benefits for some unemployed adults ages 18 to 50 who are not disabled or raising minor children, even though some counties within the state are eligible for federal waivers of this requirement. Advocates have charged that this decision disproportionately impacts minorities, as the state accepted waivers for counties with predominantly white residents while refusing them for counties largely populated by people of color.

• Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas maintain restrictive asset tests for nutrition assistance, which decreases low-income families’ self-sufficiency by requiring them to spend down their savings or sell off assets to access assistance. Assets are important for economic mobility generally. For example, when working-age families can put aside even sums of less than $2,000—they are less likely to face hardships such as running short on food, forgoing needed health care, or having the utilities turned off.

In some of the worst performing states, more than one in five residents live in poverty.

Adding insult to injury, many of these poorly performing states have doubled down on conservative policies that have made life harder for low-income people:

• Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee have allowed wages to stagnate by not setting their minimum wage above the federal level of $7.25. For example, in Georgia, employees that are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act can be paid as little as $5.15 per hour. This failure to raise wages has meant that a single parent of two children who works full time does not earn enough to escape poverty.

• Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Tennessee, and West Virginia maintain restrictive asset tests, which decrease low-income families’ self-sufficiency by requiring them to spend down their savings or sell off assets to access assistance. Assets are important for economic mobility generally—for example, when working-age families can put aside even sums of less than $2,000—they are less likely to face hardships such as running short on food, forgoing needed health care, or having the utilities turned off. But, in states like Georgia with particularly stringent tests, families can only have $1,000 in assets to access cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, with few exceptions.

• Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas (under the leadership of newly-elected Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson), Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi have instituted drug testing that stigmatizes public assistance applicants even though they test positive for drug use at a rate lower than the general population. In Tennessee, officials found that less than 0.2% of all applicants tested positive, mirroring results in other states like Mississippi and Arizona. The cost to states for this wasteful testing has exceeded $1 million dollars collectively—money that could have been spent on strengthening the program.

Throughout December, as Christmas and New Year’s Eve drew closer, I felt increasing anxiety about how I would pay for necessities—rent, food, utilities—as well as some modest gifts for my children.

I listened as neighbors, friends, clients and other acquaintances discussed their holiday plans and travails, including: securing tickets to the new Star Wars movie; upcoming vacations to warm, tropical locations; a new snowboard and other fantastic gifts for their kids; and lavish holiday parties. One neighbor lamented that her husband didn’t want the $1,300 kayak she had just purchased for Christmas.

I can only dream of these kinds of stresses. One person’s kayak is another person’s rent.

Despite working as a specialty baker, personal chef, pet sitter, and fitness instructor—including on nights and weekends—I fell about $600 short, or less than half of a kayak, of what I needed to make December’s rent. Thinking through how I could close that gap felt like watching the back and forth of a ping pong ball in my head, with one question ricocheting to another and another: If I cannot pay rent, where will we go? Should I consider a shelter? How many personal items do I need to sell and what do I have that’s of any value? Which utility bills do I need to postpone paying? When our food assistance (SNAP) runs out at the end of the month, how will we afford food? Should I go on a crowdfunding site to ask for help with my child’s medical expenses?

Mixed in with these questions was the sinking feeling that came with not knowing what I would tell my two children if I couldn’t afford any Christmas presents.

My experience felt surreal, like I inhabited an entirely different universe from those I interacted with in my daily life. But I also knew I was hardly alone. For example, at the top of an e-newsletter for one of my children’s schools was a “new policy” notice regarding students’ Apple Watches; just a few paragraphs below it was a “thank you” for donations that helped 50 school families like mine during the holiday season. I’m certain those families were as jarred by the juxtaposition as I was.

Within a few days of Christmas, providence presented itself to me in three unexpected forms: a last-minute pet sitting gig, a bonus from clients, and a generous gift from a church—none of whom knew of my predicament. These things, in addition to some extra baking orders for the holidays, secured just enough money to pay rent, all my utility bills, purchase food for December, and buy a few gifts for my kids.

The stress was gone—at least for a couple of weeks.

Now I’m worrying about this month, when my business income grinds to a near halt. I have also been informed that due to a computing error by human services, my monthly SNAP benefits will decrease by $125.

When people say that the holidays are stressful, I want to say, “Define stress.” For me and many others, the fullest meaning of peace and joy is simply this: not having to worry about how we will provide food, shelter, and heat for our loved ones.

As President Obama put it earlier this year: “In this country, of all countries, a person’s zip code shouldn’t decide their destiny.”

But what makes this trend even more problematic, as a new Center for American Progress report indicates, is that now—due to a lack of affordable housing and enduring patterns of residential segregation—the zip code where people live is largely determined by income, race, and ethnicity.

The report’s co-authors suggest that if we want to change this unacceptable status quo we need to work on two fronts: reinvest in impoverished neighborhoods so that residents have access to high-quality housing, jobs, good schools, transportation, and other basics; and ensure that families with low-incomes have access to affordable housing in neighborhoods that already offer residents these resources.

For low-income renters, the affordable housing situation is now a crisis. As Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said at the release of the report: “This issue of an affordability crisis on the rental market is real, in big cities and in small towns.”

Indeed, half of all renters in the U.S. spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing (above the threshold commonly defined as “affordable”); and more than a quarter spend over 50 percent of their income. On top of that, the housing that is available is increasingly limited to high-poverty, low-opportunity neighborhoods: 13.8 million Americans now live in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of residents are poor, nearly double the number of people in 2000.

When low-income families are able to move to neighborhoods that foster mobility, the benefits are clear: the children perform much better academically than their peers in high-poverty neighborhoods; their average annual earnings as adults increase by 31 percent; they are more likely to attend college and less likely to become single parents. There is also marked improvement in physical and mental health, particularly for adults and girls.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Quanda Burrell, 30, lives with her 10-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son in Boston where she works full-time as a childcare teacher for infants. She grew up in low-income communities, where there was a lot of drug and gang activity and shootings.

When she was pregnant with her first child, she was couch-surfing with friends and relatives, and briefly lived in two homeless shelters. She then moved to privately-owned, subsidized housing in a mixed-income neighborhood.

“The neighborhood was primarily Caucasian, and quiet,” Burrell said. “That took getting used to.”

Her children haven’t had to face the stressors Burrell dealt with—like how to cross rival gang territories in order to walk to the park; getting robbed at gunpoint when walking home from work during high school; or needing to stay inside of the house “for safety reasons.” Her family has also enjoyed quality childcare and schools, and easy access to services like WIC, a food pantry, and a diaper bank when they have needed help.

“But the number one difference is safety,” she said.

In order to help more low-income families move to high-opportunity neighborhoods, the report recommends establishing a federal law that would prohibit landlords from refusing tenants just because they possess a housing voucher. Additionally, the authors call for the elimination of exclusionary zoning—“ranging from density limits and minimum lot size requirements to community vetoes of new construction”—which limit affordable housing construction and increase racial and economic segregation.

But not every family is going to be able to move to a high-opportunity neighborhood (nor does every family want to relocate), which is why we need to revitalize distressed communities as well.

Secretary Castro and the report’s co-authors point to the Obama Administration’s Promise Zone model as one way to do that. The initiative aims to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies that break siloes—so that people working on issues ranging from housing, transportation, job training, health equity, youth employment, and more—are working collaboratively towards solutions that connect these issues. There is also technical assistance to help the zones access federal funding and other resources.

“I believe that ultimately more local communities [will] put this kind of thinking into action, and challenge the state and federal government to do the same,” said Secretary Castro.

Whether families remain in distressed neighborhoods or move to more affluent ones, a big part of the solution lies in increasing the overall supply of affordable housing. Currently, for every 100 households earning below 30 percent of the area median income, there are just 28 affordable and available units. That adds up to a shortage of 4.5 million units just for those very low-income households.

If our priorities weren’t so skewed to benefit affluent homeowners, an increase in our affordable housing stock might be more easily achieved. As the report notes, “More than 75 percent of federal housing expenditures support homeownership. More than half of these…benefit high-income households earning more than $100,000 per year.” In all, we spend nearly three times more on subsidizing homeownership than we do on rental assistance. It should come as no surprise then that only 1 in 4 households eligible for federal rental assistance actually receives it.

This trend could easily get worse before it gets better.

According to the authors, 2.1 million units of subsidized affordable housing are at risk over the next 10 years as rent restrictions expire and landlords look to cash in. It is critical that states and cities pass laws that give tenants, local agencies, and non-profits opportunities to purchase these units from private landlords. “Opportunity to purchase” laws have proven most effective where there are entities committed to affordable housing, including “local housing agencies, legal aid clinics…and mission-oriented non-profits that specialize in preservation transactions.”

The report co-authors also suggest that we could do a better job increasing the supply of affordable housing through tax policy. For example, they argue that we need to expand and better target the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which in the past 30 years has preserved more than 2.7 million affordable units and leveraged more than $100 billion in private capital. The LIHTC program offers significant tax credits to participants who “agree to keep the units affordable to very low-income tenants for a period of at least 30 years.” We also need to allocate these credits based on where the need for affordable housing is greatest, rather than the current approach of making the determination based on a state’s population.

Finally, we need to promote mobility and access to more affordable units by better funding the voucher program. The authors note that “while the share of households that are spending unsustainable portions of the income on rent has grown, the number of households that are receiving rental assistance has remained flat.” In fact, sequestration alone resulted in 70,000 fewer families receiving vouchers.

There is no question that these reforms and the many others outlined in the report would dramatically increase affordable housing in our nation and move us closer to our ideal that “anyone can rise.” The question—and it’s always the question when it comes to poverty and opportunity in America—is how do we create the political will to make it happen?

Burrell believes low-income people speaking out is key.

“A lot of people say that the political leaders in the statehouse don’t care about them,” she said. “But you got to make them care. You got to visit them, speak out. If more low-income folks were talking, I think that would make a difference.”

Secretary Castro seemed to largely agree, adding that the rental crisis is also harming the middle class.

“How do you mobilize folks to impress upon policymakers at all levels about the needs of different communities?” Secretary Castro asked. “I don’t see that conversation right now happening enough.”

While Ryan pushed many of his favorite myths about the safety net, he also inadvertently made one of the strongest cases to date for raising the minimum wage and investing in policies to help people balance work and caregiving.

Indeed, in his grand finale, Ryan called on Congress to:

“Push wages up. Push the cost of living down. Get people off the sidelines. I could think of no better way to restore confidence in the American economy.”

Bravo, Speaker Ryan. We couldn’t agree more. Now, if only we knew how to do these things…

Oh, wait. We do!

How can we “push wages up”?

It’s called raising the minimum wage. And luckily for Speaker Ryan, over 75 percent of Americans support raising the federal minimum wage to $12.50 by 2020.

But wait, there’s more.

As Speaker Ryan so eloquently points out, our minimum wage is a poverty wage and not nearly enough for working parents to support their families, leaving many with no choice but to turn to public assistance to make ends meet.

“So say you’re a single mom with one kid. You’re making minimum wage. You’re on food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and other assistance.”

So, by raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 as the Murray-Scott bill would do, not only would 35 million Americans get a raise, but we would also save nearly $53 billion over the next 10 years in SNAP alone.  

Unfortunately Ryan has voted against raising the minimum wage at least 10 times since he’s been in office.

So, how can we “push the cost of living down”?

Paul Ryan is correct when he says that the cost of living is rising. But families with young kids often face the tightest squeeze of all. Childcare expenses have skyrocketed; the average annual cost for center-based childcare is now more than tuition and fees for a public 4-year college in 31 states and DC. And low-income families spend an average of nearly 14% of their annual income on diapers alone.

What these families need is affordable, high-quality childcare—which also helps parents work—and a stronger Child Tax Credit to help alleviate the squeeze of stagnant wages and rising costs.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

And, finally, how can we “get people off the sidelines”?

While there’s obviously a lot that policymakers can and should do on this one—including investing in job creation and removing barriers to employment for people with criminal records and people with disabilities, a major piece of the puzzle is ensuring access to paid family and medical leave.

Speaker Ryan has led by example on this important issue—well, for himself anyway. But, in opposing legislation that would help families access up to 12 weeks of paid family leave, he’s left other working parents high and dry.

The U.S. stands alone among developed nations in failing to guarantee access to any form of paid family leave. But research has shown that when women are able to take paid leave, they are more likely to be working; to have higher wages 9-12 months after their child is born; and to avoid turning to public assistance.

***

Interestingly, a major theme of Speaker Ryan’s speech was about how conservatives need to push new ideas to cut poverty and boost opportunity. “Our number-one goal for the next year,” he said, “is to put together a complete alternative to the Left’s agenda.”

Unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell him that his speech didn’t actually contain any new ideas on tackling poverty and boosting opportunity – only the same old stuff conservatives have been pushing for years such as block grants and cuts to effective programs.

Instead, at his poverty summit on January 9th, Speaker Ryan should endorse raising the minimum wage and adopting work-family policies. To borrow his hashtag of choice, that would make us a #ConfidentAmerica.

In recent years, low and non-existent cost-of-living adjustments (“COLAs”) have been gradually eroding the value of Social Security benefits. These COLAs are calculated using an inflation measure that is intended to reflect costs faced by workers. The measure does not accurately account for costs faced by seniors and Americans with disabilities, who spend a far higher percentage of their income on health care.

To the wealthy few, the extra $40 or $50 a month from a COLA increase might not seem like a big deal. But to elderly Social Security beneficiaries, this increase is much-needed income that they can use to put food on the table and pay for lifesaving prescriptions.

That’s why Social Security’s 59 million beneficiaries were devastated to hear the news that, for only the third time in 40 years, there will be no COLA in 2016. They know that the cost of basic necessities, including medical care, prescription drugs, food, and housing, has continued to increase. But their benefits are not increasing accordingly and are losing their purchasing power. If this trend continues, younger generations will have effectively lower benefits, even though the decline of pensions and rising inequality means that they will be even more reliant on these benefits than their parents and grandparents are.

And this isn’t just hurting Social Security beneficiaries. The same formula is used to calculate the COLA for many other programs, including Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and various veterans’ benefits including Disability Compensation benefits, pension benefits, and Military Retirement Pay. For the millions of Americans—particularly veterans—who receive Social Security as well as one or more of these other benefits, a year without a COLA is a double or triple whammy.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

But there is hopeful news. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a longtime champion of Social Security, is on the case. She is sponsoring the SAVE Benefits act, a bill—already supported by twenty of her colleagues—which would send every Social Security beneficiary (as well as others impacted by the lack of a COLA) a one-time payment of about $581 to cover next year’s lack of a COLA increase.

That payment would make a serious difference in the lives of millions of beneficiaries. For many seniors, it could cover over three months of groceries. For others, it may cover the average Medicare out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs. It’s no surprise that the SAVE Benefits Act would lift over one million Americans out of poverty.

Senator Warren’s bill is fully funded by closing the “performance pay” loophole, which allows big corporations to take a tax deduction for the lavish compensation packages they give their wealthy CEOs. This loophole costs taxpayers about $9.7 billion dollars every year. The SAVE Benefits Act uses some of these savings to provide the 70 million Americans who are not receiving a COLA with the much-needed $581 checks. The rest would go into the Social Security trust fund to bolster the program’s long-term actuarial balance.

Passing the SAVE Benefits Act is an essential step, but it is only the first step. To permanently address the gradual erosion of Social Security benefits, Congress must pass legislation adopting an updated measurement tailored to reflect the real living costs (such as high health care expenses) that seniors and Americans with disabilities face, for calculating future COLAs. And to permanently tackle our country’s looming retirement income crisis, and address the millions of seniors and people with disabilities already living in poverty, Congress must expand Social Security’s modest benefits.

This is a powerful movement that is gaining momentum every day. The American people overwhelmingly support expanding Social Security’s benefits by requiring the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. Forty-three Senators and over 100 U.S. Representatives have pledged to support expanding benefits, not cutting them.

Social Security has been a resounding success for over 80 years. Now is the time to build upon that legacy.

It is clear from the numbers alone that in communities across America—including where I live in Ocean County, New Jersey—federal, state, and local public housing assistance programs are not reaching nearly enough people.

I’ve experienced homelessness and I also volunteer at a homeless outreach center that provides clothing, blankets, tents, heaters, food, and other items that are essential to our local population of about thirty homeless individuals and couples. We also offer a hot meal and a safe place for people to gather and freely express themselves. Many of the people we serve refer to our center as their “safe house.”

At the end of a recent meeting at the center, a couple in their forties asked me for a ride home. They had blankets, coats, and foodstuffs—I suspected they didn’t want to traipse through the downtown business district and draw attention. I gave them a ride, and they directed me to the end of a large parking lot behind a supermarket. They unloaded their things from my car and then slowly disappeared into the woods.

It occurred to me that if they were stray animals, I could have brought them to a half dozen shelters where they would be taken in and cared for, no questions asked. But in my county, not only is there a shortage of affordable housing, there is not a single emergency shelter for homeless people. This is the reality in too many communities across America. It is not only painful to witness, it is also completely unnecessary.

One unutilized tool that could go a long way towards addressing the problem is the National Housing Trust Fund, established by President George W. Bush and Congress as part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. The goal of the Trust Fund is to provide revenue to build, rehabilitate, and preserve affordable housing for the lowest-income families, including people experiencing homelessness. The Trust Fund is unique in its aim to increase and preserve the supply of affordable rental housing for the very low-income, as most of the fund’s money must go to people who make no more than 30 percent of area median income. The Fund also increases homeownership opportunities for these households. While Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently started devoting some of their earnings to the Fund, as the original legislation intended, Congress—perhaps not too shockingly—has complicated and threatened the necessary revenues for the fund.

According to ThinkProgress, a recent example occurred in April 2015, when a House appropriations subcommittee passed legislation that halted funding for the Trust Fund. The legislation instead robbed Peter to pay Paul, diverting monies from the trust fund to another HUD program, HOME, which targets people who make 60 or 50 percent of median family income. The appropriations bill that passed the House ultimately maintained this provision. With its focus on the lowest-income people, the National Housing Trust Fund is a critical resource for fighting homelessness, and these moves to slash its funding imperil people who are on the verge of losing their homes.

In contrast to the Congressional inaction, some states—including Nebraska, Washington State, and Georgia—have created Homeless Trust Funds that allow local civic groups to access monies for emergency shelters and affordable housing.

In 2009, for example, New Jersey passed a law called The County Homelessness Trust Fund Act that authorizes counties to impose a $3.00 surcharge for each document it records. These revenues, administered by a County Homelessness Trust Fund Task Force, are then used to fund housing and supportive services to individuals and families currently experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness.

More than one-third of New Jersey counties have implemented the legislation, raising more than a million dollars for efforts to increase permanent affordable housing; prevent the eviction of Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance beneficiaries, including through payment towards rent, mortgage, or utilities; and provide supportive services for chronically homeless individuals who receive housing vouchers.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

But despite bearing the brunt of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Ocean County has yet to implement such a trust fund. So what can a community like mine do to convince its local political leaders to take action?

Along with other activists and members of the community affected by homelessness—including health care professionals, trauma experts, police officers, clergy, teachers, local politicians, homeless advocates, and small business owners—I am working to get the backing of our community by framing homelessness as both a values and economic issue. The Ocean County Board Freeholders has the final say on whether or not the county enacts a Homeless Trust Fund. They have public meetings twice a month, and we’ve agreed that we won’t leave their next meeting until we get either an acceptance of our proposal or a counter proposal for eliminating homelessness. Our point is that homelessness in our county must end now, and that’s non-negotiable.

With Congress impervious to the reality and needs of its most vulnerable citizens, county trust funds are just one approach we can take towards ensuring that every person finds the stability and shelter they need to survive and thrive.

We need to take this action and many more—because nobody in America should be dropped off to disappear in the woods when we have the resources to end homelessness.

Author’s Note: For more information on how we can capitalize the National Housing Trust Fund, visit NATIONALHOMELESS.org. To see how other states have gone about initiating Homeless Trust Funds, visit the Center for Community Change. If there are members of your community who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, please make sure your local political and civic leaders are aware of these avenues for addressing this issue.

Our new animation shows that the key to understanding this is to not think of them as tax programs—instead think of them as this:

That’s right, gigantic congressional money cannons.  Because these tax programs take what would be government revenue, and give it out to folks to buy a house, go to college, or build a retirement nest egg or financial security for themselves.

At CFED, we like all of these things. We want low-wage workers to be savers and learners and homeowners and entrepreneurs. In other words, we want them to have the opportunity to build wealth. As we see it, while income is crucial for getting by, wealth is crucial for getting ahead.

But in America—the land of opportunity—wealth inequality is skyrocketing. The top 0.1 percent own about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined. A typical single white male owns $28,900, while a typical single woman of color owns $200 or less. While wealth grows for those at the top, nearly half of Americans are mired in financial insecurity—one paycheck away from economic collapse.

…Which brings us back to those gigantic money cannons. According to our research, the federal government spent $620 billion to help Americans build wealth last year. That’s a lot of dollars shooting out of those cannons—more than $5,000 for every single household in the country.

So where’s your big benefit check?

Well, here’s the bad news: unless you’re a Walmart heir or regularly sport a top hat and monocle, those money cannons probably aren’t aimed at you. Remember that top 0.1 percent that owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent? A typical member of that elite club got $33,391 last year from the largest of these tax programs—roughly the sticker price of a Lexus or BMW. A typical American in the bottom 20 percent?  She got $77—roughly enough for a BMW’s hubcap.

In short, these upside-down tax programs are making wealth inequality even worse. There’s nothing wrong with rich people buying a new Lexus, but the rest of us just shouldn’t have to subsidize it with money that we could be using to get ahead.

It’s an expensive, inequitable, and wasteful way to help Americans afford housing, save for retirement, pay for college, and build financial security. It widens the wealth divide between the rich and the rest; between men and women; and between whites and communities of color. Instead of helping all Americans get ahead, we’re just giving a boost to the lucky few who are already at the front of the pack.

This isn’t going to change unless we speak up. Because you know who doesn’t think taxes are boring? The guy getting that Lexus-sized check every year. And you can bet he’s making his voice heard.

That’s why we made this animation. To fight for change, we have to understand the problem and the solution. We know that the government is already spending billions on wealth-building programs. We just want them to spend it smarter to help everyone get ahead.

As we enter 2016, the country is engaged in a debate on opportunity, inequality, financial security, and, yes, taxes. The Republican and Democratic presidential debates this week are two venues where this discussion will continue, and there will be many more to come. So let’s shape that debate instead of letting others shape it for us. Demand that our elected officials—and wannabe elected officials—commit to turning these upside-down tax programs right-side up. They say they want to reduce wealth inequality and grow financial security for all Americans—well, here’s an easy way they can do just that.

These policies are not going to change overnight, but to get there we first need to raise awareness about the enormity of the problem. Do your part: watch our animation, share the message, and sign up so you can stay informed and take action. Real change starts with you and a click, so do your part to turn things right-side up.

]]> https://talkpoverty.org/2015/10/09/tell-moderators-talkpoverty-first-democratic-debate/ Fri, 09 Oct 2015 14:10:47 +0000 http://talkpoverty.org/?p=10216 This post continues our campaign at TalkPoverty.org to ask 2016 presidential candidates about how they would significantly reduce poverty and inequality in this country. 

CNN is hosting the first Democratic Presidential Primary Debate, happening at 9pm ET on Tuesday, October 13—and they’re accepting question suggestions via social media. Tell CNN to make poverty a priority during the debates by suggesting questions through their Facebook post:

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Here are some question ideas to get you started:

• Millions of people struggle to balance work and caring for their families. What will you do to ensure that households aren’t forced to choose between their paycheck and family responsibilities?
• Each year, investments like Social Security, nutrition, healthcare, housing, and tax credits lift millions of people out of poverty, and prevent millions of families from going deeper into poverty. However, conservatives in Congress continue to put these programs on the chopping block. What are your plans to protect and strengthen vital social insurance programs?
• Since research shows that areas with higher union membership demonstrate more mobility for low-income children, what are your plans to increase workers’ ability to collectively bargain with their employers?
• Income inequality is increasingly a problem in this country with productivity increasing, while wages are flat or falling. How do you plan to ensure that more Americans benefit from the recovery?
• Families with young children are facing some of the deepest economic pressures just as their children reach a critical stage of development.  This economic stress can affect their life outcomes. What will you do to improve the economic security of families with young children?
• The United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population, but over 25 percent of the world’s prison population. What measures would you take to address mass incarceration in this country?

“Are you aware your payment is late?” they always ask.

“Yes,” I say. “Are you aware the payment you want is a fourth of my income?”

I can hear them shrug through the phone.

At this point in my life, I can compute rates and payments with the skill of a Wall Street day trader. I use an available balance of one credit card to make a payment on another card. I make $50 payments to two different store cards that have 26 percent interest rates. The phone and internet bill is $50. Electric is $53. Car and life insurance bills are $62. I have two more credit accounts with 20 percent interest rates that have the largest balances, the largest payments, and close out my month with payments due on the 22nd and 24th. I immediately use the available credit on these cards to get gas and toiletries.

For the past six years of putting myself through college, I’ve had lists posted in my home by my desk or on the fridge. They would list my fixed expenses, which usually hovered around $1,100, and my income from work, which usually came in between $300 and $1,300 depending on the time of the year. During school, I received grants and a scholarship but I still came out with $50,000 in debt, a chunk of that due to student loans.

Federal poverty data released in September show I’m not alone as I juggle to make ends meet. While the unemployment rate is dropping, and parts of the economy show signs of improvement, not everyone is benefiting. According to the latest data, I am one of 46.7 million Americans who live in poverty. Factoring in the government assistance we receive for food, housing, health insurance, and child support, my total annual income hovers around $20,000. The current federal poverty level for a family of four is almost $24,000.

Over the last year, I’ve struggled to launch a freelance writing career while caring for my 8-year-old and 15-month-old daughters, and the dog we somehow acquired from the local shelter. Finding full-time work is difficult when you can’t afford daycare. And when money is so tight, even the smallest of wrenches thrown in the sputtering machine can set me back for months.

A wrench can be something as simple as my daughter’s after-school activities. I recently had to tell my older daughter that I didn’t think she could do the Nutcracker try-outs because of the $150 we have to pay upfront, and the make-up and costumes we’d have to pay for. I tried to convince her to do gymnastics again, since the gym gives us a scholarship. These are the conversations I hate the most.

I find myself asking how people in poverty are supposed to work their way out. We work so we won’t need assistance for food or health insurance, but even still, we’re not earning enough to sustain ourselves. Meanwhile, legislators are always looking for ways to pass laws that compromise our eligibility for help. Then there are always the other mishaps of life that can send your ledger spiraling. A broken transmission or a sick child can mean the loss of a hard-earned job.

The possibilities to upend the ledger are endless, real, and exhausting. For most of the last year, I sent my rent check in on time, knowing it wouldn’t be deposited until the 10^th. I needed that extra time for child support payments and paychecks from the end of the previous month to go through in order for the rent check to clear. Paying the bills is like walking on rotted floorboards in your own house; at any moment an unexpected expense will cause you to fall through a hole. What’s worse, I have no back-up. No emergency credit card, no savings, and no family to help us out of a bind.

The recent poverty statistics are evidence that the economy may be improving, but not for those of us struggling the hardest to make ends meet. And every month, the scramble to pay the bills starts all over again.

Many of us, including the pope, might very well disagree on just what makes a family, but we can all agree that the common good of our society is best served when caregivers don’t need to risk their livelihoods in order to provide care for young people. However, policies like paid sick leave—which allows workers to take time off to care for themselves or their families if someone becomes ill or incapacitated—remain out of reach for too many people.

President Obama recently made headlines after signing an executive order requiring federal contractors to grant workers up to seven days of paid sick leave each year. But the fact remains that out of the 22 wealthiest nations in the world, the United States is the only one without any form of guaranteed paid sick leave for workers. As a result, only about 43 percent of workers have reported the ability to take paid leave to care for a sick family member. Nearly a quarter of American workers report losing a job or being threatened with job loss for taking time off to care for a sick child or relative.

While paid family and medical leave impacts all families, it especially impacts women. Six in every 10 mothers are the primary, sole, or co-breadwinner for their family. This includes both single mothers and mothers with an unemployed spouse or partner at home. And about a third of all children in the United States live in a single-parent household; nearly half of them are already living below the poverty line. Forty percent of their parents are working in low-wage jobs—the types of jobs least likely to offer paid sick leave.

Many working families simply cannot afford to take the time they need to care for their children when they get sick. For a family headed by a sole breadwinner who earns the average wage for workers without paid sick leave, it would take just three days of missed work to be driven below the federal poverty line. With over one in five churchgoers estimated to be living in households that earn less than $25,000 a year, people of faith must come to realize that this kind of instability—and injustice—is a reality for many of the people in their congregations.

This desire to care for our children is a human instinct, a family value, and a faith practice. The scriptures appeal repeatedly to God as a nurturing parent who always comes to the aid of their children. Most of us are familiar with the imagery of “God the Father,” and scripture pushes us further. God the Mother speaks through the prophet Isaiah to promise: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” In the Christian New Testament, Jesus remarks at how often he has “desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”

Faith advocates have endorsed more just, family-friendly workplace policies for years. It’s now time for people of faith—whether in the pulpits, in the pews, or in politics—to stand up, speak out, and actively promote paid sick leave as a real family value and faith practice that impacts every working family. In a real “culture of care,” when parents inevitably get that call from the school nurse, they can leave their desk, or register, or assembly line and offer the care their children need. State and federal elected officials and business leaders—especially those claiming to be pro-family and pro-faith—should take the steps necessary to make access to paid leave a reality for all working families.

Unlike some, I don’t see official Washington as a soulless place. Many here are hungry for something better than the politics we have now. One reason Pope Francis’s visit resonated so deeply was that he repeatedly called us to our better selves. He believed all of us—including our political leaders—could heal the “open wounds” that surround us, and that gave many of us hope.

One of my favorite passages from Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Laudato Si’, reads: “Our goal is … to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.”

As he also said to the prisoners he met in Philadelphia: “Any society, any family, which cannot share or take seriously the pain of its children, and views that pain as something normal or to be expected, is a society ‘condemned’ to remain a hostage to itself, prey to the very things which cause that pain.”

Just prior to the pope’s visit, I led our fourth annual “Nuns on the Bus” trip. Our goal was to meet with people in communities from St. Louis to Washington, and gather stories of their suffering and their work for the common good. We are now sharing these stories with our elected officials, and an iPad of the collection was also given to Pope Francis during his visit.

Today, in contrast to the pope’s vision of justice, we see a disconnected Congress mired in hyper-partisanship, so removed from the lives of people like those we met on our tour that some legislators actually consider shutting down the government a useful strategy. Never mind how many people would be harmed by a loss of services and pay, or the pope’s calling on Congress “to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good.”

