New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is battling his Democratic colleagues in the state legislature over this very premise. The legislature is hesitating on Murphy’s proposal for a millionaire tax hike, restoring the sales tax to a pre-Gov. Chris Christie rate of 7 percent, and an end to budget gimmicks that made his predecessor’s fiscal plans seem more responsible than they were. At stake are investments in public education, transit, affordable child care, and other pillars of economic security. The showdown couldn’t be more relevant for antipoverty advocates or anyone interested in a more equitable economy.

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The governor’s argument is simple: Lawmakers are constitutionally obligated to balance the state budget. If New Jersey residents want to make these fundamental investments—and they do—there must be adequate and sustainable revenues.

So straightforward, and yet …

Many lawmakers still don’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy, in part because they fear it will cause those residents to relocate. However, research shows that millionaires are less likely to leave a state than middle- and working-class families, and tax hikes on wealthy residents have a negligible impact on their moves out of state. Additionally, despite overwhelming popular support for asking the wealthy to pay their fair share, too many Democratic elected officials still worry that they will pay a political price for raising taxes.

But if you don’t raise taxes on the wealthy, you’re left with … budget gimmicks. You end up using one-time revenue sources such as draining funds that were earmarked for the Clean Energy Fund, or fuzzy math instead of transparent accounting. People deserve a government that plans for the long-term funding of its core functions and obligations, instead of one that reels from budget crisis to budget crisis, leaving constituents uncertain at best or pessimistic. People also respect a politician who is honest about the trade-offs and implications of budget decisions.

In the case of this budget fight, the stakes couldn’t be more clear: New Jersey’s millionaires just got an average federal tax cut of $21,700 courtesy of the Trump Tax Scam. In contrast, in the 8 years leading up to Murphy’s election, his predecessor cut $9 billion from public schools, which resulted in axing academic and extracurricular programs, teacher layoffs, and increased property taxes for working-class and middle-class families. If the choice is between protecting New Jersey millionaires from a negligible tax increase or restoring funds for public education, health care, transit, and other basic needs, there is a clear answer that is good politics and smart policy.

Despite low national unemployment, people are still rightfully worried about their own family’s ability to afford necessities like health care or save for a future home or college education. And while there is positive GDP growth, people know that the rich are getting richer while the rest of us aren’t—nearly half of Americans can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense. If advocates, policymakers, elected officials, and others want to connect with the American people and address their economic struggles, they need to be straightforward in their message and forward-looking in their policies. Rather than protecting millionaires due to unwarranted fears about a political price, let’s be clear about what it will take to fund the government that the people want and deserve.

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Just a minor problem: Literally every aspect of the argument is dead wrong. Today’s young people are more educated than any previous generation, and the share of people living in poverty who have some college education has grown dramatically. Seventy-seven percent of people in poverty have the high school degree that Will claims is part of the golden ticket out of poverty.

Source: Center for American Progress

Even with those increased credentials and growing productivity, young people still can’t escape poverty because there are not enough good jobs. Unemployment and underemployment have been falling for years, yet the electorate gave a primal scream this past November, imploring policymakers to understand that their communities had been left behind. Take a look at the graph below: Even with unemployment falling, the share of families struggling to make ends meet remains high. Why? If you pay people poverty wages, workers will remain in poverty. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ solution is that if we simply take away people’s health care to pay for more millionaire tax cuts, that will help people find jobs faster!

Source: Center for American Progress

And marriage? Two poor people getting married does not make anyone less poor. As my colleague Shawn Fremstad explains in his issue brief, Partnered But Poor, “the vast majority of people in low-income families with children are in families headed by married or unmarried partners, as are most people in families with children that receive means-tested benefits.”

Moreover, this overemphasis on marriage can actually have detrimental effects and promote extremely dangerous practices when considering violence committed against individuals—usually women—within partnered relationships. Blindly promoting marriage over programs that support independent financial security—like jobs that pay a living wage or education that’s accessible for all—places even more pressure on survivors to stay in an abusive marriage or partnership.

We all want our children to get educated, work hard, and find partners who will treat them well (if they want partners). But George Will’s column conveniently forgets two things: At the macro level, in an off-kilter economy, where the gains from economic growth are concentrating among the wealthy few, all the hard work in the world isn’t going to change this basic economic reality: There are not enough good jobs for today’s young people, and this has implications for their marriage prospects as well.

At the micro level, life happens. People lose jobs. They get sick or have an accident that leaves them with a disability. They have babies in a country without paid leave or adequate child care, leaving families struggling to afford the basics for their kids. “The poor” aren’t some stagnant group that just needs to make better life choices. Seventy percent of Americans will turn to a means-tested benefit at some point during their working years, because Medicaid, nutrition, tax credits for working families—all the things at risk under this conservative Congress and president—are there for us if we fall on hard times. And most of us will.

