Been A Long Time Since I Had This Feeling

When I got an e-mail alerting me to John Edwards' latest speech on poverty, I expected the usual hand-wringing about a country so great and a shame so large and an inequity so massive and so forth. That's not to dispute the truth of it, but it's a debate that Americans have long ago been inured to and, unless Edwards was bringing something new to the table, rehashing it would be good for the soul but far from the center. And then I read this:

The trouble is that for too many Americans—not just in the Gulf but everywhere—the American Dream has become too distant. You can see it in the numbers: millions of parents work full-time but still live in poverty. The typical white family has about $80,000 in assets; the typical Hispanic family, about $8,000; the typical African-American family, about $6,000.

“Income is what you use to get by, but assets are what you use to get ahead.” This huge asset gap is one reason so many families are barely getting by. And again, it’s not just the poor: middle-class incomes are stagnant, and more people file for bankruptcy than graduate from college each year.

Assets couldn't be more crucial. And almost nobody mentions them. Poverty is usually discussed in platitudes, a Bad Thing requiring either random cash or the magic of personal responsibility. Edwards, here, is light-years beyond that crap. Reading him, I got goosebumps for the first time since the debates. And they they kept a-coming:

In the 1960s we fought a war on poverty. Our intentions were good, but sometimes we expected government to do things that only individuals and communities can achieve.

Sometimes we gave too much money to bureaucracies, not people. Yet those efforts still helped cut the poverty rate by 43 percent from 1963 to 1973.

Again, in the 1990s, the Earned Income Tax Credit and welfare reform helped lift 7 million more people out of poverty. If we are going to fight poverty, we have to commit ourselves once more, more deeply than ever before.

What!? He's not fleeing from the Great Society? Not promising to outsource government? Not putting it all on black families? Surely you kid!

Sorry, I wasn't expecting to quote so much of this speech, but I also wasn't expecting it to be so good. More after the jump:

Where I come from, what matters the most isn’t how much you have, it’s how much you give. Work gives pride, dignity, and hope to our lives and our communities. And so the President is wrong: America is not, and never wished to be, a Wealth Society.

To be true to our values, our country must build a Working Society – an America where everyone who works hard finally has the rewards to show for it. In the Working Society, nobody who works full-time should have to raise children in poverty, or in fear that one health emergency or pink slip will drive them over the cliff.

In the Working Society, everyone who works full-time will at last have something to show for it – a home of their own, an account where their savings and paycheck can grow.

In the Working Society, everyone willing to work will have the chance to get ahead. Anyone who wants to go to college and work will be able to go the first year for free.

In the Working Society, people who work have the right to live in communities where the streets are safe, the schools are good, and jobs can be reached.

In the Working Society, everyone will also be asked to hold up their end of the bargain—to work, to hold off having kids until they’re ready, and to do their part for their kids when the time comes.

The first test of the working society will be in the Gulf. And the central principle of our effort should be the one I just outlined: We can only renew the Gulf if we renew the lives of the Gulf’s people by encouraging and honoring work.

The President doesn’t get that. At a time when a million people have been displaced, many already poor before the storm; when the only shot many people have is a good job rebuilding New Orleans, the President intervened to suspend prevailing wage laws so his contractor friends can cut wages for a hard day’s work.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the President never suggested cutting million-dollar salaries for the heads of Halliburton or the other companies profiting from these contracts. A President who never met an earmark he wouldn’t approve or a millionaire tax cut he wouldn’t promote decided to slash wages for the least of us.

Seventy-five years ago, our government was led by a President who actually succeeded in navigating America through a disaster. Faced with the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt saw that relief requires more than food and shelter; it requires the dignity that comes from a job at a decent wage. And he saw something else: as Allida Black put it at a forum here last week, we have to “build to last.”

Many of our children still go to schools that the WPA constructed; many of our homes are lighted because of dams that the PWA built; many of our families still hike on trails that his CCC blazed. That’s why trailer parks are not the answer.

In fact, if we know anything from a half century of urban development, it is that concentrating poor people close to each other and away from jobs is a lousy idea. If the Great Depression brought forth Hoovervilles, these trailer towns may someday be known as Bushvilles.

We can do better.

While reading this next quote, pay special attention to what I've italicized; this should be the progressive response to school vouchers:

Today, a single mom with two kids who works full-time for the minimum wage is about $2000 below the poverty line. The erosion of the minimum wage is a disgrace; we need to raise it to at least $7.50 an hour. Unionized workers make 30% more, so we need to give them back a real right to organize. And we need make sure that people can enter the workforce and change jobs without losing their health insurance.

It’s not enough to say that people who work full-time shouldn’t live in poverty.

We need to help every American develop the assets they need to get ahead—to send their kids to college, buy a home, or just have the piece of mind that there's a little breathing room should catastrophe -- in the form of a hurricane or lost health insurance - -comes into their lives.

First, let’s help folks buy a home they can actually keep. Today, the rich get subsidies while the poor get ravaged by predatory lenders. We should do something different: crack down on those lenders and offer a new deal to poor families just going into the workforce: for the first five years you are working, we will set aside up to $1,000 in an account to help you make home payments. After five years, you’ll have up to $5,000 for down payments.

Next, I’d help families save. We should offer low-income Americans “work bonds”—an extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit that helps families save for the future. Low-income working families would receive an extra credit of up to $500 per year that would be directly deposited into a new account held by a bank or a safe stock fund with low fees.

If families put away more, the amount in the account would grow, and it would be available not just for retirement, but also for a small business or a personal emergency. It’d be there for a rainy day and a better future.

Third, work should give you a good education. I could give a whole speech about education alone, because we will never end poverty unless we improve our schools. But here’s just one idea that would help with both education and housing.

This President likes to talk a lot about school vouchers; I’d like a major effort to give working parents who are poor housing vouchers so they have a chance to move into neighborhoods with better schools. That will not only expand opportunity; it will build healthier communities through “cultural integration,” as David Brooks called it.

Poor people don’t need new bureaucracies; they need access to the same banks and jobs and markets that most Americans take for granted. The chance to go to college meant everything in my life, and young people need to know that if they work hard they’ll be able to afford it.

For years now, I’ve talked about an idea I call College for Everyone: if you stay out of trouble in high school and agree to work your first year in college, you ought to get your first year of tuition at a public university or community college free. In a couple weeks, I’ll be announcing a new pilot project in North Carolina to test out that idea in an entire county.

And we also need policies that help strengthen families. Though the 2001 tax bill eliminated the marriage penalty for the middle-class, poor families can still get hit with a $3,000 marriage penalty. That makes no sense. We need to finish the job of welfare reform. It caused millions of mothers to go out and get jobs, but it left poor young men right where they were.

In communities where 40 percent of young men are unemployed, we can get more poor men into the workforce by connecting them with more jobs and supporting their wages, the way the EITC already does for families.

Read it all. The only bit missing is health care. So what say you, John? Ready to be right on everything?