Rather than scolding Congress for its shortcomings, however, Pope Francis chose to raise up four Americans as representative of who we really are. Everyone could readily identify Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, but many of us were deeply touched when he included the lesser-known Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.

An ardent pacifist, Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement that continues to feed and shelter people in poverty. Thomas Merton sought to bring people together, promoting peace and dialogue so we could truly become one united family. Both led controversial lives and represent the “bruised, hurting and dirty” church that Pope Francis seeks, “rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security” (Joy of the Gospel 43).

With some urgency, Pope Francis has called all of us—especially our lawmakers and key economic players—to create an economy of inclusion, one in which all can thrive and no one is shut out. He once wrote that “growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programs, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality.” (Joy of the Gospel 204).

Even though the pope didn’t mention them explicitly, there are actions Congress can take right now to help fulfill his vision. Legislators should raise the minimum wage and make permanent key improvements to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit that are set to expire in 2017, while expanding the EITC to include younger childless workers and noncustodial parents who are presently taxed into poverty. Congress can also make sure that all people have access to healthcare by strengthening rather than attacking the Affordable Care Act, and encouraging all states to expand Medicaid coverage. As the pope told Congress, “Now is the time for courageous actions and strategies, aimed at implementing a ‘culture of care’ and ‘an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded’….”

The son of immigrants, Pope Francis often reminds us that immigrants deserve to be treated justly and with compassion. “The rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected,” he said last week. “…When the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past.”

When I think about our nation’s current broken immigration system, I think about Katherine, a 15-year-old we met in Kansas City during our bus tour. When her parents went to pay a traffic ticket, they were deported. She and her five siblings moved in with their grandmother, a major financial burden on the family. Most heartbreaking was when Katherine’s 11-year-old sister attempted suicide because she thought one less child would help makes things “better” for her distraught grandmother.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

With that kind of suffering so prevalent among so many people who are trying to build a better life for their families, there is no excuse for congressional failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform. They must do so now.

Finally, we all know that racism is at the core of many of our problems. When I think about the crisis of systemic racism, I think about the pain of African American mothers whom I met in Saint Louis during a conversation with “Mother 2 Mother.” This discussion group meets regularly to talk about the differences between raising black and white children in the U.S. One woman spoke about the horror of seeing Michael Brown’s body in Ferguson: “I remember the blood triggering me to a state of anger like I had never been there before because I could only imagine if that was our boy, if that was our grandboy… What’s the difference between Michael Brown and my grandson? Nothing.”

If #BlackLivesMatter to our politicians, they must respond to the unique challenges confronting communities of color, including fear and racism within our police forces that have led to the unjust killings of black and brown people, housing discrimination, food deserts, a lack of opportunities in jobs and education, and much more. By honoring Dr. King, the pope reminded us how this civil rights icon moved our nation toward justice. We can and must continue in that quest.

Let us live out Pope Francis’s message to bridge divides and transform our economy and our politics. We the People know that our country must move toward justice for all. I pray that Congress heard what Pope Francis said and will work with us to make that happen.

Funds for Head Start were restored by Congress in 2014, but tensions during recent budget negotiations have left Head Start families bracing themselves once again. The temporary solution reached by Congress would maintain funding at current levels through December 11. But if Congress doesn’t reach an agreement on the budget before then, Head Start programs could be subject to massive sequestration cuts, and vulnerable families may be without access to services.    

Victoria Hilt of Bremerton, WA was homeless and six months pregnant when she turned to Head Start. She describes her family’s experience with the program and the impact sequestration had on her community.

When I was six-months pregnant I left an unsafe living situation and became homeless. I went to my local WIC office, where I received information on prenatal care and nursing and was directed to an Early Head Start program. The WIC office told me the program would help me learn how to best care for myself in order to have a safe pregnancy and prepare to be my child’s first teacher. In the end, Early Head Start and Head Start would do that for me and so much more.

Since birth, my daughter, now age four, has grown up in the Head Start buildings with exposure to the same staff over that time period. The program has taught me about many aspects of healthy child development—from routine visits with the pediatrician and dentists, to positive father-daughter relationships, to social-emotional and cognitive development. My daughter and I have learned not only in the classroom, but also through home visits, parent-child activities, policy council meetings, board meetings, and everyday interactions with staff. Early Head Start also connected me to the Kitsap Community Resources Housing Solutions Center, where I was able to find temporary housing and, ultimately, the home where my daughter and I have now lived for four years.

I’m hardly alone. Throughout the nation, Head Start and Early Head Start are helping struggling families—and the communities where they live—build a better future.

When sequestration hit my hometown of Bremerton, Washington, Head Start had to cut the number of slots available for children. Many of these families had no other options for high quality care. The staff also took a cut to their benefits in order to maintain the high quality of services provided to the families who were still able to attend. These cuts disrupted the continuity of care for the children. Some “non-essential” personnel such as kitchen aids and training aids were let go. Other employees were asked to take on more tasks without a pay increase. Job insecurity made some staff members seek employment elsewhere—who could blame them? Federally-funded jobs were on shaky ground to say the least. The agency has now reduced staff down to the bare bones needed to meet the existing performance standards. If the sequester hits again, the program will have no other option than to further reduce the number of slots available. This bad policy is a disservice to the future of our community and many others: When a family’s foundation or a community’s assets are weakened or cut, progress is slowed or even halted.

I can’t even imagine where my daughter and I would be had we not had this incredible resource available to us.

Prior to Head Start, I was struggling to find my voice and my direction—homeless, pregnant, and sometimes hopeless. Through the program, I not only found a home, but I also attended finance classes and learned how to provide for my family on a budget. I learned the importance of self-care, and how this sets an example for my daughter. Using the skills we learned through the program, I am successfully co-parenting with my daughter’s father. Engaging in Head Start has also reignited my passion for learning, helping others, and advocating for policies that help people build a better life just like I have. I am back in school, working on completing a degree in political science so that I can pursue a career in grant and policy writing. I’m very involved in early learning and welfare policy in my community, and am interested in perhaps running for elected office someday so that I may continue contributing to my community in a positive, powerful way.

But that’s down the road. Right now I’m concerned about this: Head Start might not be available to me and my daughter and too many other families if Congress doesn’t act soon. If my daughter can’t attend Head Start, I worry that she will fall behind developmentally, and that I will not have a high quality program to send her to while I pursue my educational and employment goals and forge a path toward financial independence.

Head Start is crucial to families and communities that are most at-risk. Take it away, and you are simply making a life on the brink more precarious.

This frustrating state of affairs is directly related to high levels of inequality and stagnant wages, which have kept poverty rates much higher than they should be given that we’ve had more than five straight years of economic growth. The problem is that despite workers’ increased productivity and higher levels of education, the economic gains have concentrated at the top of the income ladder, leaving workers with flat or declining wages and chronic economic insecurity.

It’s clear that we need more aggressive action on inequality and poverty. But, at the same time, the Census data also confirm the dramatic role that our social insurance and assistance programs play in protecting families from hardship and boosting economic security for low- and middle-income families.

For example, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account a more comprehensive set of family resources and expenses, shows that last year Social Security lifted 25.9 million people out of poverty and the Earned Income and Child Tax credits kept 9.8 million people out of poverty. Similarly, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and affordable housing protected 4.7 million and 2.5 million people, respectively. Moreover, recent research shows that without our nation’s social safety net, the poverty rate would be nearly twice as high—with nearly 30 percent of Americans living in poverty!

The safety net assists working-age people across all levels of education. The combination of these programs—ranging from Social Security and Unemployment Insurance to nutrition assistance and tax credits for working-class families—boosted the average income of the most vulnerable workers by 22 percent.  For working-age people with a post-secondary education, average incomes increased by between 6 and 12 percent.

These policies don’t just lift families above our meager poverty line. They boost long-term employment, educational, and health outcomes for children, and increase family economic security in an economy that is increasingly only working for the wealthy few.

In order to build on the successes of these programs we need to act now and implement policies that we know work: boost wages and labor standards for low-wage workers and promote full employment; invest in nutrition, education, affordable housing, healthcare, and tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC); and remove barriers that keep people trapped in poverty such as our broken criminal justice system and predatory loans.

Thankfully, we’re seeing progress on many of these fronts.  We learned from the new data that last year the Affordable Care Act resulted in the largest drop in the uninsured rate since the Census Bureau began tracking it— there were 8.8 million fewer people without health insurance than in the preceding year.  There is now bipartisan momentum to reform the criminal justice system.  Workers are organizing for a higher minimum wage in states across the country.  Finally, a new overtime rule from the Obama administration would boost pay for millions of workers.

The bad news is that vital programs are at risk of cuts. Conservatives have already indicated that they will not make a routine fix to Social Security’s funding formula without extracting a pound of flesh through cuts to critical programs for people with disabilities. Key provisions in the EITC and CTC are set to expire in 2017; if Congress fails to act, it would push 16 million Americans into poverty or deeper into poverty. The House and Senate Republican Budgets deeply slash SNAP and Medicaid. And the tight caps and cuts to annual funding levels caused by sequestration and the Budget Control Act of 2010 have left critical investments such as those in affordable housing and education vulnerable to even deeper cuts.

Basic economic security would be weakened by conservative budget proposals this year, despite the fact that no policymaker’s district is immune from poverty. The tables below shows the poverty and child poverty rates in the districts represented by Members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees, which have jurisdiction over key antipoverty programs like Social Security, and the Earned Income and Child Tax credits.

The new Census data underscore that we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to reducing poverty and inequality. We know the good policies that we need right now.  It’s time to turn up the heat and call on all of our representatives to make good policy a reality.

House Committee on Ways and Means

 Senate Committee on Finance

We encourage you to ask questions of the candidates and join the conversation using #talkpoverty and #familiesvote.

The upcoming Republican presidential debate in Simi Valley, California offers prospective leaders of the largest economy in the world a chance to speak to the concerns of the 106 million Americans who are struggling to make ends meet. The looming question facing the working and middle class is this: how do we build a system that works for all of us?

The first Republican debates ran three and a half hours with 17 participants. The moderators failed to ask the kinds of questions that force candidates to say exactly how they will create opportunities for Americans being left behind. Even worse was the reinforcement of false and offensive stereotypes. When Fox News anchor and debate host Martha MacCallum asked—“How do you get Americans who are able to work to take the job instead of a handout?”—she effectively called millions of struggling Americans freeloaders.

We need a debate with powerful solutions, not tired stereotypes.

Yet the next debate will be held at the library dedicated to the President who created or propagated many of the stereotypes that are still used to demonize people who are struggling in our economy. Ronald Reagan is seen by many as a hero—a Dirty Harry who told it like it is and stood up to friend and foe alike. But to many low-income families, he is a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge, who—like the famous miser—exerted his power in a way that has made it harder for people to lift themselves up.

Reaganomics was rooted in the idea that if we build an economy that puts the interests of the wealthy first, then the benefits will trickle down to the rest of society. His formula was one part tax cuts for the well-off, and three parts dismantling labor unions, cutting spending on social programs, and neutering government oversight.

The rigged rules of today’s economy are the logical conclusion of Reagan’s approach to public policy.

“In so many domains, the course was set in the 1980s,” says Luke Shaefer, a University of Michigan professor and co-author of $2.00 A Day, Living on Almost Nothing in America.  “Reagan set the course and the [politicians] who have come afterwards have taken it even further beyond.”

In our continuing series on the presidential debates and poverty, we asked Americans how Reagan’s economic legacy affects them and what they want to hear from the presidential candidates.

‘The King of Rhetoric’ pushes the stereotype of the ‘Welfare Queen’

One of Reagan’s enduring legacies was his deft use of rhetoric to push his ideas. None was more harmful than the label “welfare queen,” a pejorative term he coined that has become synonymous with black single mothers who receive public assistance.

For Gloria Walton, it is a deeply personal slur. She grew up poor in Mississippi with a single black mother who worked all of her life in minimum wage jobs to make ends meet.

“My mom was working and needed public assistance to help make ends meet,” she says. “But Reagan demonized black women with this idea of the welfare queen. It’s offensive.”

Today, Walton is the president and CEO of Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE) in Los Angeles, training low-income adults in careers that will help them sustain their families. She says SCOPE combats the effects of Reagan-era policies like deregulation and cuts in federal programs, as well as wage stagnation, which have all devastated low-income communities.

Walton wants to ask all of the presidential candidates: “Economic inequality has widened. In my city, per capita income is $13,243 in South LA and $128,000 in Bel Air. What can you say to the hard-working men and women of South L.A. to justify this historically unprecedented income gap?”

The wealthy few get richer

Since Reagan, the gap between the wealthy few and the rest of us has reached historic proportions. After-tax incomes of the top 1 percent grew almost twice as quickly as they did for middle-class families between 1988 and 2011, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office.

Reagan’s efforts to weaken unions in order to strengthen corporations helped increase the gap because it reduced bargaining power and the number of well-paying jobs. When he fired striking air traffic controllers during his first term, it was considered an opening salvo on labor and a signal to corporations that they came first. Today, 11 percent of workers belong to unions, compared to 20 percent in 1983. One result has been a rise in temporary workers with few or no benefits. There are almost 3 million temporary workers in the U.S. today, more than double the approximately 1.2 million temporary workers in 1990.

Sonya Spann, 50, is one of those workers. She earns $11 an hour as a billing contractor for an insurance company in Birmingham, Alabama. Spann has no health or retirement benefits, or paid sick or family leave. But this was the best job she could find after the hospital where she worked shut down. Her husband lost his full-time job during the recession and now picks up hours working at a retail store for minimum wage.

“Every time we try to get off our knees and attempt to stand up, we get the rug pulled out from under us,” Sonya says. “What would you do in my situation and what are you going to do to create family-sustaining jobs?”

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Cuts in federal programs

Current efforts by legislators to cut SNAP, require drug testing of recipients of nutrition assistance, or implement other punitive measures that reduce the number of people eligible for government aid, all grow out of the Reagan tradition.

Reagan also eliminated or cut programs that significantly funded city budgets, cementing a pattern of disinvestment in low-income urban communities that continues to limit opportunities today. He also cut funding for public service jobs and job training, gutted federally funded legal services for the poor, and reduced funds for public transit.

Pat Jones, 63, sees the effects of this deprivation on her south LA community. It is a neighborhood wracked by poverty and a lack of jobs, where families struggling to make ends meet on the minimum wage must choose which utility is the most important to pay that month, she says.

“We look at the job market here and a lot of us can’t qualify for jobs or there are no training programs,” she says. “Corporations run everything. Reagan did that.”

Jones asks all presidential candidates: “Everybody has to pay their fair share of taxes, but corporations and the wealthy have a string of exemptions and loopholes. Why can’t they pay their fair share and what are you going to do to increase investment and opportunity in low-income communities?”

Here’s hoping that presidential candidates in both parties start answering the questions that people who are struggling want answers to.

Either scenario would mean that thousands of low-income and disconnected young adults would miss the valuable opportunity to serve their communities, and their neighbors would miss out on the vital services that AmeriCorps members provide.

As CEO of The Corps Network, a network made up of more than 100 Service and Conservation Corps, I am extremely concerned about the potential consequences of these cuts on low-income youth and their communities.  In 2014, more than 10,500 of our Corps members were living below the poverty line, on public assistance, or were court-involved upon entry into the program. Many of these young adults were also out of school. But instead of seeing them as liabilities, we view them as “Opportunity Youth,” because of their enormous untapped potential and their desire to improve their own lives and the world around them.

As an AmeriCorps member in The Corps Network, a young person receives a stipend or living allowance to perform service projects in their communities and on public lands. These projects range from planting trees and gardens, to building playgrounds and parks, to restoring degraded environments and habitats, to weatherizing and retrofitting low-income housing.  In order to undertake this work, Corpsmembers learn technical skills and earn professional certifications.  Their experiences help them advance their education, gain hands-on work experience, and develop skills in communications, teamwork, and leadership.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

I’ve been talking with our Corps about the potential impact of the proposed Congressional cuts, including with several staff and participants at the Youth Conservation Corps (YCC), located just outside of Chicago.

“We might have to close. AmeriCorps and additional private funds leveraged through AmeriCorps are especially important,” said Robert Shears, YCC’s Executive Director.

YCC Corpsmember Samuel Myers told me about how AmeriCorps service has helped him transform his life.

“If not for AmeriCorps I would still be on the streets. I would not have career goals—nothing like that,” said Myers. “YCC AmeriCorps helped set me straight. [I] feel good at the end of the day because I get to do things for people that they want to do but can’t. I wish more people would realize how important it is.”

Of particular concern to both Shears and Myers is the possibility of losing funding for the AmeriCorps Education Award that can be used to pay for postsecondary education.

“The award is a huge incentive for youth to join,” said Shears. “We’re focused on trying to help those Corpsmembers get through at least their second semester of college—that would be impossible without the AmeriCorps Education Award.”

“I am going to need some help to even think about going to college,” Myers added.

Shears noted that the cuts proposed by Congress might seem pennywise but they are decidedly pound foolish.

“There are few [programs] that provide both education and jobs skills to local young people while also providing important community benefits,” said Shears.  “Youth who are disconnected from work and school are a much greater burden on the tax system than those who are using our program to break out of poverty. Our members also serve as important role models in their disenfranchised communities.”

Many of the service projects are specifically designed to help low-income communities address environmental justice issues.  Corpsmembers turn abandoned lots into parks, playgrounds, and gardens; install energy-saving (and money-saving) retrofits in low-income homes; plant trees and organic urban farms in places that lack green spaces; cut down invasive trees and deliver the wood to families in need in rural areas; and provide community education around environmental health issues. Through AmeriCorps funding, the Corpsmembers are making a difference in their own underserved communities ranging from rural towns and Native American reservations to low-income neighborhoods in our country’s biggest cities.

Julian Amos is another YCC AmeriCorps Corpsmember who said that without the program he “would be on the streets right now.”  He also pointed to the tangible results he sees in his community.

“Feeding people, and helping build a house for a low-income family—all of that is helping out,” he said. “It also helps people like me get to where [we] need to go—into jobs and college. I’m just trying to get my foot in the door.”

The opportunity AmeriCorps offers is especially important in the wake of a recession as young people who have limited experience and few marketable skills suffer the most.

As a 2013 study conducted by The Corporation for National and Community Service found: volunteers without a high school diploma are 51% more likely to find a job than non-volunteers; people from rural areas who volunteer have a 55% greater chance of finding employment than non-volunteers; and volunteers who have been out of work have a 27% greater chance of finding a job than out-of-work individuals who do not volunteer. In short, young people who participate in AmeriCorps – regardless of their socioeconomic background – improve their chances of finding employment, getting on a career pathway, and becoming a productive adult and citizen.

Because of the AmeriCorps cause and the clear pathway to greater economic security that the program offers, demand already hugely outpaces available AmeriCorps slots. In 2011, 582,000 AmeriCorps applications were received for only 82,000 slots. As a result of budget cuts, AmeriCorps slots presently stand at around 73,000—now Congress is considering cutting that by another 25,000.

The very programs that strengthen our young people, our communities, and our nation need to be fortified, not torn down.

In $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Edin and Shaefer trace this disturbing trend to the 1996 welfare law, which has gradually but inexorably gutted the cash assistance safety net for families with children. Attention to this often neglected side of our nation’s extreme economic inequality is especially timely as policymakers from both parties consider reauthorizing the 1996 welfare law. As the book vividly shows, we are long overdue to take a different path — one that upholds our nation’s values, including our responsibility to protect and empower the most vulnerable by eliminating extreme poverty.

Living on less than $2.00 per person per day is the World Bank’s standard for measuring poverty in developing countries. Through rigorous data analysis and in-depth interviews, Shaefer and Edin document the dramatic rise in extreme poverty since the 1996 welfare law. Similarly, research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities confirms a rise in “deep poverty” — income below half the poverty line, or below roughly $10 per person per day for a typical family — and shows that Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), created in 1996, reduces deep poverty far less than its predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Research shows that early childhood poverty causes short- and long-term harm, in turn posing enormous costs to our economy.

To be sure, many experience $2.00-a-day poverty for months, not years. But trying to make ends meet with such minimal cash resources can be devastating even for the shortest periods. For many families, perilous work, unpredictable work schedules, and housing instability add up to much longer periods of destitution. Through story after story, Shaefer and Edin show how the inability to afford basics like personal hygiene items and transportation, combined with insufficient work and meager public benefits, can drive people towards abusive relationships, precarious housing, mistreatment by employers, and impossible choices between breaking the law and feeding a child.

How did we get here, and how do we get out?

First, when policymakers supposedly shifted to a work-based safety net in 1996, they didn’t ensure that there would be enough decent jobs for everyone who wants one. While President Clinton’s proposed welfare overhaul in 1992 guaranteed a public-sector job for anyone who couldn’t find one, the 1996 law had no such guarantee. Both the labor market since 2000 and the experience of the successful but short-lived TANF subsidized jobs program in the Great Recession have made clear that many more people want jobs than can find them, in good times and bad.

Second, changes in the structure and funding of welfare have given states incentives to keep people out of TANF and to kick off many of those who do manage to enroll. As much as other programs like the EITC and SNAP (formerly food stamps) have done more over the past two decades to help families in poverty, including deep poverty, these improvements have been little match for the continued underfunding of housing assistance and the huge hole blown in our cash assistance safety net by the 1996 law.

$2.00 a Day shows that charities and individuals provide some help to extremely poor families, often making the difference between spending the night on the street and having shelter. But Shaefer and Edin also observe that people with the greatest need often live the farthest from available assistance. And even the communities with the most resources can’t meet the need without government help.

Shaefer and Edin suggest a straightforward strategy to change the unacceptable status quo: create jobs and prepare the most disadvantaged adults for them; update labor standards to reflect the reality of work in America today; invest in affordable housing; and provide a real safety net for times when people who want to work simply don’t find work possible given their caregiving responsibilities and other challenges.

We hope that this new book forces us all to grapple with the destructive circumstances we have allowed to persist for our nation’s most vulnerable families. We must reform our public policies to ensure that nobody faces a poverty so deep that many of us wouldn’t even believe it exists in this wealthy nation. We can’t ignore the shortcomings of our safety net that are exposed by the growth of $2.00-a-day poverty in America.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

At Princeton Seminary, in a theology class on the life and writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I came across this same assertion that the American ethos about people in poverty had changed. In Dr. King’s Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, he writes of the attitudes in the early 20^th century:

“At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s ability and talents… the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber… We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent.”

King’s analysis is spot on in terms of poverty being largely caused by an economy that doesn’t provide full employment.  But his belief that America had progressed beyond its perception of an unworthy poor was inaccurate.

I have been studying and working in the field of social work for nearly twenty years, and I have seen the unworthy poor resurrected time and again in debates about what America should do about poverty. My college sociology classes in the late 1990s coincided with the implementation of a sweeping welfare reform bill that focused on “personal responsibility.” My grad school days saw appeals from “compassionate conservatives” that social services should be left to the churches and non-profits that they claimed were better equipped to help people change their lives.

Then, in my first social work placement, I encountered firsthand the consequences of the belief that social policies should punish struggling people for their “poor decisions.” I remember two young mothers, each with a child and no source of income.  They turned to our county welfare program for help to meet their children’s basic needs. Both mothers received a small monthly cash grant, but they were denied emergency housing assistance because each had “caused her own homelessness” as determined by the welfare office. In desperation, they moved in with new boyfriends, neither of whom were willing to use birth control. The result was unwanted pregnancies. The response from the system was horrifying: these unborn children would receive no help from the state because their mothers had gotten pregnant while receiving cash assistance.  The insidious narrative of the “welfare queen” left no room to consider their circumstances or their desperation.

Now, more than a decade into my career in social justice advocacy, I have grown accustomed to social policy proposals being based on the assumption that people experience poverty because of their own failures. For example, when national leaders rail against the nation’s largest anti-hunger program and slash its funding in the name of reducing “dependency”—a dependency that in fact doesn’t exist—they are really saying that people in poverty are lazy and should be forced to fend for themselves. It is still acceptable, even popular, to ascribe moral weakness to people in poverty rather than to examine the economic and social structures that hold them there.

Despite Dr. King’s overestimation of progress in attitudes towards the poor, his core message remains relevant today: Only when we change a system that traps so many Americans in a struggle to meet their basic needs will we create an economy defined by opportunity and the chance for anyone to thrive.

To discuss how far we’ve come—and how far we still have to go—we’re joined by Talley Wells, Director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, for an overview of the ADA as well as the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision, a critical civil rights case for people with disabilities. Courtesy of the Vera Institute, we feature remarks from Talila “TL” Lewis, founder of HEARD, on the impact of the criminal justice system on people with disabilities. We also hear from Alice Wong about the Disability Visibility Project, a partnership with StoryCorps to collect oral histories of people with disabilities. And we are joined by Michael Morris, Executive Director of the National Disability Institute, to discuss the work that lies ahead to ensure that disability and poverty no longer go hand in hand.

Here are 7 moments from this week’s episode reflecting on the ADA:

1.  “[Olmstead] is the most important civil rights decision for people with disabilities. It’s often called the Brown v. Board of Education decision for people with disabilities.”

2. “When the laws changed and society changed, [Kate Gainer] had the right to get in the front of the bus, but it wasn’t until much later – and the push from the disability rights movement – that she was actually able to get on the bus because she uses a wheelchair.”

3. “Tanisha Anderson, Freddie Gray, Anthony Hill, Ezell Ford. These are African American people with disabilities whose lives were cut short by law enforcement.”

4. “People with disabilities are the largest minority populations in jails and prisons.”

5. “Deaf-blind, deaf-disabled, and hard of hearing prisoners customarily experience discrimination and terrible abuse in our prisons. Punished for failure to obey commands they cannot hear.”

6. “I couldn’t believe it. It was thrilling to be in the White House and to actually say hello to the President.”

President Obama talks w Alice Wong via robot before ADA reception today. pic.twitter.com/W7BMEwWX9B

— petesouza (@petesouza) July 21, 2015

7. “There’s a disability pay gap: For every dollar earned by workers without disabilities, those with disabilities earn just 68 cents.”

Subscribe on iTunes!

Questions? Comments? Email us at info@talkpoverty.org!

This scenario is common. Hardworking direct-care workers give up their jobs because of untreated injuries and chronic illnesses that could have been managed if the worker had access to health coverage. Our new analysis, “Too Sick to Care”, finds that nearly 300,000 of America’s paid caregivers—nursing assistants, home health aides and personal care aides who provide care and assistance to millions of our nation’s elders and people with disabilities—have been denied coverage because they live in one of the 21 states, mostly across the deep South and Midwest, that have rejected federal funds from the Affordable Care Act for Medicaid expansion.

These workers fall into the “coverage gap”—that is, without expansion they are ineligible for Medicaid coverage but earn incomes below the minimum threshold (100 percent of the federal poverty line or $24,250 for a family of four) required to receive tax credits to buy coverage on a state market exchange.

Solving this coverage issue for direct-care workers is significant not only for them but for all of us.

With growing numbers of elders and people with disabilities, the demand for direct-care workers—particularly those who care for clients in their homes—is skyrocketing. The two home care occupations—home health aide and personal care aide—will create more new jobs between 2012 and 2022 than any other occupation.

If a large percentage of these workers are unable to access health coverage, we will find it increasingly challenging to find the care we need for ourselves or our loved ones. For people living with disabilities, this isn’t simply an inconvenience, it is a barrier to exercising their civil rights. On the 25^th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is important to remember that living independently in the community—a right that people have fought for, for decades—requires access to a robust and stable workforce.

But long-term care employers, particularly those who provide supports in private homes, are already reporting that they cannot find or retain sufficient numbers of workers to meet the demand for services. It’s not surprising: average wages are less than $10 per hour; injury rates are higher than in almost all other occupations; and employer-sponsored health coverage is uncommon. The reality is that one in two workers leave the job each year. This turnover is highly disruptive for clients and undermines the overall quality of care.

So what can we do to ensure that direct care workers don’t go without health coverage themselves?

First, and foremost, we need to continue to advocate for states to expand Medicaid coverage. Direct-care workers are 32 percent less likely than other workers to have employer-sponsored coverage, making Medicaid an important option.  Long-term care employers who depend on Medicaid reimbursement for the majority of their revenues often can’t afford to offer health coverage. For example, in North Carolina, the state pays only $13.88 per hour for personal care services. The average wage for a personal care aide is $9.18, making it extremely difficult for the provider to also provide health coverage.

One solution would be to provide a “differential reimbursement rate” for high-road employers who make affordable health coverage for their workers a priority. Under this scenario, states would pay providers an additional amount per hour of service provided. Recognizing the recruitment challenges in their state, the Maine legislature recently increased Medicaid reimbursement to home care providers from $15 to $25 per hour. The legislation is essentially a “wage pass-through.” Almost the entire increase (85 percent) must be used to increase direct-care worker wages and benefits, including health care coverage, as opposed to being used to fund administrative or other agency expenses.

Finally, about 25 percent of direct-care workers are immigrants. Unfortunately, lawfully residing immigrants who have lived in the US for less than five years cannot access Medicaid coverage for themselves or their children, although 14 states extend some health benefits through state programs. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for either Medicaid coverage or federal subsidies. Recently, the California State Senate passed a bill to offer coverage to undocumented immigrants in their state. A better solution would be for Congress to create a path to citizenship for direct-care workers, thereby expanding opportunities and improving wages and benefits, and growing and stabilizing the workforce.

As Rosalynn Carter once said, “You have either been a caregiver, you are a caregiver, you will be a caregiver, or someone will care for you.” Acknowledging this universal reality, we must expand coverage to all direct-care workers so that they can continue to provide quality care for those who need it while also caring for themselves and their families.

Throughout its history, Medicare has been effective at reducing poverty for older people and people with disabilities, and at increasing access to health care. In the program’s very first year, more than 19 million people over age 65 enrolled; access to care increased by one-third; poverty among older and disabled Americans decreased by nearly two-thirds; and personal economic security increased for older people and their families.

As Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro said, “Medicare is a bedrock part of the American social insurance system.” It has provided peace of mind for millions of Americans, who know they will have reliable health care coverage in retirement. The program covers people most in need of care—people who often wouldn’t be covered by private insurers or couldn’t afford such insurance. It also strengthens families by limiting the financial burden of health care costs for their older and disabled relatives.

Many people are unaware that Medicare has also helped change our society. For example, its creation was a huge boost for civil rights. Any hospital wishing to collect Medicare funds had to desegregate to qualify for payments. As a result, thousands of hospitals fully desegregated in only four months.

Medicare has seen many positive changes.  It added hospice coverage in 1982 and now almost half of beneficiaries who die use this important benefit. In 2008, Medicare coverage of mental health services changed, so that these services were reimbursed at the same rates as other Medicare-covered services delivered in the same care settings. As a result, hospital care for mental health services no longer costs more than hospital care for a physical health problem.

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act added a decade of economic security to the Medicare Trust Fund, increased free preventive services, and increased parity between traditional Medicare and private Medicare plans.