Will’s column isn’t just wrong; it resurfaces a dangerous myth at a moment when the basic economic security of millions of struggling Americans is on the line.

For months, Trump has been all over the map: One day he’s pledging to provide “insurance for everybody,” the next he’s considering a so-called “replacement” plan that would pull the rug out from under some 21 million seniors, people with disabilities, children, and workers.

But on Wednesday, he took his cluelessness and unpredictability to a new low when he declared, “Whether it’s Medicaid block grants or whatever it may be, we have to make sure that people are taken care of.”

As fans of the 1980s cult classic The Princess Bride, there is only one appropriate response:

There are few surer ways to guarantee that people will NOT be “taken care of” than converting Medicaid into a block grant—a technical term that in reality means massive cuts.

Converting Medicaid into a block grant would end the program’s promise of health insurance for all eligible individuals. It would also slash the federal funding that states receive to run their Medicaid programs, forcing them either to make up the difference with money from their own coffers, or (much more likely) to make huge cuts in the coverage they provide to their residents. Faced with inadequate resources, states could have little choice but to institute waiting lists for coverage or cap enrollment—leaving millions of Americans without the care they need.

In fact, an Urban Institute analysis of a past GOP proposal to block grant Medicaid estimates that an additional 14 million to 20 million Americans would lose coverage under a Medicaid block grant—that’s on top of the 30 million who would lose coverage under ACA repeal and elimination of Medicaid expansion.

This isn’t a new idea. Congressional Republicans—including Representative Tom Price, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—have long had Medicaid block grants on their wish list. But what’s still unclear, as Trump swings recklessly from promising universal coverage to considering slashing health care for people who can’t afford insurance, is whether the President-elect is actually changing his opinion or if he is just so ignorant on health care policy that he doesn’t understand what he’s saying.

In either case, we can be sure of one thing: Trump’s willingness to embrace life-threatening policies without even making an effort to understand them is:

Severe economic pain was widespread—more than 10 million people were unemployed, up from 7 million before the crisis.  No one was hit harder than communities of color, where residents who should have qualified for prime loans had been targeted and steered toward higher-priced exotic subprimes, then lost their homes to foreclosure. As reporter Jamelle Bouie put it, the loss of wealth represented “a generation’s worth of hard work and progress wiped out.”

This was the economy our nation’s first African-American president inherited.

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Barack Obama’s work to respond to hardship and deprivation began before he even took the oath of office, when he ordered his transition team to develop what would become the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act).  He signed the bill into law in February 2009.

The Recovery Act was one of the most powerful pieces of antipoverty legislation passed in decades. It extended tax credits to more people who worked in low-paying jobs—a reform that eventually became permanent, and helped lift nearly 10 million people out of poverty last year alone. It prevented more than a million home foreclosures, saved or created up to 3.6 million jobs, and helped families and communities survive the economic havoc that had been unleashed by a reckless Wall Street.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder and Moody’s Chief Economist Mark Zandi estimate that without the Recovery Act we might have faced a depression, with 17 million lost jobs (instead of about 8 million), and a peak unemployment rate high of nearly 16 percent (instead of 10 percent).  The Recovery Act’s expansion of the safety net also kept more than 6 million Americans out of poverty.

Immediately following passage of the Recovery Act, the President began work on healthcare reform, eventually signing the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) into law in March 2010. The legislation established historic economic protections. Gone is the ability of insurance companies to reject people for coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions.  Gone was the chance that Americans would be too poor to afford insurance, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid (until the Supreme Court got involved).  And gone is the chance that young adults would be cut off from their parents’ plans.

More than 22 million Americans have gotten health insurance through Obamacare, and the share of Americans without health insurance has dropped to a record low.  The law also protects millions of low- and moderate-income families who would otherwise be a single health crisis away from poverty.  Vice President Joe Biden described the significance of the legislation perfectly when he said, “This is a big f—ing deal.”

Once the Affordable Care Act was in place, Obama began working with Congress to tackle some of the root causes of the Great Recession—including the actions of “too big to fail” financial institutions. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices, and to take action against companies that break the law.

Throughout his term, President Obama worked tirelessly to make sure Americans have a fair chance at success. He launched the Promise Neighborhood and Promise Zones initiatives to improve economic opportunity in high-poverty communities—whether urban, rural, or tribal.  He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for women to file an equal pay lawsuit. He issued Executive Orders to raise wages for federal government contractors, updated a meek Overtime Rule in order to raise working-class wages, took executive action to help ensure that people aren’t held back by a criminal record, and created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to protect undocumented children and young adults from deportation.

The president also drew attention to issues that have been neglected for far too long, ranging from criminal justice reform, longstanding federal policy failures on American Indian and Alaskan Native issues, and science-based nutrition standards for school meals.  And he accomplished all of this while most Republicans in Congress refused to cooperate on virtually any of his proposals—a tactic stated explicitly by Senator Mitch McConnell, among others.

To be sure, the legacy is not all positive and the work is not complete. The economic recovery following the Great Recession was extraordinarily slow and painful for far too many of us—and many people haven’t recovered at all. He could have prevented more foreclosures by forcing banks to modify mortgages.  DACA and the Overtime rule were blocked by the courts, food and nutrition assistance programs were cut nearly as quickly as they were expanded, and revenues were never increased sufficiently to meet the nation’s long-term antipoverty and infrastructure needs.

That said, President Obama’s legacy is one that demonstrates a tireless commitment to making the American Dream accessible to all Americans.

As we now approach the swearing-in of President-elect Donald Trump, just about everything we have alluded to here, and much more, is in jeopardy.

That’s why in the coming weeks, TalkPoverty’s series examining Obama’s legacy will focus not only on poverty and inequality, but on what’s at risk under a Trump administration. It will address how we can protect—and eventually expand—the gains we have made over the past eight years.

No one will be more vulnerable to the changes proposed by Trump and his Republican allies than people who are already struggling. We need to be ready to fight as if lives are at stake—because they are. 

Editor’s note: TalkPoverty presents this series in collaboration with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

The American Dream is premised on the idea that the circumstances of your birth should not determine how far you can rise. Yet a growing body of research shows that a child’s ZIP code too often limits her life chances, with factors such as failing schools, dangerous streets, lack of quality jobs, and a dearth of community resources coming together to perpetuate poverty. And a new report suggests even more bad news for the American Dream: As it turns out, where you live isn’t just correlated with how high up the ladder you can climb; it also helps to determine the point at which you fall off altogether.

Multiple studies have confirmed that the rich typically live longer than those in struggling families, and that this gap is growing. A new study from Raj Chetty and his colleagues underscores that this gap is unconscionable, with nearly 15 years’ difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest American men and over 10 years’ difference for American women. But the study reveals something new as well: that the gap is place-based, with significant differences in life expectancy among lower-income individuals based on where they live.

Among the top 100 commuting zones, poor individuals had longer life expectancies in wealthier areas with more educated individuals. A poor person in New York City, for example, is expected to live years longer than a person with the same income in Detroit. In other words, there are not just “two Americas” — the rich and the rest of us — but also dozens and dozens of Americas on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, with policy choices dramatically shaping not just quality of life but also the length of it.

These disturbing findings come out as issues of poverty, inequality, and mobility have taken center stage in the political conversation. Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator Tim Scott recently held a GOP “poverty summit” in South Carolina. Further, the speaker has indicated that later this spring, House Republicans will be releasing a “white paper” synthesizing their ideas to cut poverty.

But if past is prologue, many of the House’s recommendations will be a recipe to exacerbate and perpetuate the disparities that Chetty’s study unearthed. First, under the Republicans’ budget blueprint, struggling families would suffer no matter where they live. The recently proposed House budget protects tax cuts for millionaires while deriving more than three-fifths of its cuts from programs that help low- and moderate-income people — programs that have cut the nation’s poverty rate nearly in half.

But it gets worse. The solutions favored by conservatives have typically been to consolidate and flat-fund federal programs that are currently helping struggling families, and to send these programs to the states. There have been many euphemisms for this policy over time: block grants, “empowering local communities,” “increased flexibility,” and, most recently, Speaker Ryan’s “opportunity grants.” But new packaging doesn’t change the reality. Block-granting and sending low-income programs to the states has historically resulted in deep cuts to core assistance programs, the inability of programs to respond when hardship rises during recessions, and wildly different access to help based on where one lives.

One example is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program, or TANF. In 1996, the federal guarantee of income assistance was sent to the states as a flat-funded block grant. Since that time, the value of the block grant has declined by nearly one-third, and the share of eligible families able to turn to income assistance has dramatically fallen. During the Great Recession, as unemployment and poverty were rising, some states tried to help as many families as possible, whereas other states put up new barriers that resulted in fewer struggling families having access to help.

Now conservatives are proposing to do the same thing to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, our nation’s most important defense against hunger. SNAP not only kept 10 million people from falling into poverty last year, but the program actually boosts long-term outcomes for children, including their health as adults.

Wildly varying programs at the state level isn’t limited to TANF. Many states do not have a stellar record when it comes to acting in the best interest of their low-income citizens. Nineteen states have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving 4 million Americans without health insurance. “Flint” is a one-word reminder of how unresponsive states can be to disadvantaged groups that lack political power. And while conservatives trumpet the importance of flexibility and local control, many conservative states have passed policies to “preempt” more progressive localities from implementing measures that help families, such as raising their cities’ minimum wage or passing paid-sick-days legislation so that parents don’t lose needed income or their job if the school nurse calls them to come pick up their sick child.