A recent “improvement” came about as a result of work by the Center for Medicare Advocacy – where I serve as the Executive Director – and by our partners at Vermont Legal Aid. When Medicare beneficiaries have a chronic condition, such as Alzheimer’s or Multiple Sclerosis, they often need skilled care in order to maintain their condition or slow deterioration. Medicare regularly denied such coverage because the beneficiaries weren’t “improving.” This harmful practice impeded access to necessary care and placed an unfair burden on families who were forced to pay for these services. As a result of a 2012 settlement with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, coverage for skilled care can no longer be denied simply because an individual isn’t improving. Coverage is available for skilled care to maintain an individual’s condition.

Despite Medicare’s success, it faces threats like never before. From privatization to coverage denials, to political pressure that would limit coverage and increase costs for beneficiaries in the future. However the Center for Medicare Advocacy is advocating for a number of common sense solutions that would better protect beneficiaries and help improve Medicare’s financial security, without cutting benefits or coverage. These include:

• Paying Medicare Advantage at the same rates as traditional Medicare. Private plans should not be paid more than traditional Medicare. This would save more than $132 billion dollars over 10 years;
• Adding a prescription drug benefit to traditional Medicare;
• Requiring Medicare to obtain the best prices for prescription drugs — — which would save more than $141 billion over 10 years;
• Fixing the broken Medicare appeals system by eliminating one of the first levels of review. The vast majority of reviews at the initial and second levels are “rubber stamp” denials which simply add bureaucracy and waste money. This would save around $100 million per year in operating costs.

Medicare works well for the American people and it has for 50 years. Let’s ensure that it stays strong and continues to open doors to health insurance and health care for our nation’s most vulnerable people and their families.

Jodi and Randy Speidel, a couple in their mid-40s, taped a note to the front door of their one-bedroom rental home warning visitors of carbon monoxide. They let their three cats outdoors and wrote a note attesting that their next decision was a mutual one. Then, in their locked bedroom, they lit two charcoal grills and committed suicide.

The couple’s 20-year-old daughter had recently turned to gofundme.com to seek assistance for her parents, The Columbus Dispatch reported. Describing them as “the hardest-working people I know,” she wrote, “now that they literally cannot work anymore, they have nowhere to turn to.”

Chronic illnesses had forced both to stop working. They had lived without heat all winter and without water for a week. Jodi had applied for assistance and was waiting for a response. She had turned to food banks but was struggling to cook without water. They were down to $33 in savings.

Jodi herself sought help from gofundme.com and giveforward.com. She in fact signaled a little hope—writing that she had “found a job that is willing to work with my illnesses.” But she also described driving more than 30 miles “on gas fumes” and not knowing if she “would make it back home or even there.”

“I have turned in every direction possible and don’t know what else to do,” Jodi wrote. “If you can help we will be forever grateful and will even pay you back once we get back on our feet.”

One thing the Speidels apparently didn’t do was turn to their neighbors—some of whom said they would have offered help had they known of the couple’s struggles.

“We have become such a disassociated and anti-social society that we don’t even know our own neighbors,” a pastor lamented to the Dispatch, suggesting that a tighter community could have made a difference.

We don’t really know if their neighbors were in a position to provide the kind of resources the couple needed. But it’s notable that Jodi opted for the relative anonymity of reaching out online rather than turning to her neighbors. Over the years, I have heard from many people with low incomes about the shame and stigma of poverty, and how it keeps them from telling others about what they are going through.

In March, a couple of colleagues and I met with five members of Witnesses to Hunger, an advocacy organization whose members use photographs and their testimonials to document their experiences in poverty and advocate at the state, local, and federal levels for policy reform. We wanted to explore a campaign that would push back against the shaming of low-income people by the media, politicians, and other high-profile individuals, and support individuals who want to share their stories in order to educate the public and policymakers about poverty in America.

“Telling my story was like coming out of the closet,” said Betty Burton of Martha’s Vineyard. “Stigma makes people hide in the shadows. Your next-door neighbor could be struggling with poverty and you don’t even know it.”

Anisa Davis of Camden said she felt ashamed to tell her story until she became a member of Witnesses to Hunger. “People need to tell their stories in order to rid themselves of the baggage that comes with that shame.”

But finding the courage to tell one’s story is easier said than done, especially when much of the media and our politics not only blame people who are struggling for their poverty, they also bash them for it. Philadelphia Witness to Hunger member Angela Sutton spoke of the stereotypes propagated about people with low-incomes, such as their being “dumb, lazy, or just making babies.”

“Stories rarely show the positive changes that Witnesses and others are trying to create in our communities,” said Sutton. She said these kinds of stories would “break barriers” and help “people who are struggling to speak up.”

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

In addition to Jodi’s posting online, the Dispatch reports that she also had applied for assistance. We don’t know what she applied for—or whether her application would have been approved—but it’s worth looking at how hard we make it for people to get help in our country. Despite all of the rhetoric that suggests “welfare dependence” is rampant, the numbers tell a far different story.

•  Only 25 in every 100 families with children in poverty receive TANF cash assistance, down from 68 in 1996. In Ohio, it’s about 29.
•  Only about 1 in 4 households eligible for federal rental assistance actually receives it. By mid-2014, because of sequestration, there were 100,000 fewer families receiving housing vouchers. In Ohio, more than 370,000 low-income renter households pay more than half of their monthly cash income towards housing costs.
•  Ohio opted out of a waiver of work requirements for recipients of nutrition assistance, despite the continuing struggles of low-wage, unemployed, and underemployed workers. This impacted thousands of people, many of whom reported poor physical or mental health.
•  According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), when it comes to disability benefit systems, the United States has “the most stringent eligibility criteria for a full disability benefit.” More than 80 percent of people are denied when they submit their initial application, and less than 40 percent are approved after all appeals are exhausted. Every year, thousands of applicants die while awaiting their benefits.

Jack Frech, the former director of the Athens County Department of Job and Family Services in Appalachian Ohio, recently retired after more than thirty years of service in the welfare department. He said times have changed and we have made it much more difficult to get assistance.

“I’ve watched the stigma about welfare grow at the hands of both political parties at all levels of government,” said Frech. “It is deeply ingrained in our administration of assistance programs. We have codified the belief that we are not our neighbors’ keeper. Shame on us.”

I hope a reporter does a follow up to this story: What assistance did Jodi Speidel try to obtain? Did she receive a response? What is the process for applying? Is there any expedited process for emergency assistance? How could we reform the system to prevent the next unnecessary deaths from occurring?

The unavoidable truth is this: These deaths did not need to happen, and the Speidels should not die in vain.

Poverty is a word loaded with preconceived notions, common misperceptions, and seemingly innocuous assumptions. What the word does not do is delve below its surface meaning, into the reality of poverty—a world that no one wants to live in.

Poverty is exhausting. Poverty is despair and desperation-inducing. Poverty is soul, dream and hope crushing. Poverty is like being enclosed in a prison cell with no doors or windows. It feels claustrophobic, as if there is no way out. Only the most resilient do not give up. Still, there is no guarantee that life will get better—and those in poverty know this all too well. They either become hardened or submit to fate. You don’t live life, you don’t thrive—you survive. You wonder if you are predestined, like a caste in another country, to live out a life destitute of fulfillment—whether financial, professional or just having a better life.

These are the very thoughts that consumed me in times of poverty. And yet, I never stopped believing that there must be a way out. The “how” and the “why” of my situation—resounding questions that were never sated—eventually fell by the wayside as I pushed towards hope. The very thing that brought despair and darkness motivated me to dig out of that prison, to fight with everything within me, to find that light that must exist outside of the walls.

In America, there is this prevalent belief that if someone just pulls herself up by her bootstraps, she can succeed. And yet, as I have learned, it is entirely possible to work your ass off and still struggle. Whether I had boots or not, whether I was barefoot, in heels, what I really learned is that resources and access to them—a network of support, and awareness of available choices—are the most influential factors in the “making it or breaking it” of life in the US. So much of this became clear to me only later—when I had the opportunity to see outside of the tiny, claustrophobic room that I had been in for years.

Living in poverty need not be a death sentence. I decided when I was 5 years old that I wanted to secure a bachelor’s degree before I was married (which I did). Throughout my childhood, I had a voracious appetite for knowledge: I was constantly hungry to learn more. In high school, I decided that upon graduation I would leave the state and my family to start a new life for myself, even though it was extremely hard and I worked three jobs at one point. In college, I knew that I wanted to live and work overseas, to expand my perspective and learn more about the world. And when life challenges blindsided me as an adult (now with two degrees under my belt), I continued to learn what my options were, what resources were available to me, and to fight hard to provide the best opportunities that I can for my own children, so that they may never see themselves as “living in poverty” or not having a shot at a better life.

Enduring poverty is not the end of hope or life. The key things needed to break down the walls that imprison those within poverty are: outside influences, support networks such as friends or family, awareness of other opportunities, and access to resources.

With this combination, a new life is possible.

The question we are now faced with in New York City (and around the country) is this—how do we enhance or create new government policies to further reduce poverty? A groundbreaking new study finds that in fact we could reduce poverty in New York City by as much as 69 percent.

Commissioned by the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA), Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, and UJA-Federation of New York, the study examines the potential impact that select antipoverty policies—alone and in combination—could have in reducing poverty in the City. This partnership is born out of our shared values and traditions of caring for people in need; the unparalleled reach of our combined networks in helping all New Yorkers; and a fundamental belief in the God-given dignity and potential of every human being.

We examine policy reforms related to transitional jobs, minimum wage increases, earnings supplements, tax credits for seniors and persons with disabilities, increased SNAP benefits, guaranteed child care subsidies, and increased housing vouchers.  An analysis by the Urban Institute tested the policies for their individual impact, as well as the effects of three different policy combinations with varying levels of participation.

The individual policies reduced poverty by 1 percent to 26 percent, but when the policies were combined they had a far greater effect: Combination 1 in the chart above reduced poverty by 44 percent, to 12.1 percent; combination 2 reduced poverty by 54 percent, to 9.8 percent; and combination 3 reduced poverty by 69 percent, to 6.7 percent.

The evidence is clear. Public policy must be at the center of efforts to fight poverty, and as a nation, we need to adopt policies that invest in low-income workers and their families while also removing barriers to economic stability. Ending poverty will require a significant commitment of city, state, and federal resources.  But there is also ample evidence that these investments not only improve the lives of individuals and strengthen their communities, they also ultimately reduce government spending.

There is plenty of talk these days about the importance of reducing poverty and improving economic mobility.  Our new study shows what a comprehensive plan might look like and how we can get the job done.

As recently as 2009, nearly 4 in 10 Americans felt that it was common for someone to start poor, work hard, and become rich. But by 2014, only 23 percent of Americans said that hard work alone is enough to achieve success, and an overwhelming 92 percent said they value financial stability over economic mobility, an increase of 7 percentage points since 2011. These results indicate that American attitudes appear to be shifting: The American Dream is becoming less about mobility and more about keeping one’s head above water.

In late February, Pew released findings from a nationally representative survey that collected data from more than 7,000 American households on family balance sheets as well as families’ perceptions of their own financial security. This research combined quantitative and qualitative information to begin to explain the changing definition of the American Dream. The survey revealed that although Americans are starting to feel more optimistic about the economy and their own finances, most still worry about money.

Fifty-six percent rated their financial situations favorably, but the same proportion (57 percent) said they are unprepared for a financial emergency, and only half reported feeling financially secure. Many people’s descriptions of their financial lives suggest that they have reason to worry: More than half (55 percent) said that they either break even or spend more than they make and that their income or expenses fluctuate each month, making it difficult to plan and save. A full one-third reported having nothing in savings, which causes a great deal of anxiety.

In addition, many Americans experience economic shocks that strain family finances and often derail savings plans and aspirations. These unexpected expenses, combined with frequently unpredictable income, even eat away at the budgets and savings of families at the upper end of the income ladder: One in 10 of those with income of $100,000 or more has no savings, and 1 in 5 reports income volatility.

As policymakers look for ways to bolster families’ economic security in the post-recession economy, they must consider Americans’ changing perceptions as well as their financial realities. For example, specific components of savings plans, such as opt-out versus opt-in choices for 401(k)s, can dramatically increase retirement savings.

But decision-makers must also take into account that policies can present conflicting messages about—and even hinder—asset accumulation. For example, although many low-income families understand the importance of saving, a host of states include asset limits in the eligibility requirements for cash and food assistance programs, which can deter potential participants from enrolling or keep enrollees from building savings. These unintended consequences can, in turn, further compromise families’ financial security and feed the growing sense among many Americans that economic mobility is no longer readily available in the United States.

As they prepare platforms for the 2016 election, many policymakers have begun to outline proposals intended to increase Americans’ opportunities to move up the ladder. But before going too far down the mobility path, they should consider families’ priorities, attitudes, and financial realities. People can’t be economically mobile if they aren’t first financially secure.

The social problem I am talking about is poverty. Poverty has always been an issue that’s been framed—one way or another—by morality. For those who view the poor with moral indignation, the solution is to enact policies designed to punish; and for those who apply empathy, the goal is to create programs that are geared to empower and uplift the poor.

What I perceive, based on personal experience—I’ve worked with many public and private groups on the issues of homelessness and poverty and I’ve experienced homelessness myself—is that one’s moral perspective on the poverty issue usually defines how one goes about finding and implementing solutions to it.

The dividing line seems to be whether you think poverty is caused by people lacking the basic resources they need in order to have stable families, good educational opportunities, and jobs; or, you think that people do not have these basic resources because they lack the personal attributes and social skills needed to earn them, as was implied by columnist David Brooks in a New York Times editorial last year.

I think it’s unfair to expect that people who don’t have access to basic needs—like adequate food, housing, and health care—should live normal and productive lives. To then punish them on top of that—by denying work and income supports, for example—is not only immoral, it’s irrational as well.

Early on in the battle to end poverty in America, the moral high ground was held by those with an empathic approach to alleviating poverty, in words and actions.

President Roosevelt proclaimed: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.” He followed up those words with the New Deal, giving rise to Social Security and the modern liberal/progressive movement in America.

In his Inaugural Address in 1961, President Kennedy said: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” He then announced a “New Frontier”: policies that extended jobless benefits, aid to children, increased Social Security and the minimum wage, and financed public affordable housing.

After Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ championed the Great Society and the War on Poverty: “… Neither you nor I are willing to accept the tyranny of poverty, nor the dictatorship of ignorance, nor the despotism of ill health, nor the oppression of bias and prejudice and bigotry. We want change. We want progress.” And he backed those words up with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, The Food Stamp Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965.

In 1967, Martin Luther King wrote that “poverty has no justification in our age.” He compared it to “the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned” to produce their own food. “The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” He launched the Poor Peoples Campaign in 1968 to try to “gain economic justice for low-income people in the United States.” He was assassinated that year.

Bobby Kennedy took up the mantle as advocate for the poor and during his presidential campaign declared: “I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.” He, too, was assassinated—just two months after King.

Even President Nixon continued to build on many of these progressive policy reforms. In 1969 he called for “an end to hunger,” expanded the food stamp program, and then created the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in 1972.

I was born in the 1950s and lived through each of these periods of inspiration, hope and optimism; each were followed—inevitably, it came to seem—by death and anguish. The sudden, tragic loss of our most gifted and promising political and moral leaders left many in my generation traumatized and deeply scarred.

In the wake of the political carnage of the 1960s, and the national emotional hangover that only worsened with Vietnam and Watergate, Ronald Reagan came onto the national scene in the 1970s with openly racist disdain for the poor. His stump speeches included references to “welfare queens” taking “government handouts” while driving a “Cadillac”; and “strapping young bucks” using food stamps to buy “T-bone steaks.”

Does anyone think for a moment that if Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X were still alive then that they would have let him get away with that racist vitriol unchallenged? But Reagan did, and he backed up his words with actions.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

He took particular aim at programs and services that were effectively reducing poverty and preventing homelessness prior to his election. In his own version of a perfect storm for the poor, Reagan gutted the budget of Housing and Urban Development  (HUD); discarded the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, and as a result, scores of people suffering from mental illness became displaced, homeless, or incarcerated instead of receiving treatment in community mental health centers; and he changed the political narrative about poverty and homelessness—from one that acknowledged it as a national problem, to one that framed it as a matter of personal choice.

As President Reagan said in a 1984 interview with Good Morning America regarding the unprecedented surge in homelessness: “People who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.”

It’s a legacy we are still unable to escape more than a quarter century since he left office. How many of us liberal and progressive leaders are willing to take on Ronald Reagan’s view of America that has seeped so deeply into our national psyche?

I’ll start the dance. I’m a writer and David Brooks is a writer. So I’ll call him out. Your editorial in the NY Times that singled out single mothers as being one of the chief causes of poverty in America? The last thing a single mother needs is a lecture from you on the “cultural roots of the problem” of poverty that are “really the inescapable core of the thing.” What she really needs is a job that pays a wage that is sufficient to house and feed herself and her children; affordable quality childcare so she can work; and access to health care is probably a pretty damn good idea too.

If our current busting-at-the-seams economy can’t provide a living wage because it’s so grotesquely skewed to enhance the wealth of the already wealthy, then it’s our responsibility—as proudly empathic liberals and progressives—to force our politicians to enact programs that will protect, serve, and empower ALL of our citizens equally and together.

However, when it comes to an increasing population of low-to-no-income seniors, many preventative measures come too late.  Education and retraining initiatives, savings plans, and job creation programs won’t help someone in her 70s or 80s who is struggling just to cover room and board after a lifetime of low-wage labor.

But it’s not too late to protect the rights of seniors to a basic living.

For this growing demographic of aging poor, we cannot hold up our hands and say we should have helped them 50 years ago, or helped their parents a century ago. We must, and we can, take action.  By updating the federal safety-net programs we already have in place, we can move towards an economically stable future for people as they age.

Here is a 5-step plan to fight senior poverty:

Strengthen the existing safety net. Senior poverty would be much worse without Social Security, the Supplemental Security Income program, and Medicare and Medicaid. These programs are almost single-handedly responsible for reducing the official measure of senior poverty from 35 percent in 1960 to 9 percent today. But seniors today are rapidly losing ground. Proposals to cut Social Security benefits, increase Medicare cost-sharing for beneficiaries, or limit Medicaid coverage should all be rejected. Instead lawmakers must advance proposals to ensure that these benefits meet the growing need.

Improve the Supplemental Security Income program. The poorest two million people over age 65 receive SSI payments, but the rate of seniors in extreme poverty is increasing in part because this program — originally intended to lift all seniors out of poverty — has not been significantly updated since it was first passed in 1972. As a result, SSI essentially still leaves millions of the country’s most needy seniors in poverty. The maximum federal benefit for an individual is $721 per month (though some states kick-in a small supplement), but to be eligible a senior must have less than $2,000 in savings. In addition to the limit on savings, the SSI income disregard limits the amount of income someone can have from another source, such as from a pension or Social Security benefit, and still receive SSI. But the current SSI income disregard allows for only $20 of additional general income or $65 of earned income before there is a reduction in benefits. Updating the SSI income disregard would mean just a little more money for people for whom every dollar counts. The Supplemental Security Restoration Income Act, poised for reintroduction in Congress this spring, offers an opportunity to modernize the program.

Increase the availability of programs that provide assistance with healthcare and long-term care costs. One of the drivers of seniors’ economic vulnerability is the rising cost of health care. Proposals that would shift more of those costs to seniors will only drive more seniors into poverty. Instead, the health care programs that are designed to help the poorest seniors afford their health care – Medicaid, Medicare Savings Programs, and the Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy – should be expanded, and out-of-pocket costs should be reduced or eliminated.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Push for federal support for the long-term care safety net. With 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day, the number of people needing long-term care coverage is projected to rise from 12 million today to 27 million in 2050. Few seniors are prepared to pay for the costs of long-term care. For poor and economically vulnerable seniors, proposals that rely on them to save more of their already inadequate incomes in order to cover these costs are simply unrealistic. Public programs must be strengthened and modified to meet long-term care needs and to encourage the provision of more home- and community- based services.

Reauthorize the Older Americans Act (OAA). The OAA provides funding for critical services that seniors rely on to remain independent and healthy. Services include meals, benefit counseling, caregiver support, transportation, health promotion, legal services, and more. While these services are not always limited to poor older adults, seniors in poverty rely on them heavily to make ends meet and to ensure that their basic needs are met. It is time for Congress to renew its commitment to providing seniors with essential social services by reauthorizing the Older Americans Act.

We have done a great job reducing senior poverty in our nation. The next steps we must take are clear, and millions of seniors are relying on us to do the right thing and take action now.

Last year, Representative Paul Ryan proposed the most recent conservative block-grant proposal. Under his Opportunity Grant program, funding for the nation’s bedrock nutrition assistance program (SNAP) and several other means-tested programs would be combined into a single block grant with a fixed annual funding level. Rep. Ryan says he draws inspiration from the United Kingdom’s Universal Credit—a new means-tested cash entitlement benefit that consolidates six current benefits, including the Housing Benefit, Child Tax Credit, and Job Search Allowance. The Universal Credit has gotten off to a slow start in the UK due to implementation challenges, but the government says it will be fully implemented by 2019.

We will hear more about the Universal Credit this week. At an event at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Iain Duncan Smith, UK Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—and the architect of the policy—will keynote a discussion of what the United States can learn from the Universal Credit.

The fact is the Universal Credit doesn’t even remotely resemble Rep. Ryan’s proposal—or, for that matter, TANF or other block grants in the United States. Perhaps the most fundamental difference is that the Universal Credit will be an entitlement to eligible low-income people, one that is administered centrally by a single government agency.

We’re all for learning what we can from other countries, but the Universal Credit is not the most relevant policy for the United States to draw on. Among the key differences limiting its relevance to our system is the fact that one of the main problems the UK is trying to address—financial penalties for work—is far less of an issue in the United States. This is due to the design of our Earned Income Tax Credit—which kicks in at the first dollar of earnings—and the limited nature of other means-tested benefits for low-income unemployed people.

Moreover, a primer the Center for American Progress co-authored last year on the Universal Credit notes several concerns with the policy. For example, the UK’s Housing Benefit is currently a locally administered in-kind housing benefit paid directly to landlords on behalf of low-income tenants. Under the Universal Credit it will be paid directly to tenants as a cash benefit and administered centrally by the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions. This has raised concerns about how tenants, especially vulnerable ones, will manage direct payments of housing costs, and what happens if they fall behind on rent.

We do, however, welcome a conversation on how the Universal Credit can spur momentum stateside to reduce the administrative burdens associated with navigating multiple safety net programs. But it is worth noting there are already a long list of effective homegrown practices and policy reforms on this front that are seeing results. For example, the Affordable Care Act created a new, simplified system that states can use to enroll eligible people into Medicaid and CHIP, including an option to enroll people based on their SNAP eligibility.

Beyond the Universal Credit, when it comes to social policy more generally there is indeed a lot the US could learn from the UK: the UK has stronger labor market protections, more modern workplace standards, and a longstanding commitment to ensuring that working-age people—whether in or out of work, and with or without children—have access to health care for free as well as a minimum floor of housing and income assistance. While we don’t know if these types of lessons and reforms will be discussed at this week’s AEI event, any discussion of the UK’s Universal Credit and its relevance to US social policy should not be divorced from this broader context.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

To that end, here are a few things we hope US policymakers do consider when taking lessons from across the pond:

• Health services and almost all prescription drugs are free for everyone in the UK. But in the US, 22 states have refused to implement the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, leaving millions without access to care and subject to higher “marginal tax rates.”
• In the UK, all low-income people who rent are guaranteed means-tested housing assistance; in the US only about one-quarter of eligible low-income renters receive help.
• The UK guarantees means-tested unemployment assistance to low-income people who are unemployed—a single unemployed person without children is eligible for weekly grants that total about $450 a month[i]. The US does not have a means-tested unemployment assistance program that guarantees benefits nationwide. Low-income people can access SNAP, but the benefits are much more modest, and can only be used for food.
• The UK provides a family allowance to all low- and middle-income families with children through its Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit. In 2015, a single parent with one child and no earnings would be eligible for about $6,300 as a basic income guarantee under just these two benefits. While the US has a Child Tax Credit, it is modest by comparison and completely excludes families with no or very low earnings.

Although some of these programs—means-tested unemployment assistance, Housing Benefit, and Child Tax Credit—will be brought into the Universal Credit, they will continue to function as entitlements with the same base benefit levels.

Beyond benefit differences, it’s also worth noting that the UK has a national minimum wage, which is updated annually and currently equal to about $9.50 an hour (it will go higher when updated later this year) and gives almost all workers a legal entitlement to paid sick days. In addition, it provides paid family leave and a comparatively expansive system of pre-K and child-care assistance. This may help explain why women’s labor force participation has grown steadily since 2000 in the UK, while trending downward in the US.

In short, the US has a lot to learn from the UK. But we should glean our biggest lessons from the UK’s policy and reform successes that have improved basic labor standards, strengthened work-family balance, and fortified benefits for low-incomes families. Efforts like these have led to better outcomes for individuals and families, including lower poverty rates, than we have accomplished to date in the United States.

[i] This and other UK benefits amounts are converted into US dollars using an exchange rate that adjusts for cost of living differences between the UK and US.

Good Jobs
Strong Families
21st Century Social Insurance
Removing Barriers to Opportunity

Good Jobs

The President calls for a new investments in infrastructure projects such as ports, bridges, and roads, which would create millions of new jobs that pay a living wage.

The budget also includes significant investments to prepare American workers for medium- and high-skills jobs, including $60 billion for the president’s historic proposal to make community college free for students who keep up their grades, as well as funding to ensure that Pell grants don’t erode with inflation. Other funding would allow a doubling of apprenticeships over 5 years, and a significant expansion of re-employment services, and other workforce development programs that serve low- and middle-income workers.

Importantly, the president’s proposal includes significant new funding to help some of the most disadvantaged workers in the labor market. The budget includes $3 billion for a “Connecting for Opportunity Initiative,” which would make summer and year-round job opportunities more widely available and offer competitive grants to create educational and workforce opportunities for at-risk youth. Recognizing that subsidized jobs are an important tool for helping disadvantaged workers, the president’s budget also redirects over half a billion dollars to a “Pathways to Jobs” initiative to help states partner with employers to create these positions. The budget provides additional funding for subsidized jobs under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

Finally, the “First in the World” program would fund evidence-based and promising practices to improve the likelihood that low-income students could complete degrees and have a better shot at medium- to high-skill jobs in today’s economy.

Strong Families

CAP’s recent report on family policy underscores that policies that strengthen the economic foundation of families are an important part of ensuring that all families are stable, healthy, and strong. To that end, the president’s budget includes several key initiatives to ensure that families don’t need to make choices between a needed paycheck and bonding with a new baby, or going to work without affordable and quality child care.

Specifically, the President’s budget includes a proposal that provides incentives for up to five states to adopt earned paid leave legislation so that the birth of a child or illness of a family member doesn’t send a family into an economic tailspin.

The President reiterates his commitment to providing preschool for all by providing matching funds to states that set up preschool programs, but also offers up a historic expansion of childcare assistance, tripling the maximum child and dependent care tax credit to $3,000 and enabling more families to claim it.

The proposal also includes substantial investments of $82 billion over 10 years in the Child Care and Development Fund to help states offer subsidized child care to low-wage working parents. This could boost the number of slots available by more than 1 million. The budget also increases investments in quality infant and toddler care by expanding access to the Early Head Start program and ensures that children in Head Start can access full-day, full-year programs, which helps parents to work and improves outcomes for kids. The president’s budget continues his commitment to evidence-based home visiting programs that provide professionals like social workers and nurses to pregnant women and new moms in order to help parents support their child’s healthy development. The funded programs have shown a range of positive outcomes including lower rates of depressive symptoms and stress for parents and higher grade point averages and graduation rates for the children in the long-term.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

21^st Century Social Insurance

Given that four out of five Americans will face at least a year of significant economic insecurity at some point during their working years—and half will experience three years or more—we must ensure that our social contract provides sufficient protection amid the ups and downs of life.

To that end, the President’s budget includes important investments to strengthen several key elements of our social insurance system. He proposes bold reforms to Unemployment Insurance to make it respond more effectively as a stabilizer during recessions; ensure that long-term unemployed workers get the assistance they need without Congress needing to extend benefits; and help individuals secure comparable jobs as quickly as possible through investments in vital re-employment services.

Additionally, while the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of our nation’s most effective antipoverty programs, it largely misses childless workers and noncustodial parents, who remain the only group the federal government taxes into poverty. The President’s budget would expand the EITC for these workers, while also making permanent the 2009 improvements to the EITC and the Child Tax Credit, currently set to expire in 2017.

Finally, the President’s budget includes a commitment to keeping our Social Security system strong for current and future generations. To that end, the President would rebalance the old-age and survivors’ fund and the disability insurance fund to put both on sound footing for the next 20 years and to prevent a shortfall in the disability fund. (Rebalancing is a routine step that has been taken 11 times in the past when either fund has faced a shortfall—and it is the only option available to avoid needless, across-the-board benefit cuts for millions of disability insurance beneficiaries—which is what would happen if Congress fails to act before the disability fund’s reserves are depleted in 2016). With his budget, the President is sending a clear message to Congress that it would be irresponsible to threaten the benefits of nearly 9 million disabled workers and 2 million spouses and children for the sake of Congressional politicking. The budget also proposes much-needed increases in administrative funding for the Social Security Administration to reduce the backlog in disability hearings, and mandatory funding to ensure that the agency can do critical program integrity work.

Removing barriers to opportunity 

As a recent CAP report highlights, one group that faces significant barriers to opportunity is the approximately 1 in 3 Americans who have some type of criminal record. To ensure meaningful access to second chances, the President proposes increased investment in programs that support successful reentry. For instance, the budget includes a doubling of the Second Chance Act Grant program, which provides funds to state and local agencies and nonprofit organizations that provide services to support reentry and reduce recidivism; significant increases in resources for Bureau of Prisons programs that support mental health treatment and residential reentry centers, and the establishment of a new program to maintain and strengthen familial bonds for incarcerated individuals with minor children.

Moreover, recognizing that an individual’s zip code should not determine his or her life chances, the President proposes important investments to tackle place-based and concentrated poverty, including an expansion of the Promise Zones initiative, which aims to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies while helping local leaders access federal funding. The President designated five Promise Zones in 2014, and will name another 15 by the end of 2016.

Additionally, the President’s budget includes several policies to ensure that workers with disabilities have a fair shot at employment and economic security. For instance, it provides demonstration authority and funding for key federal agencies to explore early intervention strategies to support workers with disabilities in remaining in the workforce, as well as incentives for states to better coordinate services.

**

Budgets are about choices. One important choice that cuts across all of the above themes is the president’s choice to reject the spending caps imposed by sequestration in his budget. These caps are due to re-emerge in the next fiscal year absent congressional action, which would have disastrous consequences for our economy and for families. Sequestration costs jobs and erodes funding for skills training; sequestration undermines family economic security by kicking children out of Head Start and child care slots; it hurts the most vulnerable by slashing programs such as affordable housing and nutrition aid for babies and toddlers; and it means fewer resources for investments in community development in distressed neighborhoods, second chances for ex-offenders, and other opportunity-boosting programs.

But the president’s budget isn’t just about damage control. It makes real investments in cutting poverty and boosting economic mobility. In fact, the study that launched the Half in Ten campaign several years ago showed that raising the minimum wage, expanding the EITC and Child Tax Credit, and making childcare more broadly available to low-income families could cut poverty by 26% over 10 years. Those types of investments are all in this budget.

While a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to adopt the president’s budget, there are opportunities for bipartisan movement—including on the EITC, subsidized jobs, and common-sense reforms to our criminal justice system. But even if Congress were to ignore the vast majority of the president’s budget blueprint, it is important for advocates to pay attention. Budgets are about choices, and the President’s budget underscores that we can achieve deficit reduction while making investments in key aspects of economic opportunity: good jobs, strong families, a 21^st century social contract, and removing barriers to opportunity. The question is this: can we build the political will to make these choices happen?

“My favorite is Head Start because it was my idea,” he answered. “But I am proudest of Legal Services because I recognized that it had the greatest potential for changing the system under which people’s lives were being exploited.”

Legal services, also known as civil legal aid, has indeed been a potent anti-poverty tool in two ways. First, through individual case work that enables poor people to gain access to the rights and benefits from state and federal service agencies, health care providers, and schools to which they are entitled. Second, through large, class-action lawsuits and advocacy efforts that change laws and governmental policies that adversely―and overwhelmingly―affect poor people.

With the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty in 2014, we have been treated to numerous assessments of the effectiveness of Johnson’s (and Shriver’s) program these past 12 months. It is indisputable that tremendous progress has been made and that much work remains.

To continue progress, civil legal aid must be deployed more broadly in future efforts to combat poverty, and public resources for legal assistance must be increased greatly.

With regard to class action lawsuits, we have seen how civil legal aid has resulted in significant legal victories. In 1970, legal aid attorneys successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in Goldberg v. Kelly that state welfare departments cannot terminate benefits without first providing applicants with a fair hearing. In 1973, California Rural Legal Assistance successfully sued to stop large agricultural operators from requiring migrant farm workers to use short-handled hoes while working in fields. (The short-handled hoes forced workers to stay bent over for long periods of time; field managers required their use because if they saw workers standing up, then they knew that they were resting and not working.  After these hoes were banned, back injuries among farm workers dropped by more than 30 percent. ) More recently, a federal lawsuit by Greater Boston Legal Services resulted in changes in policy by the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance which had improperly denied benefits to people living with disabilities.

A look at how civil legal aid case work for individuals struggling with homelessness and/or unstable housing, as well as those who are victims of intimate partner violence, is also instructive.

Numerous programs around the country demonstrate that civil legal services can help poor people keep their housing, or negotiate exits from housing that prevent immediate evictions, and ensure a smooth transition to safe, affordable housing. A pilot program launched in 2009 by the Boston Bar Association showed conclusively that poor people fighting eviction notices in housing court in Quincy, Massachusetts fared much better when they were represented by attorneys. Two-thirds of those with full representation kept their housing; only one-third of those who went through housing court without an attorney were able to do the same. Similar results have been found in New York City, San Francisco, and San Mateo County in California.

Meanwhile, a landmark 2003 study published in Contemporary Economic Policy showed that legal services is one of the most effective ways to help women living in poverty escape intimate partner violence. Amy Farmer and Jill Tiefenthaler, researchers at the Carnegie Mellon Census Research Data Center, were intrigued by a U.S. Department of Justice report noting that rates of domestic violence had significantly declined during the 1990s. They analyzed data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and the U.S. Census to tease out the reasons for the improvement. Their conclusion? Access to civil legal services ensured delivery of protective orders; assistance with child custody and support; and divorce and property distribution that victims needed to begin rebuilding their lives. Civil legal assistance was also critical for resolution of domestic violence-related legal disputes around immigration, housing, and public benefits.

While services provided by emergency shelters, counselors, and hotlines are vital in the short-term, Farmer and Tiefenthaler wrote, services provided by civil legal aid “appear to actually present women with real, long-term alternatives to their relationships.” (It is also interesting to note that between 1994 and 2000, the period during which incidents of domestic violence declined, the availability of civil legal services for victims of domestic violence increased 245 percent—from 336 such programs to 1,441).

Despite these clear successes, many people do not understand what civil legal aid is, and surveys regularly find that most Americans erroneously believe that poor people have a right to free counsel in civil cases. Meanwhile, state and federal funding for legal assistance is well below what it needs to be.

This fall, the Boston Bar Association’s Statewide Task Force to Expand Civil Legal Aid in Massachusetts released Investing in Justice, a report showing that more than 60 percent of those who are eligible for civil legal aid in Massachusetts and seek services are turned away due to lack of resources. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the task force.)  The Task Force proposed that the Commonwealth’s investment in civil legal aid be increased by $30 million over the next three years to begin to address the unmet need. Currently, the state invests $15 million annually in civil legal aid.

The irony, of course, is that the civil legal aid yields a measurable―and significant―return on investment. Looking at work solely related to housing, public benefits, and domestic violence, three independent economic consulting firms which did analyses for the Task Force found that every dollar spent on civil legal aid in eviction and foreclosure cases saved the state $2.69 on services associated with housing needs such as “emergency shelter, health care, foster care, and law enforcement.” Every dollar spent assisting qualified people to receive federal benefits brings in $5 to the state. Every dollar spent on civil legal aid related to domestic violence is offset by a dollar in medical costs averted due to fewer incidents of assault.

This summer, Philadelphia resident Tianna Gaines-Turner became the first person actually living in poverty to testify before Congressman Paul Ryan’s Congressional hearings on the War on Poverty. In her strong and moving testimony she spoke of the need for increased state and federal funding to end poverty, saying, “People living in poverty―those who were born into it, and those who are down on their luck―want to get out of poverty. We want to create our own safety nets, so we never have to depend on government assistance again.”

Civil legal aid is a powerful tool.  It helps people living in poverty build a foundation of stability so they can create a better future for themselves, their families, and our communities. 

This commonsense step is called reallocation, a simple budgetary fix that temporarily changes the share of the payroll tax dedicated to each of the Social Security trust funds—the retirement fund and the disability fund. It’s a common procedure that has helped the Social Security programs deal with temporary shortfalls in both funds 11 times in the past. The current shortfall to Disability Insurance was long-anticipated—a result of changing demographics which include aging baby boomers and women entering the workforce in greater numbers in the 70s and 80s.

Reallocation offers a sure fix that has worked time and again. That’s why leading aging and disability organizations all strongly oppose the new rule – including AARP, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, Social Security Works, NOSSCR (of which I am the Executive Director) and more. A group of Senators immediately responded by sending a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, urging him to “forcibly reject” the House Republican rule.

 “Holding hostage the Social Security benefits of any American, particularly those of the 9 million Americans with disabilities who are at risk in the coming years, is an untenable proposition.”

The truth is that this Congressional politicking comes at the expense of the millions of Americans who rely on the Social Security Disability program, established over half a century ago to serve as a vital lifeline for those with serious illnesses and disabilities.

One recent story from a beneficiary illustrates clearly how people will be affected if automatic benefit cuts kick in as a result of the House rule. Abby (name changed) was diagnosed with Type I diabetes and started requiring insulin when she was 15 years-old. Even with her health challenges, she graduated from high school and had a successful, decades-long secretarial career.

Although Abby stayed very fit, paid close attention to her diet and managed the disease for 40 years, diabetes began to interfere with her ability to work due to the onset of new complications, including episodes of extreme confusion and passing out due to hypoglycemia. As a result, Abby was no longer able to work and consequently lost her medical insurance. Despite repeated attempts to return to work, she was unable to keep her blood sugar under control.

Abby initially filed for Social Security coverage and was denied. While her case was pending, she had many more blackout episodes and made the hard decision to stop driving for safety reasons. She did not have enough money to pay for a specialist who could get her symptoms under control. She feared passing out in public and having to pay for an ambulance, so she rarely left her home. She passed out on a regular basis, waking up with no recollection of what happened or how long she’d been out.

After two years of waiting, Abby had her Social Security hearing, and, with the help of an experienced Social Security Disability attorney, she was approved for coverage. This life changing decision means that she can now get health coverage, allowing her to see a diabetic specialist. And, she can afford an insulin pump and other supplies she needs on a daily basis.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Abby worked and paid into the Social Security system for decades, and tried to keep working for as long as she could. Her story is one of millions, and shows why we need to protect the program from harmful cuts and politically motivated changes.

Congress needs to enhance and strengthen this vital program for the 11 million individuals who rely on it to help keep them out of poverty. In addition to reallocating money from the retirement and survivors’ trust fund, Congress also needs to fully fund the Social Security Administration. This will alleviate backlogs in processing claims and ensure sufficient funding for program integrity work. People like Abby shouldn’t have to wait two years for basic healthcare.

Social Security has been a hallmark of our nation’s social infrastructure for decades, and its values go well beyond dollars and cents. The program strengthens economic security and dignity for all Americans. It also provides a boost to local economies across the country. We’re calling on the new Congress to take action to preserve and fortify the program – for current and future generations – not by partisan politicking, but through sensible, commonsense reforms to support the American people. Consideration of any changes to this vital system must include the voices and views of people with disabilities as well as all Americans who may need Disability Insurance in the future.

With a new conservative-led Congress, most people devoted to helping individuals and families living on the brink aren’t feeling terribly optimistic about the prospects for positive action at the federal level.  (With the exception, perhaps, of action on criminal justice reform.) In fact, we will almost certainly need to redouble our efforts simply to defend programs that are currently working.  Remember, poverty would be approximately twice as high—nearly 30 percent—without the safety net.

But as my friend and colleague at the Center for American Progress, Melissa Boteach, constantly says when she talks about poverty with activists—we can’t simply play defense, we’ve got to stay on offense.

Melissa is right, and frankly, with more than 1 in 3 Americans living below twice the poverty line—on less than about $37,000 annually for a family of three—it’s going to take a visible, disruptive, and non-violent movement if we are to create an economy that is truly defined by opportunity as well as a robust safety net that is there for us when we need it.  To some extent whether it’s conservatives or progressives who are in the Majority, our task remains the same: we must build a dynamic movement.

In the two weeks ahead, BillMoyers.com will feature a post every day by an anti-poverty leader.  Every day, one of these contributors will offer an action you can take to advocate for people who are struggling and to help build the movement we so urgently need.

Beyond these two weeks, we hope you will keep reading BillMoyers.com, which has long demonstrated its commitment to poverty-related issues.  Sign-up, too, for TalkPoverty.org weekly emails, and we will continue to bring you the voices and ideas of people who are struggling in poverty as well as posts by other anti-poverty leaders.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

There is nothing inevitable about poverty.  The only questions that remain are the same ones we have faced for so long: are we committed to dramatically reducing poverty?  And, if so, what are we willing to do to advance our goal?

Over the next 12 days, we hope the ideas offered by our contributors will provide valuable openings for your activism. BillMoyers.com will keep adding to the list each day here—bookmark the page to see all the big ideas. Please share this link and your thoughts below in the comments and via Twitter using #12Days.

The Media Must Tell the True Story of Struggle in America

by Deepak Bhargava

Last year, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly did a segment on poverty where he asserted that “poverty will not change until personal behavior does,” explaining that anti-poverty work will never overcome “addictive behavior, laziness, [and] apathy.”

In many ways, the segment sums up a widely-held myth constructed by the right that people who struggle to make ends meet don’t want to work. But in reality, people are working harder and harder for less and less, and all we have to do is listen to the stories of everyday Americans to see the truth.

Read More

Protect and Expand Workers’ Ability to Bargain

by Sarita Gupta

Greedy corporations have been on a decades-long bender to take advantage of working people – depressing wages, benefits and job standards, which has led to record inequality and poverty.

Fighting poverty requires expanding and protecting the ability of workers to bargain with their employers to demand higher wages, better working conditions and better living standards. As the nature of work changes, we look at collective bargaining through the union workplace campaign lens, but also through nontraditional forms, including legislative, policy, rulemaking and industry-wide interventions that put more money in workers’ pockets and improve standards and conditions for workers. Only through bargaining do workers have the power to directly confront the corporate actors behind poverty and inequality.

Read More

Make Public Higher Education in the United States Completely Free

by Maxwell John Love

Fifty years ago, the US National Student Association (The United States Student Association’s predecessor) declared its support for “the establishment of free public higher education throughout the United States financed by the local, state and federal governments, with the purpose of furthering the freedom of the individual and the critical spirit which ensures a dynamic and democratic society.”

Last week in Tennessee and last night in his State of the Union address, the president said the words ‘free’ and ‘college’ in the same sentence. The administration’s proposal is a big deal. It would offer funding to states to completely eliminate tuition at community colleges (on average $3,800). The funding would also not be last-dollar, meaning students could receive additional aid to offset living expenses.

We welcome the president to the fight for free college, and we believe that all public higher education in the US should be free!

Read More

We Need to Expand the Most Effective Anti-Poverty Program in America

by Alex Lawson

In order to fight poverty, one of the easiest and most effective things we can do is to expand our Social Security system. Social Security lifted 22 million Americans out of poverty in 2012, including one million children. Without Social Security, 44.1 percent of all Americans over the age of 65 would be living in poverty; with Social Security that rate is 8.9 percent.

Social Security isn’t just for seniors – it is also the primary disability and life insurance protection for most of America’s workers. Social Security provides around $580,000 in disability insurance protections and $550,000 in life insurance protections.

Read More

Low Wages Are a Moral Crisis in Our Time

by Sister Simone Campbell

Having worked as a family law attorney for 18 years in Oakland, California, I know that the single greatest cause of the breakup of families is economic stressors. This is especially true for the working poor families of our country.

Working for poverty wages creates family conflict when you have to choose between paying for rent and food, phone or medicine. This stress causes friction, blame and break-ups.

But it isn’t just families who suffer because of low wages. All workers working for minimum wage today need more than one job to get by.

Read More

Protect and Strengthen Medicare and Medicaid Programs for Another 50 Years

by Kevin Prindiville

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that play a key role in ensuring that elderly and disabled Americans have access to health care and are not bankrupted by its costs.

Before Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, 35 percent of Americans over 65 did not have health insurance, leaving a huge uninsured aging population with either insurmountable doctor and hospital bills, or more frequently, no health care at all.

While we celebrate the fact that millions of people are better off now than they were in 1965, we must be aware that access to health care is continually threatened by program cuts, and millions of beneficiaries have trouble accessing the care they are entitled to because the programs don’t always work as well as they could.

Read More

Support Human Rights for Food Supply Chain Workers

by Coalition of Immokalee Workers

The CIW’s Fair Food Program and Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model have transformed Florida’s $650 million tomato industry. The program is the gold standard for human rights in the fields today, including: worker-to-worker education on rights, a 24-hour complaint line and an effective complaint investigation and resolution process — all backed by market consequences for employers who refuse to respect their workers’ rights.

Now in its fourth season, the Fair Food Program is poised to expand, and bring respect and dignity for workers to new crops and new states. As underscored by the phone call from the former strawberry worker — that expansion can’t come soon enough.

Read More

Slash Child Hunger

by Joel Berg

Even though the United States is the wealthiest and most agriculturally abundant country in world history, food insecurity now ravages 49 million Americans — including nearly 16 million American children. This often-overlooked mass epidemic harms health, hampers education, traps families in poverty, fuels obesity and eviscerates hope, while sapping the US economy of $167.5 billion annually, according to the Center for American Progress.

That’s why in order to achieve other vital national priorities — such as fixing public education, restoring the middle class, expanding opportunity, reducing crime and incarceration, making health care more affordable, protecting the nation from enemies, and slashing poverty — we must also end hunger in America, starting with child hunger.

Read More

Stand with Native Youth and Support “Generation Indigenous”

by Erik Stegman

American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) youth face more barriers to success than almost any other group in the country. Thirty-seven percent of AIAN children under 18 live in poverty, significantly higher than the national child poverty rate of 22 percent (according to the American Community Survey).  The AIAN graduation rate is the lowest of any racial and ethnic group at 68 percent. Perhaps most stunning, suicide is the second leading cause of death for AIAN youth between ages 15 and 24 — they commit suicide at 2.5 times the national rate.

But these youth have a new partner in their movement for stronger economic and cultural opportunity: the president.

Read More

We Can Reduce Child Poverty by 60 Percent Right Now

by

Marian Wright Edelman

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.”

Today, 150 years after the end of slavery, every other black baby in America is poor. Every third Hispanic baby is poor. Nearly every fourth rural child is poor. All told, there are 14.7 million poor children and 6.5 million extremely poor children in the United States of America. It is a national disgrace that such an unconscionably large number of children are homeless, hungry and living in poverty in a country with the world’s largest economy.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Read More

We Should Ensure Access to Safe and Affordable Rental Housing

by  Sarah Edelman and Julia Gordon

Since the foreclosure crisis in 2008, the nation has gained more than four million renting households, and demographers expect an additional four million households to become renters over the next decade. At the same time, the homeownership rate has declined from nearly 70 percent to 64 percent.

This influx of renters has put significant upward pressure on rents. According to the Consumer Price Index, as most other expenses have held steady in recent months, rent expenses continue a steep upward climb. Half of all renters spend more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing, while 27 percent spend more than 50 percent — both sharp increases over the last decade. When the rental market tightens, the lowest-income renters feel the pressure first.

Read More

Stop Punishing People After They Have Been Released from Prison

by  Jeremy Haile

In America, we punish people for being poor. But we’re also one of the few democracies that punishes people for being punished.

Consider the felony drug ban, which imposes a lifetime restriction on welfare and food stamp benefits for anyone convicted of a state or federal drug felony. Passed in the “tough on crime” era of the mid-1990s, the ban denies basic assistance to people who may have sold a small amount of marijuana years or even decades ago and have been law-abiding citizens ever since.

The Sentencing Project found that the legislation subjects an estimated 180,000 women in the 12 most impacted states to a lifetime ban on welfare benefits.

Read More

Roughly 1.4 million veterans live in poverty in the United States, and, in total, more than 45 million people live at or below the poverty line. These numbers are similarly unacceptable, yet the conversation around military poverty and civilian poverty couldn’t be more different. Common rhetoric around military poverty often follows this formula: active members of the military and veterans should not experience poverty because they served our country and made enormous sacrifices.

In a time of congressional gridlock, this often well-intentioned logic is tempting and politically acceptable. Even so, it is wrongheaded. The argument relies on damaging assumptions that avoiding hunger and poverty are something you need to earn (and consequently, that those civilians living in poverty somehow deserve hardship). It lends credence to a cynical divide and conquer approach that gives benefits to the “deserving” poor while leaving the “undeserving” to struggle.

It’s time for a new approach. Members of the military and veterans shouldn’t experience poverty because no one should live in poverty. As a result of military service, veterans, active duty military and their families may require more intensive resources—such as specialized health care or hiring initiatives — than civilians to have an opportunity to succeed. They should receive them. But too many policymakers have set up programs that could benefit both civilian and military families (and our economy), but have restricted civilian access to these programs.

For example, in 2007 Congress passed the Military Lending Act, which capped the loan interest rates of several consumer loans at 36 percent for active duty members of the military. This action was spurred by a Department of Defense report that called for legislative protections on the finding that predatory lending was prevalent in the military community; that it traps borrowers in a cycle of debt and subjects them to coercive debt collection practices; and that lenders take advantage of service members despite extensive financial training provided by the military. Even though civilians and veterans experience the very same problems described by the DOD report, protections for them were conspicuously absent from the bill. This failure to protect everyone takes a toll on our economy – every year, Americans pay $3.4 billion in payday lending fees.

In another example, some states have passed “trailing spouse” clauses to allow spouses to apply for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits if one partner is transferred to a geographic location that did not allow for the other spouse to commute to their current job. This policy would benefit all families because it allows families to move together and avoid economic insecurity while the “trailing spouse” looks to re-enter the workforce in a new location. In addition, UI is one of the most effective ways that public spending can stimulate the economy. Despite the demonstrated benefits of such a policy, some states have limited access only to military spouses.

Another opportunity for expansive thinking is the coordinated efforts to reduce veteran homelessness. Ending homelessness is both a moral and economic imperative. Research demonstrates that allowing homelessness to persist is more expensive for localities than housing people in many cases. By acknowledging this reality and responding with targeted policy reforms, cities like New York and Washington, DC, have seen dramatic decreases in the number of chronically homeless single veterans.

Much of this movement has been propelled by the success of “Housing First” strategies, which house homeless individuals quickly and provide them with wraparound services such as education, substance abuse counseling, and other social services as needed. A lot of this work has taken place in urban areas – in major cities, the number of homeless veterans has declined by 12 percent from 2012 to 2013.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

However, in these cities, the number of homeless people in families increased during that same period. To explain this phenomenon, Amien Essif suggests in Jacobin magazine that dramatic decreases in veteran homelessness in major cities may have occurred because limited financial resources have been shifted to target specific groups rather than expanding investments to be more inclusive. While the progress made on veteran homelessness is important, the strategy that has been embraced by some of these cities to achieve this goal is unsustainable. It perpetuates a system where vulnerable homeless populations are forced to compete over limited resources. The efforts to house homeless veterans prove that public policy and investments in housing can end homelessness. Policymakers should shift their thinking and make a financial commitment to ending homelessness for all people.

Our economy and people living on the margins need a new approach that insists no one should live in poverty. This indeed requires strong investments in members of the military and their families. But, we can’t stop there, leaving civilians and their families behind.

It should therefore come as no surprise that 1 in 5 women over age 65 who lives alone in America is living in poverty.  Yet it isn’t even on the political or media radar. I’m talking about women who must make daily choices between heat and medicine—who consider suicide on a regular basis, like the women in this video.

Sandy, Myrtle, Lidia, and Dolly agreed to share the struggles they face in their daily lives in the hope that if enough people learned the truth and spoke out about it, politicians would be forced to listen and to act on behalf of low-income seniors by preserving and expanding the programs that help these women survive – Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the Supplemental Security Income program.

The life events that led these women to their current situations could happen to many women we know. They are not unusual, just everyday misfortunes and disappointments—magnified by age and economic vulnerability.

Like many poor Native American women of her generation, Dollie received only limited formal education. She came to California from Oklahoma with her family as a child and had to quit school and go to work when her father became ill. Her lack of formal education led to a lifetime of low-wage, physically demanding jobs that made saving impossible. Because many of those jobs were “off-the-books” she didn’t build the work history necessary to qualify for Social Security. She now relies on her monthly Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit of $877 to survive.

Sandy had a good job as a registered nurse, and a middle class standard of living. She lost her husband and her ability to work her physically demanding job around the same time, leaving her with no income. Because she had a good job, she receives just enough Social Security to be disqualified from means based assistance like Medicaid and subsidized housing.  As a result she spends a large percentage of her monthly income on rent, leaving little money to cover food or her Medicare copayments and premiums.

Lidia came to the U.S. from Cuba as a child. For 20 years she ran her own barbershop business, while she raised a family, bought a home, worked hard, and thrived. She became too ill to cut hair about the same time as the housing market collapsed. She lost her home and unknowingly signed away her rights to her ex-husband’s police pension, depriving herself of around $1,800 per month in benefits. Today she lives in subsidized senior housing, struggles to afford food, and tries to avoid relying too much on her children for help.

Myrtle had a good job and a big plan for travel when she retired. Then she got injured at the workplace and had to go on disability.  Her husband then divorced her. She managed to keep her home, but she struggles daily with medical and other expenses on her limited Social Security Income benefit.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

These women and growing numbers of others like them have nothing to rely on but the limited and increasingly threatened social safety net programs—like Medicaid and SSI. We all need to fight hard to preserve and expand these programs—especially with a new Congress that appears committed to reducing the assistance these programs provide.

The solutions to senior poverty are well within our grasp. As a country we have the ability to ensure that every senior has access to a safe place to live, healthy food to eat, and affordable, accessible medical care—in essence the right to age in dignity. The first step is to highlight the problem by sharing the stories of those who are suffering, then we can fight hard to preserve and expand the services they rely on to survive. Please start by sharing this blog and video.

“I realized that even though my daughter was the one in the program, our whole family was benefiting,” he says. “The teachers taught us to be hands-on parents, and to set aside family time to eat together, talk, and share together.”

The program provided more than just child care, it helped the whole family.

For low-income families like Israel’s, poverty complicates every aspect of their daily lives, from holding a job, to finding transportation, to raising healthy children. For these families, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent executive order raising the hourly minimum wage from $11.90 to $13.13 for employees at projects that receive more than $1 million in city financing is an important step forward.  Contrary to misconceptions about people in poverty, these families work, and they work hard. In fact, there are 265,000 low-income families in New York City with at least one working parent. The new wage will increase the annual income of thousands of workers from $16,640 to $27,310, lifting a family of four above the federal poverty line.

While an increased minimum wage will be an enormous help to struggling families, it isn’t enough. We need to invest in other work supports that ease the economic strain on families and create thriving communities.

The Economic Policy Institute calculates that to achieve a “modest living standard,” a family of four needs $94,676 to live in New York City, including over $2,000 for child care each month. When even middle class parents are “crushed by the cost of child care,” you know that low-income families are feeling the pain even more. In the state of New York, the average cost of an infant child care center consumes 58% of the state median income for a single mother. One study found that child care is the single greatest expense among low-income families in the city.

That is why access to early childhood education, quality childcare, and after-school programs should be implemented hand-in-hand with minimum wage raises—they serve as a multiplier of a family’s earned income because parents don’t have to pay for costly or unsafe child care, and they also allow parents to go to work. The proof is in the data: More than 70% of New York City parents with kids in an after-school program said that the program made it easier for them to keep their jobs; that they missed less work; and that they were able to work more hours. Low-income parents with child care subsidies are also less likely to have child care disruptions that hold back their careers or result in job loss.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

These programs are an investment in our future too. The Child Center of NY works with some of the most impoverished communities in New York City, in neighborhoods like South Jamaica, Corona, and Far Rockaway.  Every day we meet hardworking parents who seek our services because they want their children to learn and succeed—to interact positively with their peers, form relationships with adult mentors, and learn outside of the classroom too.  We also work with whole families to help them achieve their goals too.

When Israel came to our Head Start program it was perfectly clear that he knew the value of hard work.  His own parents had worked long hours at multiple jobs when he was growing up.

“They didn’t have much time to spend with us,” he says. “I wanted more for my family than that.”

Our staff encouraged him to be involved with his daughter and her class. He began helping in the classroom and encouraged other fathers to do the same. He ran for president of the program’s Parent Council and won, and became more involved with his children at home too.

By the time both of his children had completed our Head Start program, Israel had developed his leadership skills, which in turn helped him find investors in the community so he could open a barbershop. Now, five years later, Israel owns the shop—a neighborhood institution just a few blocks away from the Head Start program. He has eight employees and earns more money working fewer hours than he did prior to starting his own business. He spends the extra time with his children and is currently planning to renovate and expand his shop.

Israel says The Child Center gave him the confidence and the means to strengthen his relationships with his children and to grow his business. In our poorest neighborhoods, there are countless men and women who want to do the same—to work hard and make a better life for their families and communities.

Decent wages and quality affordable childcare will create new opportunities to do both.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify which workers will receive the New York City wage increase.

Disclosure: Alyssa Peterson previously served as a volunteer domestic violence advocate with the organization.

Alyssa Peterson: How does economic security matter in domestic violence cases?

DC SAFE: If the abuser and the victim are living together, she has limited options. Most people of an average income wouldn’t be able to just go and put themselves up in a hotel on zero notice. If you don’t have family or friends in the city, it’s two-hundred dollars a night for a hotel. If it’s thirty degrees out, you can’t just go sleep on a park bench—if that’s even an option for anybody. If you have children, it’s even more complicated. So, having access to housing, or money for housing, is one of the biggest barriers to getting away from the abuser.

Domestic violence is said to affect people equally across sections of society regardless of income, but [that’s] not what we experience. And that’s mostly because those with income can handle domestic violence on more of a self-help basis, whereas those without income are forced to resort to [public] services and place their violence that they’re experiencing out into the open. Somebody with means can put themselves up into a hotel [or] can hire an attorney to divorce somebody and seek assets. Those without means are going to have to come to the D.C. Superior Courthouse and seek emergency housing through the city.

Alyssa: Can you all explain a little bit about your work?

DC SAFE: One of our programs is called the Court Advocacy Program (CAP). We accompany clients to court, provide them emotional support, [and] we can also work on different things that happen in court like warrants.

We can also refer survivors to different social services, including Crime Victims Compensation, which is an organization run by the government and the court systems that assists and gives some financial support to victims of crime in D.C. We [also] have several partner agencies that provide free legal services to survivors of domestic violence. We can also refer and place individuals in our shelter program, and provide them with referrals for counseling [or] forensic nurse examinations.

We assist with running our 24-hour help line, OCAP. We do things like book emergency housing, get lock changes, safety plan, [and] talk victims through both the civil and legal remedies that are available to them, often referring them to come to the intake center if they want to talk to an advocate or file for a protective order. Transportation is also something, especially [to get] to a safe place or a courthouse.

Alyssa: We’ve seen a massive shortage in affordable housing.  Has that put a lot of pressure on your services?

DC SAFE: Absolutely. One of [our] top concerns when we meet with survivors is where is [the survivor] supposed to go?

If you have a client that can transfer to a different county in Maryland—that looks very different from a client who’s really stuck in the housing system in D.C. Some people were on [a] waiting list for a long time which could be as long as 10 years or more in many cases—[they] are afraid to leave their situation because they don’t want to lose that spot.  They don’t want to be with the abuser, but they don’t want to lose this place that they finally got to after all these years.

Then, if you look at the homeless systems, the challenges there are that we work on a crisis basis and [the homeless system] may not be working on a crisis basis. [The homeless systems] may take months for them to take a client. Or there may be sobriety rules that a client can’t adhere to. If you have a program that requires that a client have documented clean time for sixty days, and we’re a crisis shelter [with maximum stay period of less than sixty days], then there’s no way that those numbers are going to match up. Even if my client is saying: “I want to be clean, I’ve been clean since the moment I got here,” that’s still over a month left before the client can even begin to think about getting into these programs.

Alyssa: Is the shelter system even a real option for survivors?

DC SAFE: It’s not ideal. Usually, the conversation is [that] if you have kids and you need an emergency shelter, and you aren’t getting in a transitional program [(another housing option for survivors)], you’re going to be leaving the district. There just aren’t options really here currently. For people who face multiple levels of trauma, going into a shelter [means] there’s little observation of what’s happening, or sharing rooms with multiple people. That may cause [survivors] to face other levels of trauma. [Survivors] may be victimized in those shelters. And then there’s the fact that [you usually] have to take your stuff with you every single day when you leave, it’s so much easier for someone to find you when you’re out on the street every day.

And ultimately, we believe that a survivor knows her situation better than anybody else in the whole world. She or he is the only one that knows what’s best, so we have some situations where they may choose option B as opposed to going to a shelter. That’s an empowered decision and we support that. It can be very difficult when you have a limited number of options. As a society, we have created a system where people really have a lack of choices.

Alyssa: Do you see a lot of survivors in a situation where an abuser has harmed their credit or economic wellbeing?

DC SAFE: Credit is a continuing issue and it’s something that we’re trying to find more resources [to address]. Even a client who has the option to transfer [to alternative low-income housing], we may see that because of back rent, they may not be able to transfer until they pay that off. The reason that they may not have paid it off is because of financial manipulation that happened with the abuser.

Which is why there’s a real need for second chance housing in the District for people who have credit issues and need to be able to prove income.

In addition, [survivors] may have wages in cash. They have wages that may be much easier to steal and manipulate. And of course, sometimes the abuser is borrowing money. He keeps borrowing. He borrows a hundred here, two hundred there, and never pays it back. And suddenly, the victim is out two-thousand dollars that she’s just been fronting to him out of her paycheck, and she can’t pay rent.

Alyssa: Are there other things that D.C. is doing specifically that help the economic security of survivors?

DC SAFE: D.C. is starting to recognize domestic violence as an extremely serious issue, as opposed to something that should stay inside the home. Every agency is continuing to take this very seriously. [D.C. has] some of the most progressive policies surrounding domestic violence.

D.C. has sick and safe leave.  You can take sick time and you can also take safe time. So, you can take time off of work, utilizing your sick days to get safe if you are experiencing domestic violence.

[But] there remains a ton of work to be done. It’s great that that law is in place, but it isn’t going to do very much for a tipped worker or a low-income [worker] who has no idea what sick and safe leave is; or an employer who is going to look at a sick and safe leave request and just not [allow it]. So, there’s a lot of work to do in outreach and enforcement.

Survivors in D.C. also have the right to break their lease early with no penalties, which is fantastic. So, if a survivor just signed a lease in January, [it] may be actually one of the reasons that they may not report [domestic violence]. They may say I just signed this in January. They may say I’ll just stay here and keep the doors locked and then in a year when I feel like I can move, I can.

And then when you tell people—and this is something people don’t really know—and I was meeting with someone today and I said, “Let’s write up this template together.” It’s a letter from the survivor. It’s something from her that she gives to the landlord that explains what her rights are. She signs it and then she’s theoretically supposed to be able to move two weeks later. I think that’s very helpful.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Alyssa: Are there other programs to support low-income survivors?

DC SAFE: The D.C. Department of Human Services does have a domestic violence work exemption for TANF [(Temporary Assistance to Needy Families)]. If [a TANF recipient] is a domestic violence survivor, not only can they be exempted from the work requirement for three months, with the option of re-opting after three months, but they can also be referred to counseling and case management.

Alyssa: I’ve read studies that the TANF exemption is underutilized. Is that the case in D.C.?

DC SAFE: Last year, they had a grand total of three exceptions granted because people just didn’t ask for it. People don’t know. Because of the vast bureaucracy of the D.C. Department of Human Services, it makes it almost impossible for a client to know how to navigate [the system]. [A survivor has] to get a referral letter from an advocate that would be faxed to a certain person [in the Department of Human Services], and then a follow up call would have to be made to that person, who would then have the client verify, and then work through the process of initiating a work exemption.

That’s the entire reason that SAFE exists because clients can’t navigate the system on their own. It’s bureaucratic, it’s byzantine… you need an MSW to know how to access all the services that you’re entitled to. And [survivors are] dealing with their court case, and finding housing and child care, and a new job, or whatever. They need to focus on doing that, and then we can focus on advocacy piece.

And when you’ve spent years being beaten down by somebody who’s trying to make you not advocate for yourself… Your abuser’s been telling you for however long that everything is your fault; that you’re a terrible person. So why do you feel comfortable advocating for yourself? You need somebody to tell you that you have a right to these services—somebody who can help you connect with the agencies and tell you that you deserve them.

However, the devil is in the details.

A sizeable number of Americans (and politicians) claim to support survivors while limiting their ability to access the supports needed to leave an abusive relationship. In essence, people are trying to reap the benefits of appearing “anti-violence” while supporting policy choices that in fact aid and abet abusers.

Almost half of all survivors report experiencing financial difficulties.  Those who support survivors should not force them to choose between abuse and homelessness. Nor should they ask survivors to risk losing their health insurance or custody of their children.

Yet that’s exactly what some of our current policies choices do. The status quo strengthens abusers and harms survivors by:

Weakening direct services. We often have many positive things to say about the advocates who dedicate their professional lives to assisting survivors of domestic violence. Yet at the same time our lawmakers haven’t given them the funding they need to do their jobs. Three vital programs – the Legal Assistance for Victims program, the Rural program, and the Transitional Housing program – had their funding cut in the 2014 appropriations bill. In fact, some lawmakers, such as Congressman Paul Ryan, have supported further cuts to funding for domestic violence service providers. These funding pressures occur at a time when the number of survivors coming forward will likely increase, in part due to referrals from the invaluable domestic violence screening and counseling benefits included in the Affordable Care Act.

As demand for services rises, let’s remember that on one day last year, almost 10,000 requests for services were denied due to a lack of sufficient resources for service providers.  Further, more than 1,500 service provider staff positions were eliminated last year. The fact is when survivors cannot receive services, sixty percent return to their abusers.

Undermining access to attorneys and court advocates. For many survivors, access to civil legal services is essential to ending abuse. Through the court system, survivors can receive civil protection orders (also known as restraining orders), obtain a U-visa, or divorce an abusive partner.  Attorneys can also help survivors gain custody of their children, eliminating a common threat abusers use to force survivors to stay. But despite the demonstrated benefits of legal services, inadequate funding last year resulted in only 12% of domestic violence programs assisting survivors with legal representation, and slightly more than half were able to have an advocate accompany a survivor to court.

Civil legal aid providers—who also handle many domestic violence cases—remain badly under-resourced. In the past few years, more than 1,200 individuals who worked for legal services providers have lost their jobs due to funding cuts as the number of individuals who qualify for legal aid has risen.

This gap in services is alarming. The immense power differential between an abuser and a survivor, along with the effects of trauma, make it exceedingly difficult for survivors to file petitions without support.  Survivors are placed at even more of a disadvantage when their abusers have access to legal resources.

Refusing to pass paid safe days legislation. Many survivors do not even make it to the courtroom because they cannot take off work. Only California, Connecticut, the District of the Columbia, and four cities provide survivors with paid “safe” leave. In the vast majority of states, survivors who work in low-wage jobs with little job security cannot take off multiple days of work to attend courtroom proceedings. They are forced to choose between providing for themselves and their families and their safety; some may stay with an abuser as a result. For a country that claims nearly unanimous support for survivors of domestic violence seeking help, we make it very hard for them to actually access it.

Failing to invest in affordable housing. Instead of choosing to preserve existing affordable units and build new ones, we have lost almost 13% of our nation’s supply of low-cost housing since 2001. While direct service providers strive to provide domestic violence survivors with emergency shelter, it is impossible for them to meet the demand for long-term housing. When we fail to invest in the affordable, permanent housing, survivors are forced to choose between terrible options. They may ask, “When my stay in emergency housing ends, do I return to my abuser, or do I become homeless?” or “Do I stay in this lease with my abuser or do I move out, knowing I have nowhere to go?”

Support for survivors cannot be separated from support for a robust social safety net, affordable medical care and housing, paid safe days, and well-funded domestic violence service providers and legal aid providers. It’s time to evaluate our policy choices. It’s time for all of us to make a real commitment to ending domestic violence—not just in word, but in deed.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of our nation’s most effective anti-poverty programs, helping more than 6.5 million Americans—including 3.3 million children—avoid poverty in 2012. The EITC also has the rare distinction of being regularly showered with bipartisan support—no small feat in a historically gridlocked Congress.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Sharron, a bus driver in Montgomery County, Maryland, volunteers at her local Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) site and knows first-hand how important the EITC is for struggling families. For low-income single parents with children, for example, the EITC can boost earnings by as much as 45 percent. For someone like Sharron, however—working full-time at minimum wage, but without dependent children—the estimated EITC next year will be just $22. If the EITC were boosted for childless workers, her credit would increase to about $542.

What you may not know is what the numbers look like for LGBT Americans. Our latest report, Paying an Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty for Being LGBT in America, examines how anti-LGBT laws drive economic insecurity for LGBT people, including higher rates of poverty.

LGBT people disproportionately struggle with poverty. Twenty percent of LGBT people living alone have annual incomes of less than $12,000 compared to 17% of non-LGBT people living alone. Transgender people are four times more likely to have incomes under $10,000 per year than the general population despite having higher rates of education.

(click to expand the infographic)

There is a clear connection between economic insecurity and anti-LGBT laws. Nineteen states lack almost any form of legal protections for LGBT people, and that has a real, tangible economic impact. When a gay or lesbian worker can be fired legally in 29 states; when a transgender person can be denied comprehensive health insurance in 42 states; or when a lesbian couple can be evicted in 29 states—the economic toll adds up.

All LGBT Americans are affected in one way or another, but the impact of these penalties is felt most acutely by those who are most vulnerable: LGBT families with children; older same-sex couples; and LGBT people and families who are already living near or below the poverty line, including a disproportionate number of LGBT people of color and LGBT people living in rural communities.

When LGBT people are already poor, they have no ability to absorb these financial penalties. For example, a transgender person in a state lacking housing protections can be evicted without cause or warning. She then finds herself unable to piece together a security deposit for a new apartment or to afford a more expensive apartment leased by a landlord who doesn’t discriminate.

Struggling LGBT people also lack the financial resources needed to secure legal protections for themselves and their families. For example, a second-parent adoption—which allows a non-biological parent to be recognized as a parent—can cost more than $2,000. For a poor lesbian couple, this expense is too much to bear. Without a legal tie between parent and child, the couple is left to simply hope for the best, a potentially devastating situation should the legal parent die.

Our report includes a number of stories that show the devastating effect of discrimination.  But we also need more data about poverty in the LGBT community if we are to improve the economic security of all people living in the United States. LGBT people were absent in the released U.S. Census poverty numbers, although it is indeed possible to examine data on same-sex couples, as our research and research by others have shown. As for single LGBT people—since the Census doesn’t ask about sexual orientation or gender identity—researchers cannot track their poverty rates. Government surveys need to be modernized to include gender identity and sexual orientation in order to fully understand the scope of poverty and find the most effective policy solutions.

It is time to put an end to the financial penalties that LGBT Americans face simply because they are LGBT. Policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels need to update laws to prohibit discrimination against LGBT people in areas ranging from hiring to housing to credit. Policymakers also need to update the legal definitions and regulations of “family” so that LGBT families have access to the same protections and benefits that are available to other families.

Our policy responses to poverty in America are destined to fall short if they fail to address the economic experiences of LGBT families and individuals.

In Our Backyard aims to highlight efforts to dramatically reduce poverty and inequality in our city. If you are interested in writing for the project, please email us at info@talkpoverty.org.

TalkPoverty: What were the reasons and the need for the creation of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute [DCFPI]?

Ed Lazere: We were created in part because the city passed a pretty steep and regressive tax cut on the idea that we needed to cut our top income tax rate because otherwise people would flee the city which is not really supported by the research at all. There wasn’t a DCFPI to respond to that argument.

We see ourselves as using a combination of research and putting the numbers out there for the advocacy community, hopefully communicated in a strategic way, and then partnering with other organizations to try to shape the city’s budget to be more focused on the needs of low-income residents; and to do research that highlights the challenges that low-income residents face, like affordable housing or poverty, and to address working conditions, like the minimum wage or paid sick leave.

TalkPoverty: Can you describe poverty in the nation’s capital for people who know nothing about it?

Jenny Reed: The poverty rate in D.C. is a little over 18%. There were about 109,000 residents living below the poverty line in 2012. Our poverty rate has continued to be high even during strong periods of economic growth in the city. We have about 1 in 4 kids living in poverty, but in the eastern and southern parts [of the city], child poverty rates are much higher. In some neighborhoods it’s 50%.

Lazere: The poverty rate consists almost entirely of people of color… African American and Latino. Income inequality is quite dramatic in the District. If you divide the population, ranking them top to bottom, the bottom earners were even with most large U.S. cities, but at the top, the average income is the highest in the country. As a result the gap between the top and the bottom is one of the highest in the country. If you’re living in a community with substantial inequality, a lot of things may be more expensive, like housing, because it’s all one market. The high-income people are shopping in the same market as you are. They’re going out to restaurants or theater and you don’t. There’s a psychological effect of being at the bottom of a rung of a very unequal society.

Reed: We have found that a large share of people in families in poverty work. For a lot of people the problem is getting access to full time year-round work, and full time year-round work that actually pays a decent wage. D.C. recently increased its minimum wage.  It will be $11.50 by 2016. The first phase of the increase went into effect July 1 up to $9.50.  We think that will help…. We did a simulation that showed if you could get everyone into a $15 an-hour job and access to full time year-round work you could move about 80% of the people [out of] poverty in D.C.

Lazere: The minimum wage was passed the same day as something almost as equally monumental [that] got almost no attention, which was an expansion of our paid sick leave requirement. D.C. is fairly unique among jurisdictions in requiring every employer to provide some amount of paid leave for illness or domestic violence. [That] legislation passed in 2008, but you weren’t eligible until you’d been on the job for almost year. For most low-wage workers, they’re in an industry where the turnover is often 100% within a year, so it was likely that many, many people never got to the point where they started accruing [leave].

The bill that passed last fall made sure all workers were covered. They start accruing leave from the first day on the job, and there are no exclusions for tipped restaurant workers as there had been before. That was big. It’s pretty dramatic and people we know, particularly single parents who have the highest poverty rate, often face challenges if a child is sick. Do I stay home with them and risk losing my job because I don’t have paid sick leave? Now for at least some number of people they won’t have to make that difficult choice.

TalkPoverty: What is the unemployment rate in D.C.?

Lazere: For people with [just a high school degree], it’s about 20 percent. We’re talking about an unemployment rate that’s twice what the national unemployment [rate] peaked at during the great recession—in the middle of a city where construction cranes are everywhere, people are building ugly popup housing, [and] restaurants are opening left and right.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

TalkPoverty: So what do you make of that? One guy who wrote for us in Maryland lost 6 people in two years to gun violence, this young guy. He found a job in community development and he takes people to job fairs and describes the devastation of 50 people going and getting nothing. He said just what you said: we see all of these shovel-ready projects starting and none of the jobs going to low-income people who are ready to work. What do you make of that?

Reed: Workforce development is probably one of the most important things we can do, but it’s really hard to do well. There are a couple ways the city really needs to do a better job. One is the Workforce Investment Council which they’ve recently beefed up. [It’s comprised of] business leaders, developers, labor, and government officials that are all supposed to get together and say, “This is where D.C. should be investing its workforce development dollars.” They have an executive director, but they really are just getting started.

Then there’s the workforce intermediary which DCFPI and D.C. Appleseed and Employment Justice Center advocated for. It’s sort of a matchmaker. They’re supposed to be the liaison between say the developer for the convention center hotel that was recently built and the Department of Employment Services to say, “I’ve got all of these people who have these skills. You need these people with these skills. Let’s put them together.” But I don’t think that the Workforce Intermediary has really been able do anything. They’re still kind of figuring themselves out.

Lazere: You hear from a lot of D.C. residents: “I got training for a job and then there wasn’t a job at the end.” They get understandably discouraged and not very optimistic about participating in other training after that.

TalkPoverty: You hear a lot of that with TANF training programs too…

Lazere: It’s a similar thing. They used to go through the same ropes of, “Let’s get your resume ready, let’s help you get some business clothes and teach you how to do an interview.” And a lot of people didn’t show up because they were like, “I’ve done this already. What I really need is just for you to connect me to a decent paying job.”

The District made an effort to revamp its “one size fits all” TANF employment program, largely because we highlighted the problems.  The current program is not perfect but still is far more customized than the old program.  DCFPI is in the midst of assessing how well the new TANF employment program is working.

Reed: I think that there’s concern about some of the major D.C. programs like our transitional employment program or our one-stop centers [that] haven’t really shown great outcomes. They might be giving people something to do, but it’s not connecting them to a job and that’s a big problem.

Lazere: I just learned recently that while the city monitors for the federal programs whether someone got a job and how long they kept it and ways they got it, they don’t really do that for the locally funded programs. How can you have and modify and shape an effective program if you’re not looking at how well you’re doing?

TalkPoverty: How do you think the city can balance having people come into areas that were previously less developed with providing affordable housing for low-income people?

Reed:  Where I think D.C. could do a better job is being more proactive about preservation. We absolutely need to build more affordable housing, but we also need to make sure we’re holding on to what we have. We’re not helping people stay in the neighborhoods as they develop around them. We could be more proactive about tying affordable housing preservation strategies to major economic development projects. Just like you do [an] environmental analysis, or traffic analysis, you could do an affordable housing analysis and say, “What’s at risk here? Is there project-based Section 8 housing that we think owners might want to opt-out of? Are there low-income buildings with tenants that we think the owner might try to sell? Can the district purchase it? Can the tenants purchase it? What can we do to keep the neighborhood affordable?”

You won’t be able to keep every unit, but it’s actually a lot cheaper for the city to preserve units or build new affordable housing prior to development then to try and do it after development has started.

Lazere: The way that governments do their budgets it tends to be fairly incremental. We spent $100 million [on affordable housing] this year, so we’ll spend $102 million next year and then $103 million. That’s just not really going to work. With prices rising so fast, we’re losing ground every year. Once you’ve lost a neighborhood, you’ve lost this tremendous opportunity to preserve affordable housing for a long period of time.

We spend about $2 billion as a city on education, [and] we spend $500 million on our police department… So why is it that in a city where the number one challenge for residents is affordable housing, we spend three times on public safety when crime is going down than what we spend on housing? And the number of homeless families jumped 23% or 25% this year.

TalkPoverty: 25% THIS YEAR? When the economy’s supposed to be getting better…that goes to your recovery report. Recovery for who?

Reed: That was a huge issue this past winter. There was a really significant rise in the number of homeless families and the D.C. shelter system was incredibly overwhelmed. We put families in recreation centers for one night only and they had to reapply for shelter every day. If it wasn’t below 32 [degrees] it was tough luck. You had to be out. A pro-bono law firm brought a class action against the city. They’ve won two injunctions against the district.

TalkPoverty: Against that policy?

Reed: Both of the judges ruled in favor of the plaintiff, finding that the recreation centers violated the law. By law families are supposed to be placed in rooms or apartment-style shelters and what they did was set up partitions like what you see when you’re giving blood. It was really horrible the way they set them up. Families couldn’t get in until after 9 and they had to leave by 7 in the morning. They couldn’t use the showers even though the showers were there. There was no food. The lights were kept on all night, there was no privacy. The judges found not only was it a violation of the law but it was causing irreparable harm to the children.

Lazere: There’s a new national model that started largely with the Recovery Act of getting people out of shelter quickly through rapid rehousing because shelter is not a good place for anybody to live.

I think the issue with rapid rehousing in D.C. is with housing so expensive, most families who become homeless are very young and have very limited job experience. When you [try to] put them into an apartment that’s $1,000 a month even that’s hard to find right? Then to tell them a year from now you’re on your own [because rent is no longer covered after one year]—on a… job that pays $10.00 an hour.  A lot of families are very nervous about going into rapid rehousing because when they’re in shelter it may be crappy but at least they get to stay.

Lazere: Part of the solution is to get someone out of shelter quickly. You hope that rapid rehousing will give them the stability they need to get their life back together. But there still needs to be something at the end [when the rent subsidy runs out] for that significant number of people who may have a job that may be more stable, but still not enough to [pay for] their home on their own.

Reed: Maybe we should give people longer than a year to get settled and get to the point where they can afford the rent. We should make sure people aren’t paying too much of their income towards rent. Program rules allow maybe 45% [of a person’s income toward rent], which is way too high. I understand maybe 30% isn’t achievable, but 35% maybe max. More than that and we’re getting into a likelihood that they’re going to end up back in shelter.

There’s a lot on the homeless services front that we could be doing. We kind of backed away from our permanent supportive housing investments for the chronically homeless. It combines long-term affordable housing with intensive services. Chronically homeless are folks with severe mental health or chronic health issues and they really need intensive supports to maintain their housing.  It’s shown to save a ton of money because there’s less reliance on costly emergency services.

D.C. was progressing pretty well and just kind of stopped investing in the program. In the upcoming budget, we will start making fairly good investments again. For example, the mayor put in money so we’ll end chronic homelessness among veterans in 2015 which is part of a federal campaign as well. We can end chronic homelessness in D.C. There’s about 2,300 families and individuals. It’s not an unachievable number. There’s a plan. We just need to fully invest in it to get it done.

As the federal government invests in nutrition, health, education, and job-training programs that keep families out of poverty, complementary investments to strengthen high-poverty communities across the country are also important. Fortunately, over the past several years, the Obama administration has invested in low-income urban, rural, and tribal communities, and it increasingly understands what it takes to drive and support local innovation. Still, many local leaders are faced with the challenge of addressing some of the United States’ most complex social problems with limited resources at their disposal.

There is no silver-bullet policy to address the many challenges facing high-poverty communities. These communities need a comprehensive set of strategies that equip youth and adult residents with the skills they need to prosper—and that ensure opportunities for success in their neighborhoods.

That’s why the Promise Zones initiative offers designees priority access to a range of revitalization resources through the U.S. Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Agriculture, to name a few. Applicants should have a strong vision and a well-integrated strategy to achieve it. The initiative was inspired in part by examples such as the East Lake Foundation’s work to transform the East Lake community in Atlanta, Georgia—a high-poverty neighborhood that suffered from blight and crime. Local leaders developed a strategy to tackle poverty by jointly addressing housing, education, workforce development, and health services. Today, violent crime is down by 95 percent, families receiving public assistance have seen their incomes quadruple, and the neighborhood’s school is the top-performing elementary school in the city.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

Worth celebrating, right?

Hardly. While the reduction in poverty might be significant from a statistical perspective, it’s not from a people’s perspective: 15 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 2012; 14.5 percent in 2013—more than 45 million Americans lived in poverty in each of those years.  Further, historic levels of income inequality remain unchanged, with incomes flat for low- and middle-income Americans.

What is most frustrating, tragic, infuriating—pick your adjective—about this status quo that wastes so much human potential, is the fact that we know the kinds of policies and actions that would not only reduce poverty, but reduce it dramatically.

TalkPoverty.org asked a group of scholars and activists what we need to do to achieve Census numbers that we can truly get excited about.  Their responses reveal some of the rigorous research that should inform our priorities and policy choices, and also widespread activism that isn’t waiting on an anti-poverty movement, it’s building one.

Hilary Hoynes: “Remember the successes and get behind policies that work.”
Sarita Gupta: ‘What are you doing in this movement and can you do more?’
Dr. Deborah Frank: How Poverty Affects Children’s Health
Deepak Bhargava: Change this Broken System
Valerie Wilson: ‘Policymakers have been slow to use data to inform their agenda’
Sally Steenland: ‘Infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation’
Alice O’Connor: Half the Battle
Deirdra Reed: ‘This is not your grandma’s skid-row poverty’

Hilary Hoynes: “Remember the successes and get behind policies that work.”

The Census poverty release this week contained some good news – particularly notable is that poverty rates fell significantly for children – but overall poverty rates remain high relative to their levels prior to the Great Recession.

Looking over the longer term, poverty can be best described as remaining stubbornly high over the past decades. Some conclude that this lack of progress in our fight against poverty implies a failure of our safety net. However, this misses the important countervailing force of stagnant or declining wages; in this light, the lack of a rise in poverty over the past 20 years represents (sadly) somewhat of an achievement for public policy. We have the data to know “what works” against poverty and inequality—and that our policies truly matter. A federal minimum wage increase to $10.10 would lift 4.6 million people out of poverty. The Earned Income Tax Credit, together with the Child Tax Credit, lifts roughly 4.7 million children or 9 million persons above the poverty line annually; SNAP raises 2.2 million children or 5 million persons above poverty. Increasing incomes for these families leads to improvements in health and children’s well-being.

We need to remember the successes and get behind policies that work.

Hilary Hoynes is a Professor of Public Policy and Economics and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley.

Sarita Gupta: ‘What are you doing in this movement and can you do more?’

The fight against poverty is already here, it’s happening, and it can work if we challenge ourselves to focus on the real and immediate solutions that help everyday working people create a pathway to economic stability.

The good news is, we’ve already begun to do that in cities and states across the country. In Massachusetts, we passed a domestic workers bill of rights designed to protect home care workers against poverty wages and working conditions. In San Francisco, we’re working to pass a retail workers bill of rights aimed at tackling the erratic, on-call scheduling practices that keep hourly and shift workers in a constant cycle of financial unpredictability. In Illinois, Connecticut and Oregon, we’re piloting a fair-share fee legislation that requires businesses that cheat their workers out of wages to pay a fee to offset their role in keeping employees in poverty.

So we’re making strides, but there’s still so much work to be done if we are to create more good jobs that pay good wages, invest in our communities, and strengthen the voice that every day people have in our democracy.  We need you, the reader, to ask yourself what you are doing in this movement and can you do more?  That’s how we’ll achieve the change we seek.

Sarita Gupta is the executive director of Jobs With Justice, an organization leading the fight for workers’ rights and an economy that benefits everyone.

Dr. Deborah Frank: How Poverty Affects Children’s Health

To me, a pediatrician for 38 years, I know the 2013 poverty numbers represent names and faces, including the poorest Americans – infants and toddlers and their families. Doctors know that poverty stacks the odds against children in the womb with poor nutrition and high levels of stress hormones, altering the intrauterine environment and leading to early deliveries and low birth weight.

Poverty’s toxicity does not end at birth. At Children’s HealthWatch, my pediatric and public health colleagues and I have conducted extensive research since 1998 on children up to their fourth birthday in five urban hospitals across the country.  We and other researchers showed that children in families who experience the most basic level of material hardships associated with poverty — not enough nutritious food, inadequate or inconsistent access to lighting, heating or cooling, and unstable housing — suffer negative health and development effects, which constrain the next generation’s opportunities to live healthy lives as successful participants in education and the workforce.

Children in poverty cannot wait for the slow recovery from the 2009 recession to finally arrive. We need to expand and protect programs to keep all our children nourished, warm and safely housed. It is not the federal deficit I worry about, but the preventable and treatable deficits in the bodies and brains of America’s young children.

Dr. Deborah Frank is the Founder and Principal Investigator at Children’s HealthWatch, and professor of Child Health and Well-being in the Department of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine.

Deepak Bhargava: Change this Broken System

It is outrageous that in the richest country in the history of the world, the vast majority of people are never more than a degree away from poverty.  New data shows that a good job has the power to move that needle in the right direction for children.

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released data showing the child poverty rate has decreased for the first time since 2000. In 2013, enough parents were able to find full-time, year-round work to help 1.4 million children escape poverty.

At the Center for Community Change, the communities we work with know that the best anti-poverty program is a job that pays enough to allow families to make ends meet. Unfortunately, our broken labor market delivers too few jobs and unfair pay in exchange for hard work. We live in a system where no matter how much money people’s work brings into their company, they get paid as little as the CEO can get away with, and when they work harder, the increased wealth they produce goes right into the CEO’s pocket or company coffers.

Some of the people we are working with to change this broken system include carwashers in New York City; the formerly incarcerated in Texas; unemployed people in Washington, DC; and retail workers in Minnesota.  The Center for Community Change is working with grassroots groups fighting for access to good jobs and good wages in over 20 states.

People work in order to make the future brighter for their kids and more secure for their families.  America needs jobs that pay enough for people to earn a decent living and to have a decent life.

Deepak Bhargava is Executive Director of the Center for Community Change.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

We know that nearly 70 percent of the income of Americans in the bottom fifth is tied to work, either in the form of wages, employer-provided benefits, or tax credits that are dependent on work (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit).  We also know that in the past year, real hourly wages declined for all workers except those in the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution, and that the increase for these low-wage workers was due to the states that raised their minimum wages.

This week’s Census report provides an update of our nation’s progress toward greater racial economic equality.  On the positive side, between 2012 and 2013, Latinos experienced a larger decline in poverty and a larger increase in median household income than any other group.  Much of the decline in poverty occurred among children – the poverty rate for Latino children is down 3.4 percentage points to 30.3 percent.  But the rate of poverty among Latino children is still 2.8 times higher than that of whites.  Still,  that isn’t the worst news from the Census.  While child poverty declined for nearly all groups of children, it stands at an astounding 38.3 percent for African American children – 3.6 times the rate for white children.

Reducing child poverty is as much about increasing employment and wages as anything else.  Unfortunately, progress toward greater racial equity in either of these areas has been painfully slow during the recovery, and policymakers have been slow to use data to inform their agenda.

Valerie Wilson is director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE), a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analyses on the economic condition of America’s people of color.

Sally Steenland: ‘Infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation’

The new poverty numbers released by the government show no statistical change in the number of Americans living in poverty: 45.3 million. That number is way too high. And, although it’s been stuck there for several years, we know how to reduce poverty in this country—with policies that make a measurable difference in people’s lives, like raising the minimum wage, providing paid leave and paid sick days, expanding Medicaid, and investing in child care and pre-K programs.

Another thing many of us know:  faith advocacy organizations are on the front lines working to reduce poverty. Faith communities see the human suffering that comes from living in poverty, along with the economic and social injustices that lead to being poor.  That is why faith-based groups are infusing grassroots protests and political advocacy with righteous indignation across the country.

Moral Mondays is fighting for a living wage, fair labor practices, Medicaid expansion, and other policies that recognize human dignity and the importance of family. Interfaith Worker Justice is leading the charge against wage theft and setting up worker centers across the country to fight for workers’ rights.

Along with PICO, NETWORK, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and others, faith-based advocates give each of us an opportunity to help reduce poverty. Whether we get involved on an individual, community, state, or national level, each of us can do our part and put our values into practice.

Sally Steenland is Director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress

Alice O’Connor: Half the Battle

This week’s release of the predictably dire annual poverty statistics has provided yet another occasion to gin up the narrative of “big government failure” that blames “trillions” in social spending for fostering the behavior that makes and keeps people poor.  Liberal advocates have done a good job of countering that narrative, with evidence of just how much higher—roughly double—measured poverty would be without the legacy of increased social spending the War on Poverty helped to launch.

But today’s anti-poverty activists have also lost sight of the most powerful weapons unleashed by the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), signed 50 years ago in August 1964.  One was macroeconomic policy.  The Council of Economic Advisers linked fighting poverty to its number one policy priority of pushing the economy to its full-employment growth potential—down from the unacceptably high 5.5% to 4% unemployment—which, when combined with robust anti-discrimination, minimum wage, and labor standards, would put workers in better position to combat poverty wages, and everyone in a better position to get a decent paying job.

The other was participatory democracy, embedded in the EOA’s mandate to assure “maximum feasible participation” among the poor in local community action agencies, but more importantly realized in the legacy of grassroots organizing and institution-building that empowered poor people to demand access to the educational and job opportunities, social and legal services, and political representation more affluent Americans had come to expect.

The War on Poverty certainly didn’t get everything right.  But the view it offers of the battlefield, then and now, does tell us where and how much more broadly—beyond defending the safety net and raising the minimum wage—we need to set the sights of an economic justice agenda.

Author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History, Alice O’Connor is professor of history at the University of California Santa Barbara.


Deirdra Reed: ‘This is not your grandma’s skid-row poverty’

One in every seven women lives in poverty. This is not and cannot be thought of as your grandma’s “skid row” poverty. This is post-recession, soccer mom poverty. Look at your Facebook friends list and count.  Every seventh (or every one) of those women may be working full-time and still struggling to make ends meet.

I am a woman of color, a working mother (and self-declared Southern Belle). As working women, we should take the U.S. Census Bureau report as confirmation that the economic pressure we feel is real; and we should hold our elected officials accountable for their part in job creation and passing policies that support family-sustaining wages.

As a Senior Organizer with the Center for Community Change, I have been working with community-based groups all year to empower women like myself to band together as we fight for good jobs with good wages, the end of income inequality, and the chance to have a secure retirement future.

At North Carolina Fair Share, a group of women who are recently retired or close-to-retirement are organizing to protect and expand Social Security, with a new credit just for caregivers.

In Atlanta, 9 to 5 and the Racial Justice Action Center’s Women on the Rise program are organizing working-age women, most of whom are heads of households, around the way that poverty is criminalized. For example, for a service industry worker who’s stretching to make it to the end of the month, a parking ticket can turn into thousands of dollars in fines and an arrest warrant.   Someone with means would just pay the ticket. Someone without means could lose everything.

In Alabama, members of the Federation of Childcare Providers of Alabama (FOCAL), most of whom are women who provide childcare in their homes, are organizing to expand Medicaid to help the families that they serve.

I hope next year, our work will have had a big impact in reducing the poverty numbers.  And I hope you will join us.

Deirdra Reed is a Senior Organizer with the Center for Community Change.

With the poverty rate at an unacceptable 14.5 percent and economic inequality stuck at historically high levels, one might assume that chronic economic insecurity and an off-kilter economy are the “new normal”—that nothing can be done to fix it.

But there is nothing “normal” or inevitable about more than 45 million Americans living in poverty. It is the direct result of policy choices. With different policy choices, we will see a more equitable economy—it’s as simple as that. 

Here are 10 steps Congress can take to cut poverty, boost economic security, and expand the middle class.

1) Create jobs.  

The best pathway out of poverty is a well-paying job. To get back to prerecession employment levels, we must create 5.6 million new jobs. To kick-start job growth now, the federal government should invest in our infrastructure by rebuilding our bridges, railways, roads, ports, schools and libraries, neighborhood parks, and abandoned housing; expanding broadband; develop renewable energy sources; and make other commonsense investments that create jobs and boost our national economy. For example, extending federal unemployment insurance would have created 200,000 new jobs in 2014. But Congress failed to act, leaving 1.3 million Americans and their families without this vital economic lifeline. We should renew federal unemployment insurance, and also build on proven models of subsidized employment to help the long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged workers re-enter the labor force.

2) Raise the minimum wage.

In the late 1960s, the minimum wage was enough to lift a family of three out of poverty.  Not so anymore. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 is a poverty wage, and had it been indexed to inflation it would be $10.86 per hour today. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and indexing it to inflation would lift more than 4 million Americans out of poverty. Nearly one in five children would see their parent get a raise. Recent action by states and cities shows that boosting the minimum wage reduces poverty and increases wages.

3) Increase the EITC for childless workers.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) lifted more than 6.5 million Americans—including 3.3 million children—above the poverty line in 2012. Kids who receive the EITC are also more likely to graduate from high school and have higher earnings in adulthood. Yet childless workers largely miss out on the benefit—their maximum credit is less than one-tenth that awarded to a worker with two children. Policymakers across the political spectrum have called for boosting the EITC. Importantly, this policy change should be combined with a raise in the minimum wage—one is not a substitute for the other.

4)     Support pay equity.

With female full-time workers earning just 78 cents for every dollar earned by men, we must take action to ensure equal pay for equal work. Closing the gender pay gap would cut poverty in half for working women and their families and add nearly half a trillion dollars to the nation’s gross domestic product.  Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act to hold employers accountable for discriminatory salary practices would be a key first step.

5)     Provide paid leave and paid sick days.

The United States is the only developed country without paid family leave and paid sick days, making it exceedingly difficult for millions of American workers to care for their families without having to sacrifice needed income. Paid leave is an important antipoverty policy—having a child is one of the leading causes of economic hardship. Additionally, nearly 4 in 10 private sector workers—and 7 in 10 low-wage workers—do not have a single paid sick day, so they must forgo needed income in order to care for a sick child or loved one.  The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, or FAMILY Act, would provide paid leave protection to workers who need to take time off due to their own illness or that of a family member, or after the birth of a child. And the Healthy Families Act would enable workers to earn up to seven job-protected sick days a year.

6)     Establish work schedules that work.

Low-wage and hourly jobs increasingly come with unpredictable and constantly shifting work schedules. These erratic schedules make accessing childcare even more difficult and leave workers uncertain about their monthly income. Further, things many of us take for granted—such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment or even a parent-teacher conference at school—become herculean tasks. The Schedules That Work Act would require that workers receive two weeks advance notice of their schedules, create and protect an employee’s right to request needed schedule changes, and provide guaranteed pay for cancelled or shortened shifts—important first steps towards making work-family balance possible for all workers.

7)     Invest in affordable, high-quality childcare and early education.

The lack of affordable, high-quality childcare serves as a major barrier to reaching the middle class. Federal child care assistance reaches only 1 in 6 eligible children. One year of childcare for an infant costs more than a year of tuition at most states’ four-year public colleges. Poor families who pay out of pocket for childcare spend an average of one-third of their incomes.  Boosting investments in Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, as well as passing the Strong Start for America’s Children Act—which would invest in preschool, high-quality childcare for infants and toddlers, and home visiting services for pregnant women and mothers with infants—will help families obtain the childcare they need in order to work, and improve the future economic mobility of America’s children.

8)     Expand Medicaid.

Since it was signed into law in 2010, the Affordable Care Act has expanded access to high-quality, affordable health coverage for millions of Americans. However, 23 states refuse to expand their Medicaid programs to cover adults up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line, which makes the struggle for many families on the brink much harder. Expanding Medicaid means more than just access to healthcare—it frees up limited household income for other basic needs, like paying rent and putting food on the table. Having health coverage is also an important buffer against the economic consequences of illness or injury—unpaid medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy. Studies link Medicaid coverage not only to improved health, improved access to healthcare services, and lower mortality rates, but also to reduced financial strain. It’s time for all states to expand Medicaid.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

9)     Reform the criminal justice system and enact policies that support successful re-entry

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world. Today, more than 1.5 million Americans are behind bars in state and federal prisons, a figure that has increased fivefold since 1980. The impact on communities of color is particularly staggering: One in four African American children who grew up during this time period have had a parent incarcerated.

Mass incarceration is a key driver of poverty. When a parent is incarcerated, his or her family must find a way to make ends meet without a necessary source of income. Additionally, even a minor criminal record can result in lifelong barriers to climbing out of poverty. For example, people with criminal records face substantial barriers to employment, housing, education, public assistance, and building good credit. More than 90 percent of employers now use background checks in hiring, and even an arrest without a conviction can prevent an individual from getting a job. The “one strike and you’re out” policy used by public housing authorities makes it difficult for individuals with even decades-old criminal records to obtain housing, and can obstruct family reunification. And in more than half of U.S. states, individuals with felony drug convictions are burdened with a lifetime ban on receiving certain types of public assistance.

In addition to common-sense sentencing reform to ensure that we no longer fill our nation’s prisons with non-violent, low-level offenders, policymakers should explore alternatives to incarceration, such as diversion programs for individuals with mental health and substance abuse challenges. We must also remove barriers to employment, housing, education, and public assistance. A decades-old criminal record should not consign an individual to a life of poverty.

10)  Do no harm

The across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration—which took effect in 2013—slashed funding for programs and services that provide vital support to low-income families. Sequestration also cost the American economy as many as 1.6 million jobs between mid-2013 and 2014.  As Congress considers a continuing resolution to fund the federal government past October 1 and avoid another government shutdown, it should reject further cuts to vital programs and services which would once again take us in the wrong direction. Thereafter, Congress should make permanent the improvements made to the EITC and the Child Tax Credit as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which are set to expire in 2017. And it should protect and strengthen vital programs such as Section 8 housing, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, which suffered two rounds of deep cuts in 2013 and 2014.

Conclusion

It is not only possible for America to cut poverty, it is possible for us to cut poverty dramatically.  Between 1959 and 1973, a strong economy, investments in family economic security, and new civil rights protections helped cut the U.S. poverty rate in half. Investments in nutrition assistance have improved educational attainment, earnings, health and income among our nation’s children when they reach adulthood. Expansions of public health insurance have lowered infant mortality rates. And, in more recent history, states that have raised the minimum wage have shown the important role that policy plays in reversing wage stagnation.

There is nothing inevitable about poverty, and there is nothing inevitable about the lack of political will to dramatically reduce it.  Share this article with your friends, and get involved.

A total of 6.4 million people age 65 and over (15 percent of all people 65 and over) are living in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Supplemental Poverty Measure. That’s 6.4 million of our mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, grandmothers, and grandfathers who struggle daily to afford food and rent, to access needed health care and long-term services and supports, to remain connected to their families and their communities.

Older women of color are especially impacted by poverty. Twice as many women as men live in poverty and the numbers of women living in extreme poverty has increased by 20 percent since 2011.  Under the official poverty rate (which actually undercounts poverty’s impact on the nation’s seniors), over 20 percent of black and Hispanic older women live in poverty.

As has been widely reported, the demographics of our country are changing.  Every day 10,000 people in America turn 65.  By 2030 there will be 72 million seniors living in America.  If the current poverty rate of 15 percent among this group holds, there will be more than 11 million seniors living in poverty just 16 years from now.

Unfortunately, in the future, poverty rates among seniors may actually be higher for a number of reasons.

A Changed Economy

In the last 30 years, wages have stagnated.  Saving has become more difficult for working Americans.  Company-paid pensions are being phased out for most workers and there is nothing to replace them. The impact of these changes on families and working-age individuals is serious and it will only increase as they reach retirement.  Also, having a lower-income during working years means a decreased ability to save and, ultimately, less support and fewer resources later in life.

An Economic Recovery That Didn’t Reach Many

The recent recession created an additional set of problems for seniors and near seniors. For example, because of the housing crisis, many people aged 50 to 65 lost equity in their homes. People in this age group also are among the most likely to have lost a job and had trouble finding a new one. They may have had to live off of whatever savings or retirement funds they had while they were unemployed. Facing economic struggles, they were more likely to take Social Security benefits early, which decreases the value of their benefits over time.

The rising costs of health care present a serious financial challenge to retirees who have little retirement income or savings. Add to that the fact that at least 70 percent of seniors will require some type of long-term services and supports in their lifetime and few have the ability to afford it, and it’s clear that a senior poverty crisis is imminent.

What Kind of Society Do De Want to Live in?

Before Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were adopted, the poverty rate among seniors in our country neared 40 percent.  Returning to those levels of poverty among the oldest members of our communities would be catastrophic for seniors, families, and the economy.

But that’s exactly where we might be headed if we adopt the narrative of cable news shows, budget-cutting lawmakers, and television commercials that suggest American seniors are doing just fine. Instead we must educate our friends, families, colleagues, and policymakers.  We need them to know that a growing number of seniors are facing an economically insecure future—and that cutting programs like Social Security, SSI, Medicare, and Medicaid will only exacerbate the problem.

So now you know: senior poverty is a real and growing problem in America. If you want to live in a society in which people can age in dignity and no senior has to decide between food and the medicine they need, let’s start talking about senior poverty. Help build the momentum necessary to preserve and expand access to health care, long-term services and support, social services, and economic security programs for the millions of low-income seniors who struggle among us.

Throughout the year, I witnessed the remarkable resilience of my clients, and they remain at the forefront of my mind today.

One of the women I worked with owned a single bar of soap, and she used it to wash her dishes, clothing, children, and herself. Another client had to spend her last ten dollars to buy diapers for her daughter, but that meant she couldn’t afford the $2.50 subway ride to see her doctor and get treatment for her chronic seizures. A different client lived three miles away from the nearest food pantry, and she walked there in the winter three times a week, while pregnant, after the food stamps ran out.

These stories may seem extreme, but they are hardly unique. In New York City, 31 percent of children live below the poverty line. In a city of just over 8 million people, 1.9 million must turn to food stamps. It is not surprising that so many New Yorkers need nutrition assistance as 45 percent of people in NYC live below 150 percent of the poverty line, which translates to less than $35,775 a year for a family of four. For far too many in our city, access to food, housing, and healthcare is a daily struggle and never a certainty.

I finished my AVODAH service in July, but these individuals continue to face crises on multiple fronts. Some have cancer and cannot afford to go to the doctor. Many face eviction. Most skip meals to feed their children. Nearly all have no computer or access to the Internet.

In my work with NYLAG, I learned first-hand that public assistance is often critical to a family’s survival. I saw that a $215 monthly rental subsidy could avert a person’s pending eviction and that $347 a month in food stamps could allow a mother and her daughter to start eating healthy meals together. What at first seemed like modest amounts made noticeable differences in people’s lives.

At the same time, it quickly became obvious that our system of public benefits is hardly enough and needs fixing. Who can find an apartment in NYC for $215? How can a mother and her child afford enough food with $347 a month, $11 a day? What are we trying to accomplish by providing people with public benefits that are hardly enough to get by?

We use many metaphors to justify public benefits, recalling the importance of safety nets and the need for ladders out of poverty. But the metaphor most appropriate to me is that people need a floor beneath their feet. How can families start climbing the ladder of social mobility when they have no solid floor to stand on, when they are free falling through an abyss?

For public benefits to meet their goals, they should ensure that every American has access to the basic goods and services they need to survive. They should be sufficient so that families can afford adequate housing, nutrition, healthcare, and education – the primary prerequisites for family stability and mobility.

To be sure, one of the goals of public assistance should be to help those who can work find jobs. My clients who can work desperately want stable employment because they know that a reliable income offers them the best chance to provide for their families. But a parent who spends half his week in housing court, or who cannot afford child care, or who has to race between the doctor’s office and a welfare appointment, faces significant barriers to finding a job. Public assistance can provide the stability people need to pursue regular work. Cuts to social welfare programs may improve short-term budgets, but they inflict great costs on society by exacerbating the instability of people living on the brink in this country.

It is appalling that our neighbors, people living in our same zip code, might have a single bar of soap or skip meals to feed their children. Providing for people’s basic needs is both just and good public policy. We cannot let people in our midst starve or go homeless, and offering basic stability makes it easier for people to find reliable employment if they are able.

Our democratic principles and economic justice are indivisible. If we truly believe that all people are equal and deserve the same rights and opportunities, then we must ensure that every American has an open path towards a noble wellbeing.

At least since President Ronald Reagan quipped that “we fought a war on poverty and poverty won” it’s been politically incorrect for politicians of either political party to go near the issue, even with 22% of America’s children now living below the poverty line.

To appreciate how different things are, just look at LBJ’s barnstorming across the country in the spring and summer of 1964 to rally support for his Economic Opportunity Act.

Less than 6 months after President John Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson, in a lunchtime speech to the League of Women Voters in Pittsburgh put the power of the presidency on the line, saying: “We have declared unconditional war on poverty. Our objective is total victory.”

Politically, Johnson was seeking to shore up his support among JFK’s liberal supporters who were suspect of his worthiness.  But it was personal too. He’d grown up the son of a tenant farmer in a family of seven and remembered the sting of neighbors bringing needed food to his hill country home.

Those years before Vietnam, Watergate, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and race riots, were still a time when anything seemed possible. America had pulled through the Great Depression, triumphed in World War II, stared down the Soviets over missiles in Cuba, and created a secure and growing middle class.  Sargent Shriver, Johnson’s choice to run the War on Poverty, remembered: “When a War on Poverty was launched, in terms just like the war against Hitler, we were accustomed to thinking in terms of the United States being able to do big things. America bestrode the world like a Colossus.”

What Johnson didn’t say is telling in and of itself.  In speeches around the country throughout the spring and summer the president never uttered the words “middle class”. Today the “middle class” is a non-negotiable touchstone for all political rhetoric; but back then it was so secure it didn’t need to be called out, shored up, pandered to, or put on a pedestal.

Less than a year after Johnson began making the case for the Economic Opportunity Act he signed it into law.  The legislation created Head Start, Job Corps, and Community Action Agencies, along with an expansion of social security benefits, the establishment of food stamps, and Title I legislation to subsidize low-income schools. Though not perfect, these initiatives lifted millions of Americans out of poverty and they still do.

Congressional majorities and unity following JFK’s assassination gave Johnson the luxury of political breathing room.  But in just a few years that breathing room began to shrink. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter would confront Watergate’s abuse of power and the constraints of inflation, gasoline shortages, the Iranian hostage crisis and diminished confidence in government. After Johnson, there would be good intentions and nods in the direction of ending poverty, but no risk of political capital.

The fight against poverty did not end, but for many people the battleground shifted. Social entrepreneurs took up the mantle and a new generation of activists found an outlet in innovative nonprofit organizations like the Harlem Children’s Zone, Teach For America, Communities in Schools, and KaBoom—all of which focus on aspects of economic inequality.  Some, like Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign, seek to leverage the best of the Johnson era programs, ensuring access and participation in things that have proven effective, like the school breakfast program and SNAP.  But such private efforts can only go so far.

At the Rose Garden bill signing ceremony Johnson said, “We will reach into all the pockets of poverty and help our people find their footing for a long climb toward a better way of life.”  That climb has turned out to be steeper than LBJ or anyone else might have imagined.  Though the War on Poverty significantly reduced the poverty rate in America, there are still 46 million of us—more than 15 percent—who live below the poverty line.

To complete the journey, we await renewed presidential leadership.

The Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness (ICPH) in New York City has published a book (which I co-authored with ICPH president Ralph da Costa Nunez), and launched a companion website, PovertyHistory.org, to tell the history of poverty and homelessness in New York City.  These resources demonstrate what has been accomplished in the century-long struggle against poverty and also the work that remains.

To a degree, anti-poverty strategies focus on either assisting individuals or lifting communities. Johnson’s War on Poverty, for example, took a decidedly community-centered approach to confronting policy. While some of its greatest successes were policies targeting individuals—like Medicare and Medicaid and SNAP—at the core of the Economic Opportunity Act was the Community Action Program, an effort to provide greater individual opportunity by reviving entire communities.

Here are a few snapshots of other poverty warriors from our past.

The Progressives                                                

Community played a central role for this generation of reformers that came of age between 1890 and 1920.  They viewed neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty, substandard housing, and contagious disease as both a cause and effect of continuing destitution among families in poverty.  For this group, later called progressives, the solution lay in strengthening both neighborhood institutions and state interventions.

In the Progressive Era, settlement houses embodied the idea of community-based poverty relief. First established in London in the 1880s, settlements proliferated in U.S. cities over the end of the 19^th century and into the first decade of the 20^th century. At places such as Hull House in Chicago, and Henry Street Settlement or Greenwich House in New York, young men and women from the middle class came to live, assist, and learn about poor communities. A focus on community infused everything that these settlement workers did. Some of the work was cultural such as providing concerts, lectures, and art exhibits for the neighborhood. But much of the work was about providing direct assistance to poor and working class families, including: medical care, day care, kindergarten, and after-school programs so parents could find work.  The reformers also sponsored neighborhood clubs and organizations to help residents focus attention on the problems confronting their communities.

Settlements also became centers of reform. Workers collected extensive data on their communities and their expertise was central in efforts to end child labor, improve housing conditions, and provide state support for widowed or deserted mothers. In calling for these reforms, settlement workers tried to rally their neighbors to get involved, consistent with their missions as community-based organizations.

The New Dealers

The New Dealers of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration—many of whom had participated in the Progressive Movement—confronted a crisis of unprecedented widespread unemployment and poverty, the Great Depression. Their focus was on relief to those in need, a return to economic growth, and reforms that would prevent poverty in the future. The Roosevelt administration passed wide-reaching legislation to stabilize the economy, ensure protections for workers including the right to organize, and facilitate homeownership. These programs laid the foundation for an expanded middle class after World War II.

At the same time, the New Deal needed to create specific mechanisms to assist families and individuals confronting poverty. Programs such as the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration provided temporary assistance to unemployed people during the Depression.  The Social Security Act of 1935 provided a more permanent response to economic vicissitudes and remains one of our greatest pieces of legislation for fighting poverty through today. It offered new federal assistance to the elderly, and created the system of Old Age Insurance that we now call Social Security, which has led to a marked decrease in poverty among the elderly. It also provided federal support for unemployment insurance to prevent hardship in future economic downturns. The Act also contained Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC)—a program that provided assistance to widowed and deserted mothers. The bill included no general assistance for poor individuals, but Aid to Dependent Children—while never generous and subject to the limitations of each state—would help countless families.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

The Fight Today

Today, our poverty programs are a mix of both individually-focused policies and community-based approaches.  There are more than 46 million SNAP recipients, and the program kept nearly 5 million people out of poverty last year; in 2012, 26.2 million tax filers received the EITC, and it kept 6.5 million people out of poverty; and a flawed TANF provides assistance to more than 1.5 million families a month. At the same time, many community action agencies and settlement houses continue to provide focused assistance to their local neighborhoods. Programs funded through the Community Development Block Grant, and efforts like the Obama administration’s Promise Neighborhoods, are also attempts to strengthen communities in ways that alleviate poverty.

Yet, as Elizabeth Kneebone of Brookings has recently reported, poverty became more concentrated over the 2000s. The solution must be more coordinated individual and community-based antipoverty programs that provide assistance and also the resources—jobs that pay good wages, housing, transportation, access to education, social services, to name a few—that would resuscitate floundering urban neighborhoods and suburban towns.

Our poverty warriors have made great strides in the fight against poverty over the last century.  Today, through both individual and community-based tactics, it’s time for our next great advance.

Yet much has changed in the past 50 years. Demographic shifts, insufficient access to jobs that pay decent wages, and an economy that increasingly serves only the wealthy few pose a new set of challenges. Meanwhile, several components of our system of work and income supports have grown weaker and been cut back—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, is the poster child of this troubling trend—and today far too few individuals and families get the help they need and deserve in hard times.

Too bad, but this is all someone else’s problem, right?

Wrong.

As my colleague Melissa Boteach points out in her column published earlier this week, four out of five Americans will experience at least one year of significant economic insecurity—defined as living in poverty or near-poverty, or needing to turn to unemployment insurance or another form of public assistance—at some point during their working years. Yep, you read that right: four out of five.  Perhaps even more staggering: half of us will experience three years or more of significant economic insecurity.

While poverty might be a condition we associate with “other people,” just take a look at the most common precipitating factors: Job loss. Birth of a child. Illness. These are life events that could hit any of us. While some paint poverty as something that only happens to flawed people, or a condition affecting a stagnant, marginalized minority, in reality it’s something most of us will encounter at some point in our lives. As Dr. Mark Rank, whose research yielded those staggering findings, wrote in the New York Times: “Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans.”

In the coming months, the Center for American Progress poverty team will explore policies that strengthen and modernize our nation’s safety net, and promote economic mobility for families on the brink. Since we’re all in this together, shouldn’t we ensure that our social contract provides adequate protection amid the ups and downs of life?

But he’s Chair of the House Budget Committee, a leader within his party, and, whatever poverty scholars and more serious analysts might wish, he will still set many of the terms of the poverty policy debate in DC. He should be ignored, but he probably can’t be.

So what’s so bad about Paul Ryan’s thinking about poverty?

First, there’s nothing new in it. He offers block grants, cuts to programs, new work requirements, school vouchers, regulatory repeal, more money to faith-based initiatives, and privatizing social services, presenting us with little more than fresh marketing for tired ideas that — when tried in the past — made people’s lives worse, not better. Even the proposals that might seem promising are badly designed — like his way of expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit.  With the possible exception of his proposals to reduce some mandatory minimum sentences — which advocates of all stripes have been agitating for for decades — it’s old wine in old bottles.  Why should we treat it as newsworthy or innovative?

There’s a deeper problem with Ryan’s approach beyond the details of his proposal.  The foundation itself is rotten: the project is built upon three fatal, false premises.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

The first assumption is that poverty is a complex problem — that we don’t know what works to reduce it, and that we need more data and more research.

This is wrong, and there are two easy ways to see that we could reduce poverty right now. First, we could look overseas. Every other rich democracy on the planet has a lower poverty rate than we do. They do it in all kinds of different ways, but most depend on generous, national, universal, programs — the exact opposite of what Ryan proposes. Can reducing poverty really be that hard if everyone else has figured it out?

We can also look to our own history. In 1959, official poverty rates among people over 65 were higher than for any other age group.  Today, they are lower than for any other age group. What happened? Social Security, which became more generous and nearly universal over time. It turns out that if you send people money every month — wait for it — they will be less poor.

The second assumption undergirding Ryan’s plan is that private or not-for-profit agencies are inherently more effective than public ones, and that state and local approaches do better than national ones — “devolution,” conservatives used to call it.

These particular claims, not borne out by the evidence, are rooted in the idea that long ago we had a golden age of private charity and civic volunteerism that provided effective, targeted aid to poor people — the kind of assistance that impersonal, distant government is incapable of delivering, the argument goes. This is pretty bad history, but its bad history with a pedigree.  Real historians, like Gertrude Himmelfarb and David Beito — and pretenders, like Marvin Olasky and Newt Gingrich — have made these kind of assertions in previous eras of “reform,” and even helped shape the harmful welfare policies of the Clinton years.

So Ryan is merely cribbing from the anti-welfare moralists of the 1980s, who were actually drawing on 19th century social thought. And those arguments were based in earlier British Poor Law philosophy that insisted that cash aid to poor people was only going to make them worse off. These are really old ideas that have been discredited by more than a century of increasingly sophisticated social science.

More simply: you can’t have much knowledge of US history if you think overall well-being was better in the 19th century before the creation of the modern American welfare state, weak though it may be. And it is comparatively weak. Yet when Ryan claims that US social welfare programs have failed, he never includes the fact that every effort to expand them — from the Progressive Era to the New Deal to the Great Society — has been met with determined opposition, disproportionately from wealthy, white, Southern men (once Democrats, they are now Republicans). This is especially true of efforts to improve the well-being of women and people of color. The extent to which social welfare programs come up short today — as with the 2009 Recovery Act or the 2010 Affordable Care Act, for example — is in no small part due to Ryan’s Party trying to make them fail.

The final false premise that frames Ryan’s proposal is that poor people need counseling and guidance; they are broken and in need of fixing.  As a consequence, the Ryan Plan is built on intrusive casework and the micro-management of poor families’ lives (limited government is rarely a priority where poor people and people of color are concerned). But too often caseworkers are an obstacle to be overcome, not a boon to those looking for help too get by (and I say that as a Professor of social work). And perhaps that’s really the purpose of Ryan’s plan: research going back at least to the early 1960s shows that the more professional caseworkers there are in a city, and the more they are involved in the provision of relief, the less likely people are to get material assistance.

For Ryan, poverty is a failure of character.  Just as ideologues have done for centuries, he wants the very government that he doesn’t trust — not even with basic service provision — to distinguish between the “deserving” and the “undeserving,” and to treat them accordingly, even in the absence of evidence that those categories represent any recognizable reality. What he envisions might as well be called the Office for the Reformation and Redemption of the Poor, and for all of his supposed efforts to listen to people living in poor communities, he never comes to realize the most simple truth. As one homeless man put it to me a few years ago, “I’m not stupid, I’m just poor. People don’t seem to get the difference.”

Paul Ryan’s power must be taken seriously. But his analysis of the causes of poverty and possible ways to reduce it should not be.

Yesterday, Representative Paul Ryan’s unveiling of his new proposal to address poverty offered the opportunity to gather responses from some of the people who might lead such a movement.

Here is what they had to say:
Tianna Gaines-Turner: About Work and People Receiving Public Assistance
Tom Colicchio: ‘Opportunity Grants’ Will Make Hunger Worse
Laffon Brelland, Jr.: ‘My Family Does Not Struggle Because We Lack Work Ethic’
Melissa Boteach: Ryan’s Case Against Himself
Peter Edelman: Compassionate Conservatism Rides Again
Anne Ford: Put Energy into Raising Wages
Deepak Bhargava: Ryan’s Poverty Plan Equals More Attacks on the Poor
Dr. Mariana Chilton: Not a Serious Dialogue

Tianna Gaines-Turner: About Work and People Receiving Public Assistance

Earlier this month, I had the honor of testifying at one of the War on Poverty hearings. I testified as a member of Witnesses to Hunger, and as a representative for millions of Americans like me who are struggling with poverty. I had hoped that by sharing my story, and my ideas for change, Congressman Paul Ryan would have released a poverty plan that listened a little more closely to my recommendations.

I do appreciate some of what he said in yesterday’s event at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m glad he recognizes that the government has an obligation to expand opportunities in America. Many of his ideas are good. Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit would help a lot of struggling Americans—although paying for it by eliminating the Social Services Block Grant wouldn’t—and results-driven research is an important part of understanding what works and what doesn’t.

I did not appreciate Mr. Ryan’s comments about work and people on public assistance. He started out by saying that today’s Americans are working harder than ever before, but aren’t getting ahead. This I agree with. My husband and I both work part-time jobs, but we still struggle to make ends meet. Millions of Americans face similar situations as my husband and me.

But Mr. Ryan went on to explain that he wants to incorporate work into the safety net, like they did with welfare reform in 1996. I do not think this is a good idea. I stressed this during my testimony in front of the House Budget Committee. I explained that families are working. We don’t need to be placed in more work programs, we need our jobs to pay living wages, and to offer family-oriented policies like paid sick and paid family leave. This way, we can earn more, save money, and create our own safety net so that we never have to turn to the government for help again.

I am happy that Congressman Ryan ended his speech by encouraging people to send him constructive criticism, and more recommendations for him to consider when developing this poverty plan. He can be sure that I will be writing to him with more of my ideas, and more recommendations from my Witnesses to Hunger brothers and sisters.

Tianna Gaines-Turner is a member of Witnesses to Hunger, a program hosted by the Center for Hunger Free Communities at Drexel University featuring the voices and photography of parents and caregivers who have experienced hunger and poverty firsthand. She is a married mother of three children, and works with children at a local recreation facility in Northeast Philadelphia. 

Tom Colicchio: ‘Opportunity Grants’ Will Make Hunger Worse

When Congressman Paul Ryan talks about consolidating means-tested programs like food stamps, child care, welfare and housing into a single grant, he’s talking about a block grant.  And that’s something we already know all too much about.

The TANF block grant created in 1996 made cash assistance much harder to obtain.  In 1996, about 68 percent of families with children living in poverty were able to get TANF cash assistance.  Now about 25 percent can get it.  Plus, the block grant is still funded at 1996 levels so cash benefits have decreased dramatically in terms of their real purchasing power.

We can’t allow the same thing to happen with food assistance.

We already have a hunger crisis in this country.  Nearly 50 million people don’t necessarily know where there next meal is coming from.  It’s unacceptable in the wealthiest nation in the world, and it’s a crisis virtually unknown in other wealthy nations.

But hunger is also a problem we can solve—if we look honestly and critically at the policies that contribute to either making hunger worse, or to reducing it.

Lumping nutrition assistance in with other much needed assistance—like housing and childcare—would make hunger worse.  For one thing, it makes it much more difficult for our growing Food Movement to hold legislators accountable for their votes on food issues.  If they vote to cut the block grant is the money cut from food or housing? And if we leave it to the whims of states to decide how much nutrition assistance people can receive, or whether they can receive it at all—as with TANF—then how will we ever resolve as a nation to end hunger?

As I’ve written previously, it’s time we have a Food Movement that votes on a good fair food system for all.  That same movement needs to be vigilant and speak out against bad ideas that will make our food system worse.

That means speaking out in no uncertain terms against Congressman Ryan’s proposal.

Tom Colicchio is a Chef and food-activist.  You can follow him on Twitter @tomcolicchio.

Laffon Brelland, Jr.: ‘My Family Does Not Struggle Because We Lack Work Ethic’

Living in a single-parent household is tough. I grew up with my mother and two sisters, and although my mother always worked, we struggled to make ends meet. When the economy tanked, my mother lost her job. My older sister was in college, and even with the help from other outside family members and government assistance, we could not cover the cost of her education and all of our family’s other expenses.

I remember the day my mother looked me in the eye and said, “I’m going to be honest with you, son. With the way things are right now, I won’t be able to help you pay for college. What happens to you now is all on you.”

I took her advice and got to work. In addition to being a full-time high school honor student, I worked two low-wage jobs to help my family pay the bills. The years went on and things got harder at home. My family was always working. With my help, we were able to put my sister through college. I will be a sophomore at the University of South Carolina in the fall. But even with every able body in the house working, it is still a challenge every month to cover the bills.

My family does not struggle because we lack work ethic, which Paul Ryan’s new plan implies is the underlying cause of poverty in America. My family struggles because of poverty wages, which Ryan’s plan does nothing to rectify. Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the last time the federal minimum wage was raised. My family and I work tirelessly, but until employers are required to pay us enough to thrive, my families and thousands like ours will continue to scrape by.

Laffon Brelland, Jr. is a rising sophomore at the University of South Carolina, double-majoring in English and Spanish. He is a Junior Writing Fellow at the Center for Community Change.

Melissa Boteach: Ryan’s Case Against Himself

Yesterday, Rep. Ryan proposed a plan that would eliminate a program that consolidates multiple antipoverty programs into a single grant to states in the name of providing greater flexibility. Yep, you read that right.

While the press coverage has focused on Rep. Ryan’s “new” idea of consolidating multiple programs into a single “Opportunity Grant,” most of the coverage missed the fact that he proposed to pay for part of his plan by eliminating the Social Service Block Grant (SSBG).

The SSBG is a capped, flexible stream of funding to states that funds services such as adoption, childcare, counseling, child abuse prevention, community-based care for seniors and people with disabilities, and employment services. Last year it helped approximately 23 million people, about half of them children. The program dates back to 1981, when a series of social services were consolidated into this single grant, and since then, many nonprofits have been funded by it to provide services like case management. Sounds a lot like Rep. Ryan’s “Opportunity Grant”, right?

Unfortunately, while SSBG provides states with enormous flexibility, over time it lost a lot of political capital. Politicians began to complain that it was duplicative of other programs. Policymakers could cut it time and again without having to cite any specific consequences since the money was “flexible.”  Over time, it has lost 77 percent of its value due to inflation, cuts, and funding freezes, and in recent years, there have been attempts to eliminate it altogether.  This is surely predictive of Rep. Ryan’s new proposal.

Which brings me back to the “Opportunity Grants.”  Right now, Rep. Ryan is claiming that his plan is completely deficit neutral, and states would not lose any money.

Yet, in a cautionary tale, calls for elimination of SSBG have been supported by none other than Rep. Ryan, who out of the other side of his mouth is proposing an eerily similar idea: to consolidate, in the name of flexibility, major funding streams that currently help low-income families. In fact, Rep. Ryan proposes eliminating the Social Service Block Grant altogether to pay for his proposed EITC expansion for childless workers. In an ironic twist that he seems to miss, he claims that SSBG is “ineffective.”

Thank you, Paul Ryan, for illustrating more clearly than anyone else possibly could why your proposal is so dangerous.

Melissa Boteach is the Vice President of the Poverty to Prosperity Program and Half in Ten Education Fund at the Center for American Progress.  You can follow her on Twitter @mboteach.

Peter Edelman: Compassionate Conservatism Rides Again

Paul Ryan has a new suit of clothes, but inside he’s still just Paul Ryan.  In fact the suit of clothes is made of porcupine quills—take a close look and it’ll poke you in the eye.  He’s now seeming sweet and sympathetic in wanting to do something about poverty, but what he’s proposing is mainly a shell game—now you see it, now you don’t.

Never mind that his budgets for the past four years—which would have cut $5 trillion dollars over 10 years, with 69 percent of the cuts coming in programs for low- and moderate-income people—are still on the table.  The latest Paul Ryan says he will turn well over $100 billion in federal programs into block grants once his state demonstrations prove successful.  And he says he won’t cut any of the programs in his block grant.  Will the real Paul Ryan please stand up?

Of course, the new and improved version of his proposals is still pretty lousy.  Block grant food stamps?  Terrible idea.  I guess he thinks it’s fine for Mississippi to say that the definition of hunger there isn’t the same as it is in Minnesota.  Make housing compete with child care by putting them both in the same block grant?  Why?  What we need is more investment in both.

Block grants are not the friend of low-income people.  TANF, among other issues, is receiving the same $16.6 billion appropriation now as it had in 1996.  The Social Services Block Grant received $2.5 billion when it was enacted in the early 70s and is now getting $1.7 billion.   I guess there’s no reference to inflation in Paul Ryan’s instruction manual.

It’s time to get real.  There are two huge problems (and lots of smaller ones) that are making it difficult to reduce poverty right now.  One is the flood of low-work in our country—which results in 106 million people with incomes below twice the poverty line, below $39,000 for a family of three.  What does Paul Ryan propose to do about that?  Nothing. The other is the huge hole in our national safety net for the poorest among us—6 million people whose total income is from food stamps, which by itself is less than about $7,000 annually for a family of three.  Paul Ryan has a proposal there—put TANF, which is already almost nonexistent in most of the country, into a block grant along with food stamps, housing, child care, and God knows what else.  How does he think that will go?

We tried compassionate conservatism.  There was no there there then—and there still isn’t.

Peter Edelman is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown Law Center, and the Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Anne Ford: Put Energy into Raising Wages

I’ve been a nurse for more than 30 years. I worked at DC General for 17 years and as a home health nurse for 10 years before a back surgery left me unable to care for adults. So, I switched to working with children. I’ve worked in children’s hospitals and as a school nurse and I loved it. But when I lost my job of five years, I also lost a $2,000 per month paycheck – resources I needed to care for myself and pay for my mortgage, car loan, insurance, and other bills.

When I was finally able to enroll in food stamps and unemployment insurance, I received $700 per month and had to rely on my daughter’s help to make ends meet. Thankfully, I also received Medicaid, which covered my doctor’s appointments, medications, and follow-up care from my surgery. Without that care I wouldn’t have been able to leave my house. I really relied on these three benefits to survive until things could get better, same as a lot of people I met in lines, filling out forms alongside me.

With his new proposal, I can see that Paul Ryan doesn’t care about us. If he did, why would he want to make getting help harder? If he had asked any person in my situation what kind of help they needed, he never would have come up with this plan. He’s never, not for one day, walked in our shoes.

Paul Ryan and I are both Christians, and I encourage him to pray on his new plan. What he’s doing is not godly. Through my church, I volunteer at So Others Might Eat (SOME), an organization that helps people who can’t make ends meet access food, clothing, and healthcare. If Rep. Ryan’s plan goes through, the number of people needing to reach out to organizations like this will only increase, and these organizations can’t meet that kind of increased demand.

If Paul Ryan really wanted to help he should have proposed creating something, not messing up programs like food stamps that are already working well.  He should have proposed to create jobs, or increase the supply of affordable housing. He should have put his energy into raising the wages at all these jobs that don’t pay enough to survive. The truth is if you don’t have a job that pays more than the cost of living, you can’t afford the necessities to live. And that’s how we ended up with all these people with nowhere to live who are fighting every minute to put food in their stomachs.

I depend on food stamps, Medicaid and unemployment insurance, but it still isn’t enough to make ends meet. But, for myself, I’m hopeful. Just this Wednesday, I accepted a full-time job as a school nurse without even asking the salary. For all those people out there who are still looking for jobs, what Paul Ryan wants to do makes me scared.

Anne Ford is a school nurse in Washington, DC.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Deepak Bhargava: Ryan’s Poverty Plan Equals More Attacks on the Poor

For those of us who wish our nation’s leaders would pay more attention to the 106 million people living on the brink in this country, Paul Ryan’s new plan to address poverty is so bad it might make us think, “Careful what you wish for.”

Rep. Ryan’s plan adopts the conventional Republican analysis that individual failure and insufficient effort is the main driver of poverty, and then revives as the solution the bankrupt block grant proposals that have failed in the past.

Let’s be clear—the premise of Ryan’s argument is wrong.  The evidence of our own history and from around the world shows that we can—through concerted government action—make a big difference in reducing poverty.  The positive effect of better labor market standards and government supports is undeniable, in the U.S. and around the world.

So what would a serious effort to reduce poverty look like? We could reduce poverty in the U.S. by 80 percent by taking three simple steps:

First, we need to raise wages so that workers earn a living wage. The minimum wage must be increased to catch up with productivity growth, and workers must have the right to organize and collectively bargain for better wages.

Second, we need to eliminate racial and gender inequality in the labor market. Poverty isn’t just an economic issue; it’s a women’s rights and racial justice issue. A paycheck should be equal to the amount of work you produce, not be based on the color of your skin or your gender.

Finally, we need full employment. We need to invest in key sectors of the economy—from the green economy to infrastructure—so that we can create millions of jobs.

This strategy would reduce poverty in America by 80 percent because it would improve access to what people living in poverty really need: quality jobs that pay a decent wage. Paul Ryan’s plan, in contrast, would give people living in poverty more of what they absolutely don’t need: blame that reinforces the conditions that keep people poor.  It would also lead to more hardship by further weakening our already frayed safety net.

Deepak Bhargava is the executive director of the Center for Community Change which you can follow on Twitter @communitychange.

Dr. Mariana Chilton: Not a Serious Dialogue

It may be surprising to hear this, but Representative Paul Ryan is actually speaking my language.

He says he is interested in developing opportunity and choice for people, and that people need careers, not just “jobs.”  He also said, loud and clear, we need to get rid of the federal red tape.   In my state, the need to collect documentation of work participation hours creates such a gnarly cluster of inefficient busy-work and red tape that it sucks the creativity and life out of entire communities.

When Rep. Ryan said “too many families in America are working harder and harder yet falling further behind,” I perked up, thinking—Right! Their wages have deteriorated. We should raise wages to a living wage.  But discussion of wages was a glaring omission in his speech.

Another worrying thing—his talk of turning programs over to the states. There’s no good precedent for that.  Consider Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which Rep. Ryan consistently holds up as a model for reform: that’s the birthplace of federal and state red tape.  Additionally, what we see on the ground with TANF is often punitive, and downright mean. Here’s an example in Pennsylvania: at a County Assistance Office, people waiting to speak to “career development workers” are actually forced to sit facing the wall with their backs to the case managers. This is dehumanizing and humiliating.

Unfortunately, that dehumanizing treatment of America’s families is what I see when I hear that Rep. Ryan is listening to his “mentors”—people who say such thoughtless, non-Christian things as “there is a deserving and undeserving poor.” Last I checked, there is no spiritual tradition, nor any political tradition, that says some people deserve to be hungry (read: poor).  Since Paul Ryan comes from a state that has the highest rates of racial disparities in wealth and in health, everything he says should be held up to our public accountability meter that measures for transparency, fairness and basic humanity.

As I was listening to Rep. Ryan, I almost started thinking I could actually work with him, and that I could join the dialogue. After all, he’s the only leader recently who has shown a public attempt to make fixing poverty a focus of their leadership. But when I saw all the men (read: no women) joining him on the discussion panel at the American Enterprise Institute after his speech, I laughed out loud.  Until Rep. Ryan starts including women—especially women of color, African American, Latina, American Indian, Asian and more—none of us can take this “dialogue” seriously.

Caregivers like Sara should not have to sacrifice dignity in their own retirement to take care of family – be it an aging parent, a child, or a relative with disabilities.

Today, New York Congresswoman Nita Lowey is introducing a bill in Congress that would address this injustice.  Groups across the country like the Center for Community Change Action, the National Council of Women’s Organizations, and others, are rallying around the bill which would provide an earnings credit in the Social Security benefit calculation while an individual is caring for a child under a certain age, a disabled family member, or a senior in need of care.

Tonight you can hear from Rep. Lowey and others about this important issue by joining a teletown hall that starts at 7:30pm ET.

Family comes first – whether it’s your aging Mom who gets more opinionated every day or the newborn you swear already smiles, providing for your family is not negotiable.  When it becomes necessary to stay home and care for someone then our Social Security system should honor family by taking into account some of that lost time from the paid work force.

We are long overdue to recognize the largely female workforce of caregivers for the time, energy and effort required to care for loved ones outside of the paid workforce.  The hidden cost of caregiving is in the impact it has on working families who have to struggle to survive without a wage.  Millions of Americans like Sara Moore are doing the essential work of caregiving, and that number is growing. A caregiver credit is about honoring the time, effort and love that people put towards caregiving as work.  As more and more people in our country step up to do right by family as caregivers, it’s only right that their work be recognized in our Social Security system through a caregiver credit.

Even in a fractured Congress, Rep. Lowey’s bill should be something that garners supporters from both sides of the aisle.  Every one of us knows someone who has sacrificed to care for a loved one.  It’s time to truly honor those caregivers by lifting up women’s issues, expanding Social Security… and sponsoring Rep. Lowey’s bill.

UPDATE: Click to listen to Representative Lowey’s tele-town hall on this topic.

A few weeks ago they invited me to join them and other groups in Trenton, N.J. for a day of lobbying politicians regarding issues related to housing and jobs. Many voices, many issues.

I asked the director of the NJ Coalition to End Homelessness, Deb Eliis, if there was only one thing The Coalition could accomplish in the next year, what she would want it to be.

She answered: “A Homeless Shelter in Ocean County.”

Ocean County is where I live.  I know that there are seven facilities in Ocean County that house, care for, and try to find permanent living situations for stray animals, but not a single one that provides the same services for humans.  Toms River is the second largest township in Ocean County and one of its most affluent. I lived in Toms River until a month ago before I moved into permanent affordable housing in a nearby town. When I lived in Toms River I worked with the faith-based Homeless Outreach mission, so I also know that on any given night in Toms River there are between 30 and 40 people (that we know of) living scattered throughout its wooded areas. In case you have never been to a homeless encampment – and as someone who used to be homeless – I can tell you this: there is no way anyone – no matter your age – can live that way for very long without developing serious physical and mental ailments. These people will sooner or later end up in an Emergency Room, which is the least efficient and most expensive way of not dealing with this problem of homelessness.

My contribution to the meeting in Trenton was to get agreement on not calling it a “homeless shelter” and instead refer to it as an Emergency Housing Relief Center.  I feel strongly that words such as ‘shelters’ and ‘the projects’ should be dropped from our vocabularies when we are referring to people living in acute financial distress.

Why? Because words matter.

Check out this vintage 1976 ditty from a former B-list actor in California: “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”

The ‘she’ is the infamous ‘welfare queen’ who in fact didn’t exist, and the person making the lumpen remark, Ronald Reagan, goes on to become President of the United States in 1980.

The remark helped to turn back a decade of progress in eliminating chronic poverty in America, and marked a significant turning point in American attitudes toward their fellow citizens receiving financial aid and/or food assistance from the government.

Once again, we are back to where we were in the 1970s –defining poverty, rather than just tackling it head on.  But this time we have to be ever more vigilant about not letting it be defined by people who are prejudiced and use negative stereotypes.  We need a fresh working definition of poverty that reflects peoples’ real life experiences and portrays their personal and financial struggles with dignity and respect.

I didn’t get an email or phone call to tell me that it wasn’t working or why. Nobody did.  We all found out when we arrived at the store, and some, like me, not until I had reached the cashier. Embarrassed, I turned to my son and tried to explain why we had to leave the store, and our dinner, behind.

Was it because of the government shutdown? How long would we be without access to the small amount in food help that my son and I receive? I had heard from friends that unless this shutdown was resolved before November 1, there would be no food stamps, veterans’ benefits or social security.  I was worried that the food stamp shutdown had started early and so were other parents in our community.

But this isn’t what captured the nation’s attention, the humility of food stamp recipients in 17 states who were turned away at the register.  People humbled by the need to ask for government help despite long work histories or who, growing up poor, never got a shot at an income above the poverty line.

Instead, what America heard about on that day was the experience at one store, where the cashiers let food stamp recipients shop instead of turning them away.  Without a computer system to document how much money in benefits was on each card, some shoppers may have purchased more items than they were eligible for.  The media called it “looting,” taking any opportunity to cast a shadow on the integrity of the down-and-out.

I am a responsible, hard-working, minority single mother who returned to college, as a full-time student at UC Berkeley, after the bottom fell out of the economy. I am thankful for the help I receive and work incredibly hard as I carefully manage my limited time and money. Most people I know in my predicament—with incomes below the poverty level—are good people who are trying hard to do the right thing.

Government shutdowns, accidental or intentional, are scary for people like myself and my son who would be homeless and hungry without the temporary help we receive from the safety net that is there for all of us in case we lose our jobs, or are unable to work, or work doesn’t pay enough to afford the basics.  While our national leaders have failed to govern based on the real life experiences of most low-income Americans—and instead focus on the sensational exceptions meant to draw the ire of the television watching public—I’m proud to say that some California legislators have charted a different course.

Having heard my story when I told it on a local radio station, California Assembly Member Mark Stone introduced a bill to strengthen protections for consumers with EBT cards by ensuring that both consumers and retailers are informed when there are outages to the EBT system.  Governor Brown’s Administration has also now set up a process to inform SNAP recipients when the EBT system goes down.

This month, the Atlantic ran an article about the lack of real-life experience lawmakers have had with poverty.  It concluded that, while inadequate, perhaps more lawmakers participating in the SNAP Challenge and other poverty simulations might help build empathy and understanding among our nation’s leaders.  I don’t disagree, but I think that they could accomplish a lot more if they would simply stop their rhetoric and listen to someone who knows poverty first-hand like legislators here in California are doing.

Even if you count yourself as reasonably well informed about poverty in the U.S., what you think you know may be wrong. For example, you may know that by the official Census Bureau measure, 15 percent of the population was considered poor in 2012, about 46 million people; you may even know that there’s a lot of variation in that rate by age (it’s much higher for children and much lower for older people), by race (it’s radically higher for African Americans and Hispanics), by geography (it’s higher in the South, as it always has been, and it’s now growing fastest in the suburbs), and so on.

You may even know that the official measure of poverty is outdated and inaccurate, and that, using the Bureau’s new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), the problem is, in truth, a bit worse: the SPM shows that more likely 16 percent of Americans were poor in 2012, or about 50 million people, and that poverty was much higher among the elderly than the official measure would lead us to believe, and a bit lower among children.

Both of these approaches share a common problem, however: they are static, point-in-time measures, telling you how many people were poor at the time of the surveys used to gather these data. But poverty in America is fluid, and people move in and out of poverty over the course of a year and over the course of their lives.

Thanks to other data from the Census Bureau, we can step back a bit to see that more common kind of movement in and out of poverty. If we look at how many Americans were poor for at least two months during 2009, 2010, and 2011, for example, we find a poverty rate not equal to the Census Bureau’s 15 or 16 percent—but twice that, at 31.6 percent. That is, over a recent three-year period, almost one-third of all Americans were poor at least once for two months or more.

There’s another important lesson to learn from this data: while lots of Americans experienced a “spell” of poverty during those years, only 3.5 percent of the population was poor for all 36 months.  So how we think about poverty is all wrong: it’s a much more common occurrence than people realize, and the chronic, persistent, generational poverty that features so prominently in political rhetoric and media coverage is very much the exception, rather than the rule.

We can step back even further, and look at the likelihood that any American will encounter poverty at any point over the course of their entire adult lives, thanks especially to research done by Mark Rank at Washington University in St. Louis. What his work tells us is that more than 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will be poor for at least a year.  Over the same period, more than half will be poor or nearly poor, with income at 150 percent of the poverty line, or about $27,000 annually for a family of three.

So poverty in the U.S. is, in fact, a much larger problem than we think it is, and it’s one that most Americans will face.

While that’s a grim realization, perhaps it’s also a cause for hope.  Maybe if more Americans understood what their own personal stake is in committing to poverty reduction, they might be more inclined to press for higher wages, better access to affordable child care, more generous social welfare programs, a reinvigorated right to form a union, and so on. These are not policies that benefit some group of Others, but policies that serve the majority of us. If we can’t count on empathy to improve well-being, maybe selfishness will do the trick?

We live in a world of widespread economic fragility, of insecurity, of what some have come to call precarity:  According to one recent survey, about one-in-four Americans have no savings at all.

U.S. household economies are fragile, so it often just takes one crisis to push a family over the edge—from just getting by to not getting by at all: An injury that makes it impossible to work, a sudden physical or mental illness, a death in the family, a car breaking down, or even the birth of a new baby.  All of these can be traumatic economic events for a family with little or no savings and no margin for error—events that most families recover from, with time. But then the next crisis hits. And in the U.S., you can’t necessarily count on the social safety net to be there for you when you need it. And you’ll need it.

We can’t hope to address a problem if we misdiagnose it, and one of the virtues of thinking more clearly about what poverty actually looks like is that a better diagnosis might alter the political landscape.

Don’t fight poverty because you feel sorry for other people; fight poverty because the odds are increasingly high that you and your family will be poor someday, too.

There was once a strong statistical link between economic growth and poverty reduction, but rising inequality has severed it, and the results are deeply dispiriting. If the statistical link between economic growth and falling poverty that held before the mid-1970s had not been broken by rising inequality, then poverty, as the government measures it, would be virtually eradicated today. Furthermore, the impact of rising inequality is nearly five times more important in explaining poverty trends than family structure.

As the Economic Policy Institute has documented in our paper launching the Raise America’s Pay project, this rise in inequality is simply the flip side of nearly stagnant hourly wage growth for the vast majority of the American workforce in the three decades before the Great Recession. So how to reverse this wage-stagnation, especially for low-wage workers? Below is a list of proposals, all linked in their attempt to rebuild institutions that provide bargaining power to workers who have had it taken from them in recent decades.

The minimum wage is currently more than 25% below its real value in the late 1960s. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the Harkin-Miller bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 would cumulatively boost incomes of people below the federal poverty line by $5 billion. And this is probably too conservative; other academic research finds that the same bill would lift more than 4 million people out of poverty. Among those who would see a raise from the Harkin-Miller bill, 55% are women and 25% are women of color. Nearly one-in-five kids would see at least one parent get a raise.

Another key policy priority should be efforts to level the playing field for workers to organize and form unions. The decline in unionization over the last several decades has led to increases in wage inequality and a loss of bargaining power for workers. And this bargaining power loss is not confined to union members themselves—unions often set wage-standards for entire sectors. Importantly, the decline in unionization is not a natural, inevitable phenomenon or a result of workers no longer wanting unions. It is the result of a policy decision to allow growing employer aggressiveness to tilt the playing field against organizing drives.

This policy choice is clear when one looks at the evidence. First, unionization has held up much better in the public sector where employers have less ability to fight organizing drives. Second, in 2007, the share of non-union workers who said they wanted to be represented by a union or similar organization reached an all-time high at over 50%.   There is a growing wedge between the desire to organize and bargain collectively and workers’ ability to do so. And, third, even the most obvious form of employer aggressiveness—the firing of workers who are trying to organize—has risen sharply in recent decades, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

The fact is that the decline of unions can explain approximately one-third of the growth of wage inequality among men and approximately one-fifth among women since the 1970s. This rising wage inequality is the key driver behind stagnant wages for workers at the bottom. When low-wage workers have been able to organize, unionization is  associated with higher wages and benefits for many, including: food preparation workers, cashiers, cafeteria workers, child-care workers, cooks, housekeepers, and home-care aides.

Reducing wage theft is also particularly important to low-wage workers. Wage theft occurs when employers withhold wages that are owed to a worker, for example by requiring workers to work off the clock or refusing to pay overtime. There is widespread evidence of these practices and more—from tipped workers not being paid their wages to Apple store employees being forced to stand in line after their shift while their bags are checked for merchandise. In nearly 9,000 investigations of the restaurant industry, the wage and hour division of the Department of Labor found that 83.8% of the shops investigated had wage and hour violations —underscoring the enforcement problems.

Millions of low- and moderate-wage workers have also seen slow wage growth because they are working overtime and not getting paid for it. This is because the real value of the salary threshold under which all salaried workers, regardless of their work duties, are covered by overtime provisions has been allowed to erode dramatically. Simply adjusting the threshold for inflation since 1975 would raise it to $984 per week (or $51,000 on an annual basis), from its current level of $455 ($24,000 annually). This simple adjustment would guarantee millions of additional workers time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week.

Other labor market policies and practices, which, if changed, would increase the wages of low- and moderate-wage workers, include: the misclassification of employees, such as construction workers who are deemed independent contractors so that the employer doesn’t have to pay for workers’ compensation. Just-in-time scheduling occurs when employers schedule workers erratically and sporadically, and denies workers any regularity in their schedule or pay. Think about how difficult that is for working parents who need to support their families and also find child care, or for workers who need a second job to make ends meet. Finally, paid sick time, paid family medical leave, and flexible work hours, all would support workers and their families.

The social safety net remains crucial for low-income working families in this country and also needs reforms. Everything from shoring up SNAP to extending EITC to childless adults to expanding Medicaid to people in those states which refuse federal dollars. We also should have universal pre-K and affordable and high quality child care—we need to use every tool in our toolbox to give kids a chance of success, reducing inequality at the starting gate of kindergarten.

But, if we really care about children in our country, then we also need to raise the wages of parents working hard every day to lift their families out of poverty.  We need to enforce the labor standards we have, update the ones that need it, and put power back in the hands of workers to bargain for better working conditions for themselves and their families.

We stayed.

We moved out of our middle-class house in Bedford, Massachusetts. Thanks to a state law that fast-tracked mixed-income rental development projects, and also a Section 8 federal housing subsidy, we were able to rent an apartment and remain in Bedford, a middle-class town with its good public schools.

I have vivid memories of that difficult time. Checking out at the grocery store, we were the only shoppers in line using food stamps. At school, I was the kid in the cafeteria paying with a voucher for reduced-price lunch. At the welfare office, I remember my mother telling me to “shush” and promising “it would only be a minute.”

“It’s been a lot longer than a minute,” I told her.

“A minute is a figure of speech,” she informed me.

After three years my mother got a job as a travel agent. A couple years later, she was hired as a contracts administrator at Raytheon. By the time I was eleven—six years after we moved into an apartment and turned to the safety net for help—my mother was able to purchase a house for our family. It was a turning point for us, and one that wouldn’t have been possible without a lot of help during the lean years.

My ability to stay in Bedford’s good school system, in particular, changed the course of my life. I went on to attend UCLA and then Yale Law School. I was acutely aware that a lot of nameless public servants had made decisions to expand opportunity and that those decisions had made all the difference for my family and me. So today, I take great pride in leading an institution that at its very core is about expanding opportunities for all Americans. We talk a lot in this town about things like “sequester” and “the debt ceiling” and “target deficit rates”—but to me, public policy basically comes down to this question: is it expanding or contracting opportunity for most Americans?

I believe we have a historic opportunity to address poverty today, because the interests of low-income people and the middle class are converging. Median wages—the wages of middle-income earners—have been stagnant for twelve years. People recognize there is growing inequality in this country and that something is amiss when companies are doing well but people aren’t—when dividends, stock prices, and CEO salaries rise but wages don’t.

And while we have a clear opportunity to make the connection between the interests of people in poverty and the interests of the middle class, we have our work cut out for us. Conservatives have successfully pitted people in the middle against people struggling near the bottom. They are skilled at exploiting economic anger and anxiety, fear and distrust. For example, they have convinced many Americans that many people who turn to the safety net want to be on welfare rather than having a job. This mistaken notion is particularly troubling right now, when the hardest-hit communities face high unemployment rates of 20 to 30 percent. Conservatives say we have to break up the safety net or people won’t pursue jobs. But the truth is those jobs just don’t exist right now. So the real effect of these heartless policies will be more people hungry, more people homeless, and more children with fewer opportunities to succeed—children just like my brother and I.

For my family, as for many American families, the safety net was a bridge that carried us through hard times. That’s why it’s important that I tell my story.

Among some on the center left, there is a political strategy to not talk directly about poverty.  Many will say things like “trying to get people to the middle class.” I think that strategy is a mistake. If we fail to talk openly about poverty, we miss an opportunity to address people’s anxieties and misconceptions about low-income people. We fail to correct the misunderstandings about who poor people are, and we fail to make progress we otherwise could.

That is why at the Center for American Progress we work hard to speak clearly and directly about poverty, and to ensure the conversation isn’t an abstract debate, but one about real people. So we support the Half in Ten campaign to reduce poverty by half over ten years—just as we did from 1964 to 1973—which engages people to tell their stories about what the safety net meant for their lives, just as I tell mine. Our new TalkPoverty.org blog features contributors living in poverty today who write about the struggles they face. Teams as diverse as housing, healthcare, education, budget, and tax policy are working hard to determine the impact of policy decisions on people in poverty or at-risk of falling into poverty. (And let’s remember, there are now 106 million Americans—more than 1 in 3 of us— either living in poverty or on less than $37,000 annually for a family of three, which is a single hardship away from poverty.)

When we take on the assumptions and stereotypes directly—and actually look at the lives of poor people—we see in fact that their lives are full of struggle (including the struggle to navigate a welfare system that seems designed to make it as hard as possible for people to receive benefits).

Recently, I testified at a Senate HELP committee hearing on ways to improve the economic security of working women in America. One of the other witnesses on the panel was Armanda Legros. Ms. Legros was 6 ½ months pregnant when she pulled a stomach muscle at work. The doctor told her no more heavy lifting and gave her a written note for her employer, but the employer refused to comply. So Ms. Legros lost her job and had to go on unemployment insurance and food stamps. She is a perfect example of a person who wants to work but is forced to turn to the safety net. Her story is also a perfect example of the kinds of struggles low-income workers face in the workplace every day. We need to give more low-income people the opportunity to tell their stories at Congressional hearings, so our elected officials see the true face of poverty in America, and I applaud the Senate HELP Committee for providing Ms. Legros a platform.

It’s time for a new focus on the solutions to poverty, both in the November elections, and during the presidential election in 2016. To force the issue to the forefront of the national conversation, advocates in Washington and in communities across the country will need to mobilize and speak out. People will need to raise the issue at town halls just as we did for health care reform. We all need to stand with workers who are fighting for better wages and working conditions and give them opportunities to tell their stories. It’s not a question of whether change will come from the grassroots or Washington—we need to fight for good policy in Washington and raise our voices at the state and local levels.

We’re all in the same boat now, searching for economic stability for our families and an economy that raises wages for everyone. It’s time for us to make that case clearly and unapologetically. There are many times when we miss opportunities in public policy. We can’t miss this one.

The House bill also restricts funding for a summer food pilot program to rural counties in Appalachia. While this language would not, as some media reports have erroneously implied, end all summer meals programs for children in cities, it is still troubling.

The pilot program in question is the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children (SEBTC), which the USDA initially piloted in 2011 as an alternative approach to providing food assistance to children during the summer. It was designed to address a major barrier in the current Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) – namely, that children must eat meals onsite at community locations. For families with limited access to transportation, and for parents who work, taking children to a meal site in the middle of the day can be a challenge. Instead, SEBTC provides low-income families with an Electronic Benefits Transfer card (like a pre-paid debit card) that contains $60 per child per month – about the same amount the federal government spends per child on school meals – that can be used to buy groceries.

In its first two years, SEBTC was tested in rural and urban areas in eight states and two tribal nations in different regions of the U.S., and was effective in reducing child hunger. Nine out of ten families issued SEBTC benefits used them, and the program eliminated very low food security for one-third of the children who would otherwise have experienced it. Children in participating households also ate more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and drank fewer sugary beverages. And with increasing child hunger during the summer when school’s out, but stubbornly low participation in SFSP nationally, it is promising that USDA is testing innovative strategies that work in communities across the country – urban, suburban, and rural. These results are so promising that Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) is sponsoring the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act, which would expand SEBTC nationwide beginning in 2016.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

While the House Appropriations bill  would leave intact the larger summer meals program in urban, rural, and suburban areas, it would limit the successful SEBTC pilot program only to Appalachian counties.  That would mean the program would reach only a fraction of children living in poverty and experiencing food insecurity across the country, and it would also have deeply racialized outcomes – primarily benefiting White children. It is true that Appalachia has high rates of poverty and has for generations. However, only 7 of the 50 counties with the highest child poverty rates in the nation are in Appalachia; most of the others are in the Mississippi Delta and neighboring areas in Alabama and Georgia. And the counties with the largest numbers of children living in poverty are urban. In fact, pilot programs in just four counties – Los Angeles County, CA; Harris County, TX (Houston); Cook County, IL (Chicago); and Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix) – would reach more children below the poverty line than pilot programs in all 418 Appalachian counties.

Likewise, limiting SEBTC to Appalachia in essence restricts participation in the program to majority White communities, excluding counties – both urban and rural – with high percentages of people of color. The Appalachian Regional Commission reports that Appalachia is 83.5% White, a much larger majority than the country overall, which is 63.7% White. Additionally, only 13 of the 50 counties with the highest child poverty rates are majority White – though 49 of those counties are rural. MSNBC reported earlier this year that the county with the highest overall food insecurity in the nation (Humphreys County, MS), and the one with the highest child food insecurity in the nation (Zavala County, TX), are similar in a few ways: “Both are in poor, rural areas of the South, [and] have socially and economically isolated populations.” They are both majority people of color, as well. But they are not in Appalachia.

These facts are not surprising when you consider how poverty disproportionately impacts people of color in both urban and rural areas. The national poverty rate is 14.3%; however, nearly one in four people who identify as Native American, Black, or Latino live below the poverty line. The poverty rate for Whites, on the other hand, is well below that of other racial groups and the nation overall, at 9.9%.

Geography, poverty, and race intersect in the U.S. in profound ways, and have for centuries, due to countless policies that have restricted access to economic and geographic resources by race. With its current proposal, the House continues the common practice of building policies that perpetuate racial inequities without actually naming race. If we want to ensure that all hungry children are fed—and all families have access to the most convenient and effective ways of feeding their children—then we have to make sure that our policies are truly inclusive of every child, considering both where they live and their racial identity.

Ending child hunger and ending racial inequities are not mutually exclusive. They must go hand in hand.

Under the now defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, states were not permitted to restrict eligibility in this way unless they obtained a waiver from the federal government.  Nevertheless, before the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 (PRWORA)—otherwise known as “welfare reform”—20 states were granted waivers to exclude infants and children from receiving AFDC benefits.

But California received only a provisional waiver for its MFG rule because then-Director of the California social services department, Eloise Anderson, refused to comply with two of the federal requirements: to exempt teen parents from the rule; and to evaluate the impact of the rule on out-of-wedlock births and child neglect.

However, when welfare reform was passed—ending AFDC and creating the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program—states were no longer required to obtain waivers in order to deny aid to children.  Director Anderson wrote a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services asserting that neither the waiver nor the impact studies were now necessary.  But the fact is California state law did still require compliance with those same AFDC provisions and also that a certificate declaring that the requirements had been met be issued and kept on file.

During the massive overhaul that followed passage of welfare reform, no one noticed that Anderson—who now serves as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s Secretary of the Department of Children and Families—didn’t conduct the impact studies or issue the certificate as required.   The California Department of Social Services has no record of either the certificate or studies.I e-mailed Secretary Anderson for comment but she declined.  The contact number listed on her Department’s website transferred me to a disconnected line—twice—the kind of frustrating experience that happens to low-income people all of the time.

Today, the California child exclusion rule is still in existence, denying newborns and children needed assistance which would help them meet their basic needs and promote better health and economic outcomes.

While I’m confident that this shortsighted and regressive policy will be repealed—an effort currently led by California Senator Holly J. Mitchell, chairperson of the Legislative Black Caucus—I am deeply disturbed by the 20 years of harm we have done to children and families.

How could it possibly make sense—to anyone on either side of the aisle—that welfare reform simply stopped requiring states to evaluate the impact of their policy decisions?  Had California conducted an impact study on its child exclusion policy, it would have learned that it had no impact on out-of-wedlock births and increased the likelihood of neglect for already very vulnerable children.  Further, welfare reform only allows a minimal role, if any, for the Department of Health and Human Services to call these outdated and dangerous state-based policies into question.

Today, nearly every child served by TANF lives in deep poverty—on less than half of the federal poverty line, or less than about $9,000 annually for a family of three.  Their lives are very tenuous, their hopes for the future dim.  And yet dramatic policy shifts under TANF still don’t need to be evaluated for their impact, and TANF policies that have failed people in poverty for decades are allowed to continue on unchallenged.

This July 4^th, I hope California will celebrate the repeal of our TANF child exclusion law, and that it marks the beginning of a broader reexamination of welfare reform.  It is long overdue.

For Niki Davis, it took more than money to move from homelessness to homeownership.  A college educated artist, when she walked into LIFT’s DC office after a decade of financial and emotional stressors, she was skeptical.

She recalls that it had been a long time since someone treated her with dignity and respect—like a human being.  Over the course of a year, she and her Advocate—a LIFT volunteer—partnered weekly to get her off of shaky ground. What began as a goal of finding a shelter became a journey to homeownership, with Niki and her Advocate working side-by-side to navigate the maze of mortgage lending.  Today, Niki owns her home and is feeling more empowered than ever before about her future.  She didn’t come to us seeking only financial help.  She sought collaboration, and LIFT became her social network.

To hear Niki tell it, LIFT worked for her because, “There’s something much more empowering about working collaboratively. [The volunteer Advocates] had a great zest and enthusiasm—a young generation without the experience but the brainpower and hope and no loss of spirit, because it hasn’t been beaten out of them. It’s a different pace, a complete positive belief that it can get better. That let me get out of any sense of hopelessness.”

What Niki’s story underscores—and what we’ve seen in many of the stories from the 100,000 families we’ve worked with—is the importance of connections in driving success.  It took cash for Niki to secure her mortgage and make ends meet, but it also took her plugging into and activating the network of people around her to ensure that her dream became a reality.

At LIFT, we help people build the personal, social, and financial foundations they need to get ahead. In fact, we believe that having confidence and connections are so important that it actually accelerates the financial gains a person is making.

When people are plugged in—have a social network, friends, people who they know will have their back—it can make the difference between giving up and pressing on; between getting a job opportunity or not.  It can also make the difference between having a safe, stable home and living on the street.

I know this—not just from my work at LIFT—but because I lived in a homeless shelter in DC when I was a kid. It was a converted old Hotel called The Braxton, and back then, times were really tough. But, even before Facebook and Twitter, I had my own social network of sorts that rallied around my family.  I had the support of DC’s most iconic organizations like Martha’s Table, Central Union Mission, Bread for the City, the Capital Area Food Bank, and my church.  This network ensured that we were able to eat, get back and fourth to school, and get housing faster than the 10-year waiting list for Section 8 housing would allow. These organizations and many more helped my family get answers to problems that seemed too intimidating to answer on our own. They were my social network much like LIFT is to the community members we serve.  I didn’t have to go through being homeless by myself and today I have the incredible privilege of telling the stories of hope that need to be told to thousands of people every day.

The result of LIFT’s focus on relationships and connections—the transformation that occurs between two people working together in trust—is real and tangible.

We are actually measuring whether things like confidence and connectedness have an impact on our Members’ ability reach their goals. We call that measurement Constituent Voice (CV) and you can learn more about it here.  Essentially, it’s an evaluation and measurement tool we use to unearth the critical keys to our Members’ success.  What we are finding so far supports the power of social networks in social services.

We’re seeing that members with top CV scores are twice as likely to achieve things like getting a job or securing stable housing.  There is consistent correlation between the quality of our relationships and our members’ achievement of economic outcomes. This is telling us that relationships matter.

We are also finding that three of the top five most predictive indicators of ultimate economic progress aren’t financial in nature – they’re social connectedness, belief in oneself, and confidence.  This is also telling us that relationships really matter.

For anti-poverty organizations, it is clear that if we ultimately want to help people establish financial security we must bolster confidence and build social capital.

Think about what this could mean for closing the opportunity gap and for the strength of the anti-poverty movement as a whole.  If we allow ourselves to imagine the possibilities, we can envision an America where Niki’s zip code, or my own, or yours, wouldn’t determine the trajectory of our lives.

When relationships are formed, individuals thrive, communities thrive, and collectively we ALL thrive as a nation. Having each other’s backs should be a given.  Those relationships are the thread that keeps struggling families tethered to hope.

Moffitt’s analysis tracks trends through 2007, the year before the Great Recession and major legislation like the Recovery Act and Affordable Care Act. In the discussion below, I’ll stick with his time frame. But a fuller analysis would also track spending trends through both the Great Recession and a return to near full employment, which hasn’t happened yet of course.

The first two charts below track federal spending on what I’ll broadly call income security programs through 2007. Instead of looking at the change in spending on a per capita basis, as Moffitt did, I compare spending to the size of the economy (GDP). This is a common way to examine spending trends, and a common sense way to assess whether we have become “more generous” over time as Moffitt asserts.

Figure 1 shows total federal spending on these programs and the programs individually between 1962 and 2007. To allow for a clearer look at the overall trend, the second chart just tracks the change in total spending (again as a share of GDP) on these programs between 1972 and 2007.

Figure 1. Federal Spending on Income Security Programs as a Percent of GDP, 1962-2007

Figure 2. Total Federal Spending on Income Security as a Percent of GDP, 1972-2007

Source: Author’s Analysis of OMB Historical Tables, FY2015 Budget

Looking at Figure 2, it’s hard to see any big change in generosity since the mid-1970s. If you look at the peaks in spending (which occur during recessionary periods) since the mid-1970s, spending has trended downward slightly since its 1976 peak. If you look at the troughs in spending (during low-unemployment periods), spending trended downward slightly through 1989, and then upward modestly in 2000. So, for example, expenditures on income security programs totaled 1.73 percent of GDP in 2007, an amount .18 percentage points higher than in 1979. While .18 percent of the economy isn’t peanuts, it’s hard to see it as a significant expansion in the welfare state.

To thicken the plot further, Figure 3 tracks the change in federal spending on education, training, employment, and social services. There was a large increase (about 1 percent of GDP) between the declaration of the War on Poverty and last years of the Carter Administration. But since then, there has been a substantial decline in federal investments in education, training, employment and social services (about .6 percent of GDP).

Figure 3. Federal Spending on Education, Training, Employment and Social Services as a Percent of GDP, 1972-2007

If you look at the trend in total federal spending on income security plus education, training, employment and social services, the story is more about retrenchment than the expansion story Moffitt tells.

It is also worth noting some of the trends in individual programs. Most notably, as Figure 1 shows, spending on unemployment insurance as a share of the economy has declined steadily since the mid-1970s. Similarly, spending on “family and other support assistance”, primarily the Temporary Assistance program (and its predecessor AFDC), has also declined significantly.

The fact is that our core “unemployment system”—composed of unemployment insurance, the unemployment assistance provided through Temporary Assistance, and reemployment and training services—has gotten smaller over the last few decades, as compared to the size of the economy.

At the same time, we’ve allowed the minimum wage to decline substantially in real terms; labor market institutions like unions that boost wages for the working class have also weakened; and we’ve increased the payroll tax, while expanding two programs, the EITC and Child Tax Credit, that use public dollars in large part to subsidize poorly compensated employment. (A related issue with the EITC is that employers may capture roughly a quarter out of every dollar of EITC benefits through wage reductions, as economist Jessie Rothstein’s research suggests.)

Any comprehensive examination of whether the “welfare state” has become more or less generous over the last several decades needs to take these issues into account. It would also have to take into account distribution of the many social welfare benefits besides the EITC and Child Tax Credit that are provided through the tax system, including: the mortgage interest deduction and the exclusion from income for tax purposes of various employer-provided benefits. As the Congressional Budget Office has documented, the value of these benefits is very large as a share of GDP and most of these benefits go to households with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent of the population. For example, the mortgage interest deduction is a larger program than the EITC and the vast majority of its benefits go to those in the top 20 percent.

And neither my analysis nor Moffitt’s analysis, for the most part, discuss trends in health insurance or pensions. These are also areas where any comprehensive discussion of “generosity” needs to take not just Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security into account, but also the set of “submerged” welfare state programs, particularly the tax preferences for employer-based health and pension benefits.

To sum up, Moffitt raises important issues about the profound decline in the effectiveness of means-tested Temporary Assistance as an unemployment assistance program for low-income parents. But his blanket claim that means-tested welfare spending was up before the Great Recession is overstated, and his analysis misses the extent to which the non-means-tested unemployment insurance program and other parts of our core unemployment system have been weakened over time.

Around the turn of the century, fathers, brothers, uncles, and sons spent their waking hours in the dark of the coal mines, sacrificing their health, and sometimes their lives, so the rest of America could have coal. They were subjected to suppression and labor exploitation, and families were being destroyed. Finally, the mothers, sisters, aunts, and daughters, of the miners unified, and in 1921, came to be known as the Amazon Army. Holding American flags high, two to six thousand women marched through the coalfields in protest of the unfair and unjust working conditions and labor laws that oppressed the people of the region.  Armed only with red pepper, these women stood toe-to-toe with rifle and shotgun-bearing militia, catapulting the plight of Southeast Kansas coal miners into national newspapers, and forever changing the history of the region. But when the coal ran dry, this place was forgotten. Abandoned by the national eye, it became just another corner of a “flyover state.”

However, people are still here, and we are not flyover people. Southeast Kansans toil in manufacturing, farming, service industries, and education. We have successful business entrepreneurs, quality community colleges, and a Regents University.  However, there is an economic divide that continues to grow. The overall poverty rate reaches up to 23% in one county; the child poverty rate is nearly 29%–as high as 38.8% in one county.  In most school systems, 50 to 75% of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Low wages in the region make it difficult to find safe and affordable housing, and 55% of the housing stock is over 54 years old. Our elders are slipping into poverty after retirement, with nearly 10% currently living below the federal poverty line. And our average annual income from wages continues a ten-year declining trend. We are working so hard to make ends meet, that we have had little energy left to question why our economy isn’t growing, why our wages aren’t increasing, and why our civic voice isn’t being heard.

Without the leveraging power of coal, Southeast Kansans have found it difficult to stand up to the continuous attack on our future. The attack comes by way of monetary manipulation within our state legislature, which has passed one of largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever enacted by any state while leaving our schools underfunded, and our most vulnerable without medical access.  They claimed these cuts would boost our economy, but according to the Kansas Department of Revenue, tax revenue in April dropped 45 percent from the prior year—$92 million short of forecasts.

We have also faced the single largest cut to Kansas public education in state history, with more than $104 million sliced from Kansas classrooms; these cuts left school funding levels so low that the Kansas Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.  Another highly controversial school funding bill literally passed in the middle of the night, stripping teachers of due process rights and handing out corporate tax breaks by cutting funding for at-risk kids.  And most recently, legislators passed a last-minute budget deal to transfer $5 million from early childhood program funds to an agency that invests in bioscience companies.

At the same time that tax cuts for the wealthy are shrinking needed revenues, Kansas has also rejected federal Medicaid expansion, leaving one in six Kansas adults under 65 without health insurance; nearly 100,000 Kansans in more than 150 industries without access to affordable healthcare.

We’ve done it before—the people of Southeast Kansas have stood up to their oppressors and caused change. Today, we hear gunshots ring out as we harvest deer for the year’s meat.  We hear water lapping at the banks of the pits and rivers, as we search for fish to fill our freezers. And people are starting to organize. We are forming organizations and coalitions to take control of our future, grow our own businesses, promote equitable economic development, and solutions to poor health outcomes. Economic development initiatives like Project 17, spanning 17 counties—and the Joplin Regional Prosperity Initiative, spanning 7 counties—are focused on workforce development and living wage job creation. Pittsburg’s Downtown Group and Get Independence are determined to revitalize the central business districts, promoting music, art, and culture. Local farmers and ranchers are being supported through groups like Eat Well Crawford County and the Food Policy Council forming in Iola. And county health rankings are improving, along with our overall quality of life, thanks to groups like Thrive Allen County and Live Well Crawford County.

A movement is beginning to swell—a movement that will create our own version of the Amazon Army and stand toe-to-toe with the income inequality and injustice that is ruining our region, our state, and our country.

Today, concentrated poverty persists, with many communities facing inferior housing, poor health outcomes, failing schools, inadequate public infrastructure, and few employment opportunities. A growing body of research shows that being raised in such high-poverty communities undermines the long-term life chances of children. For example, poverty has been shown to genetically age children, and living in communities exposed to violence impairs cognitive ability. Even when income is held constant, families living in areas of concentrated poverty are more likely to struggle to meet basic needs than their counterparts living in more affluent areas.

However, it is important to note that low-income people are not the only residents of high-poverty neighborhoods. According to research by Professor Patrick Sharkey of New York University, the average African American family making $100,000 a year lives in a more disadvantaged neighborhood than the average white family making $30,000 a year, revealing how past social policies continue to affect neighborhood choice. Sharkey explains that the same, mostly African American families have lived in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods over long periods of time and over multiple generations, limiting access to better opportunities. “Neighborhood poverty experienced a generation ago doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t become inconsequential. It lingers on to affect the next generation,” he explained.

It is clear that the federal government has a role to play in undoing the effects of past policies that contributed to these outcomes. Further, as research shows that income inequality and social mobility place a downward drag on national prosperity, the federal government has a vested interest in ensuring that all communities connect people with the opportunities critical to helping them succeed.

Federal and local efforts must move away from short-term investments, such as relocating a fraction of families to more prosperous communities, towards transforming communities in order to alter their trajectories. “When I’m asking for durable urban policy, I’m not asking for a unique commitment to low-income, nonwhite communities. I’m proposing that we extend the commitment and the massive investments that have been made in affluent, predominantly white communities and extend them to…communities across the country,” Sharkey explained.

This is why place-based strategies, such as the Promise Zones initiative, are so important. Such strategies involve policies and practices that take into account how a community—both the built environment and the social and economic opportunities available—impacts its residents. The intersection of place with poverty comes with unique challenges that require place-based strategies to complement our national investments to cut poverty and create greater economic opportunity.

The Promise Zones initiative is designed to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies and help local leaders navigate federal funding. Promise Zones designees receive priority access to federal resources to support job creation, increase economic security, expand educational opportunities, increase access to quality, affordable housing, and improve public safety. Equally important, the initiative pulls together lessons from the administration’s previous efforts to improve struggling communities and is serving as an opportunity to rethink how the federal government can be a more effective partner to communities facing barriers to upward mobility.

The enduring effects of concentrated poverty require long-term, comprehensive strategies that will be experienced across generations. The Promise Zones initiative has the potential to serve this role and finally extend the benefits of stable communities to all people.

This is just plain wrong.

Lest I be immediately dismissed in what I am about to say (and the usual suspects will do so anyway), let me be clear that the main way to end poverty is jobs that result in a livable income, and the education necessary to get and keep those jobs.  The totality of strategies to reduce poverty also includes healthy communities and necessary services—including health and mental health services—child care, legal services, and more.  A discussion of welfare is not the same as a discussion of how to end poverty.

But one part of an antipoverty strategy is indeed a safety net.  And this is where people who should know better (or actually do) are averting their eyes.

Short history:  The old welfare system—Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, which existed from 1935-1996—needed to be reformed.  It did not work hard enough at helping people get jobs and become self-sufficient.  There were 14.3 million people receiving it when President Clinton was elected and that’s too many.

In 1996, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was enacted.  Just then, and quite unforeseen, the economy heated up and jobs became plentiful.   The welfare rolls plummeted and the number of never-employed single mothers obtaining jobs increased substantially.  But even then, because states had no legal obligation to grant benefits, about 2 out of 5 people who left welfare did not obtain jobs, and large numbers were turned away at the front door.

Beginning in 2001, the impressive numbers of single mothers at work began to go down, and now is nearly back to where it was before the 1996 law was passed.  But that didn’t mean that the TANF rolls went back up, because states did not extend benefits to those who were losing their jobs.  By the time the recession started, the TANF rolls were at 3.9 million.

TANF was absolutely useless as an antirecessionary tool.  Food stamps went up from reaching 26.3 million people to 48 million people, because there is a legal right to receive them.  TANF went from helping 3.9 million people to 4.4.million—and even reached fewer people during the recession in some states—because there is no legal right to assistance.

Here’s the bottom line: TANF is basically defunct in more than half the states and the percentage of children in poor families receiving cash assistance nationally has dropped from 68 percent to 27 percent.  In more than half the states, fewer than 20 percent of children living in poor families are receiving TANF.  Wyoming is the poster state.  About 600 people—4 percent of children living in poor families—receive cash aid in Wyoming.   Before 1996, with all of the faults in AFDC, the safety net at the bottom consisted of AFDC and food stamps combined.  The median income from welfare and food stamps combined was only half the poverty line, but there was a legal right to both.  No longer.

So, now 6 million people have incomes composed only of food stamps.  Stunning?  Who knew?  These are government figures and they have appeared on the front page of the New York Times.  A lot of people are averting their eyes.  Whatever the facts were about the success of TANF in the flush times of the late 1990s—and I think they weren’t so fact-based even then—the recession exposed the utter bankruptcy of TANF as a public policy.

This is enormously frustrating.  The minute the government gives someone a nickel we hear a chorus of aversion to handouts, a cacophony of complaints that these are people who do not want to work, a concert of disapproval of the character of anyone who would accept cash help (and now the disapproval extends to anyone receiving food stamps).

Of course we want to have a minimum number of people receiving cash assistance.  Of course we want to help mothers receiving TANF find work—and that help has to include child care assistance and health care coverage.  And we not only want to do those things well, which is not the case now, but we also need a safety net that is responsive to the individual problems and needs of the families it serves.  A properly designed cash assistance program for families with children would take into account the availability of work as well as the fact that recipients vary in their capacity to work.

It’s past time to acknowledge that we have blown a huge hole in our national safety net for the very most needy among us.  Shame on us.

The first house I remember living in was a big farmhouse.  It probably wasn’t really all that big but things always look larger when you’re a kid.  When I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night, my sister was carrying me out of the house.  It was on fire.

My Dad was working at the steel mill on the midnight shift.  The rest of us—there were nine of us kids, I had four brothers and four sisters—we stood on the other side of the road with Mom and watched our house burn to the ground.  When Dad got home there was nothing.  We weren’t able to get our clothes out, or anything else.  And there was no insurance.

So what to do?

We had a chicken house up on the side of the hill.  My older brothers and my Dad took cardboard and used it as plaster board.  And so we lived there in the chicken house for a while—that’s where I had whooping cough.  Down over the side of the hill we had what we called a smokehouse—which was basically a cellar with a little structure on top of it.  We used that as our kitchen.  Eventually, my Dad and older brothers took our barn and made a house out of it, and that’s where I grew up.

It was definitely tough times.  My Dad probably had a 5th grade education, my Mom—I’m not sure how far she went in school.  I had a tenth sibling who didn’t survive childhood.

Dad drank a lot, and wasn’t always kind.  But my mother was just the opposite—she was like the sponge that absorbed all of the incoming fire, so to speak.  She was the protector.  And I always felt secure, sure that my Mom and Dad would be there for us.

I know there were times my parents went without what they desperately needed in order to make it possible for us kids to have what we needed.  We all cared for each other.  I remember times trying not to eat too much food.  We ate a lot of mush—oatmeal, basically.  But we always had pigs, and chickens, and cows.  We had a lot of vegetables—my Mom canned a lot. We grew a lot of potatoes and tomatoes and beans.  We always had horses, I remember plowing behind a team of horses with what we called a turning plow that would dig deep into the earth.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Things got a little better as some of my older siblings left the house and got jobs.  Three of my brothers became construction workers—cement finishers.  We got indoor plumbing in our barn house when I was in high school.

I had no thought whatsoever of going to college—never knew anyone who went to college.  But I enjoyed school.  I stuttered badly at times during that period, but I had teachers who saw potential in me.  Mabel Keller taught me during 1^st through 4^th grades in a one-room school. I remember standing outside with her one day and she said to me, “Teddy, I wish you were my little boy.”  I remember the pride I felt.  When I was a senior in high school, another teacher, Frankie Edwards, took me to visit a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, Asbury College.  On the way home she told me if I wanted to go to college I could, there were people who would help me afford it.

So I went on to further my education and got two Masters and a PhD.  Other than myself, only one of my siblings finished high school.  And some of them were truly much more capable than I—and I mean that.  The only difference between my brothers finishing concrete—and it’s an honorable thing to do—and my ability to become a psychologist and a Congressman and a Governor, was opportunity and education.  Because I came a long later in the birth order it was possible for me to have opportunities they just didn’t have.

My family was strongly Democratic, primarily because of what my folks experienced during the Depression.  So I grew up hearing about FDR and the importance of social security and other programs that helped people in need.  We were also a strong labor family—my Dad worked at the steel mill, my brothers were members of the Cement Mason’s Union, and I belonged to the Laborers’ Union during my graduate school days when I worked in construction.  This, and my family’s experience when I was growing up, as well as the teachings of my faith—have always caused me to feel a responsibility to look out for those who have fewer opportunities in life.  And I’ve always tried to stay close to the people I want to represent—primarily because of my own need to stay in touch with where I came from.  I’ve always felt that if you’re not careful when you’re in public life you can start thinking of yourself as being other than the people whom you represent.  I’ve always tried to consciously make sure that that didn’t happen to me—I’ve seen it happen to too many other people.

So when I was in Congress and in the Governor’s office I never accepted any subsidized healthcare coverage, because there were a lot of people I represented who had no access to health care.  In terms of combatting poverty, I’m very proud of the work I did in Congress on the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provides health insurance for millions of children nationwide who can’t afford private health insurance.  A small group of us in the House regularly met over a long period of time to formulate what became the CHIP legislation.

But I look back over my tenure as Governor, and I talked a lot more about the middle class than I did about people in poverty, or near poverty. And, yes, it was a difficult time during the Great Recession— just trying to keep things together, keep things from totally falling apart.  But we don’t hear as much concern expressed about low-income people as we did 20 or 30 years ago, and I believe that we’re regressing as a nation in that regard.

I think there is a tendency on the part of people who are not struggling to survive every day to assume that the safety net programs are there and helping the people who need help.  But then you talk to people who operate food banks, for example, you find out that there are a lot of hungry people and the food banks can’t meet the need.  And more and more, you find people who used to donate to the food banks are now turning to them every month in need.

The excuse we hear too often from political leaders who don’t talk about poverty is that budgets are too tight and you can only do so much.  But there is a reason budgets are tight—we have cut taxes!  If we had a progressive tax system that was anywhere near the levels it was before Ronald Reagan became President, we would have the resources we need.

This is one area where I think we can do a much better job—talking about the link between tax policy, decreasing revenues, and cuts in programs that people need to have a fair shot at the American Dream.

We also have to do a better job talking about work and shared prosperity.  It’s un-American, frankly, that you can work and work and work and not get out of poverty.  And I think something that is sometimes missing from progressive consciousness—and something that certainly benefited my family—is an awareness of the importance of organized labor.  We became as egalitarian as we did as a nation because working people gained power and influence by banding together and bargaining for better wages and benefits and safety conditions.  And as economic disparities have increased over these last few decades, the influence of organized labor has decreased.

So whether it’s the same paradigm or not, we’ve got to find some way for people to act collectively in their self-interest.  And that’s a challenge that I think is facing organized labor but also all of us who care about giving everyone a fair shot and a fair chance.

We simply can’t get where we need to go as a nation through individual efforts.  It’s got to be through collective action.