As candidates and lawmakers debate solutions to address poverty and mobility, the last thing we need are policies that replicate and perpetuate the geographic disparities that leave a struggling worker in Texas with no access to health insurance while his counterpart in California can access Medicaid.

Instead, we should build off of the momentum in states and localities that are alleviating poverty and investing in families, which, not coincidentally, can also significantly reduce the chronic stress associated with a wide variety of illness affecting life expectancy. As noted by the Washington Post in its coverage of the Chetty study, “Among the 100 largest commuting zones ranked by the researchers, six of the top eight for low-income life expectancies are in California” — a state that has pursued many policies that mitigate the stresses associated with poverty, such as paid parental leave, a higher minimum wage, and investments in early care and education.

A serious agenda to cut poverty and promote economic opportunity would include these policies and more, investing in job creation, expanding access to high-quality childcare, and increasing opportunities for post-secondary education and training. It would help families manage work and caregiving through paid family leave and fair, flexible, and predictable work schedules; it would protect and strengthen the safety net, which is currently reducing poverty by nearly half. Finally, it would invest in high-poverty neighborhoods, as well as remove barriers to opportunity for Americans with criminal records.

There are many reasons for lawmakers and candidates to embrace these policies, not least of which is that they are very popular with Americans across the political spectrum. But Chetty and his colleagues have now given us one more important reason to reject the failed conservative proposals and instead make needed investments to cut poverty and boost opportunity.

Billed as an opportunity for conservatives to outline their major plans on tackling poverty, the forum comes after months of heightened rhetoric  on poverty and inequality—including a poverty tour by then-Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. These events are part of a concerted effort by conservative lawmakers and the media to paint the War on Poverty as a failure, even though the safety net reduced the poverty rate by more than half and lifted 48 million people above the poverty line in 2012.

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Unfortunately, this newfound concern for poverty is at odds with a conservative policy agenda that would exacerbate inequality, hardship, and wage stagnation.

Under his “Opportunity Grant” proposal, Ryan has proposed converting a number of programs to state block grants, a decision that nonpartisan analysis suggests would reduce families’ ability to access key programs such as nutrition and housing assistance. In crafting this idea, Ryan and other conservatives often point to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program as a model—even though it does very little to mitigate poverty and hardship and is unresponsive to recessions.

Furthermore, in their most recent congressional budgets, Republicans obtained two-thirds of their cuts from programs helping low and moderate income families, while channeling additional resources towards tax cuts for the wealthy.

South Carolinians like Dr. Ebony Hilton take issue with this approach. Dr. Hilton grew up in poverty in Spartanburg, a city located almost one hundred miles north of Columbia, as the middle child of a mother with only a high school education. Now she earns in the six figures and serves as the first black female anesthesiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. Hilton credits federal programs like Pell Grants for much of her success. As she told TalkPoverty, “Pell Grants allowed me to pursue higher education because when I was going through college, there was no option to call home for money for books or tuition or fees. The overwhelming amount of debt can be tremendous and can stop people from taking that extra step to pursue their life passion.”

In addition to attempting to gut programs that invest in people like Dr. Hilton, conservatives have stood in the way of policies that would raise stagnant wages, increase access to health insurance, and allow families to better balance the responsibilities of working and caring for themselves and their children.

For example, although a majority of Republican voters support raising the minimum wage, Republicans in Congress continue to block a minimum wage hike that would actually save $53 billion in nutrition assistance over 10 years. In contrast, longtime state advocates like Sue Berkowitz, who serves as the Director of South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, view increasing wages as a core component of an anti-poverty strategy: “You can’t not examine why we haven’t increased the minimum wage in [nearly] 10 years. We can say all these wonderful things but without real plans, we’re saying we’re comfortable with people being in poverty.”

And for South Carolinians like Yolanda Gordon, conservative opposition to expanding Medicaid and providing access to paid sick days has proved economically destabilizing. Although Gordon has an associate’s degree in occupational therapy and works part-time at a non-profit helping families of kids with disabilities, she struggles to provide for her three children—each of whom has special medical needs. To add insult to injury, South Carolina has refused to expand Medicaid, leaving her without health coverage.

Due to the intransigence of the state’s conservative leaders, Gordon is one of more than three million adults nationwide—and 123,000 South Carolinians—who fall into what is known as the “coverage gap.” That is, her income is too high to qualify her for Medicaid, but too low for the subsidies she needs to afford health insurance. Without these subsidies, the average cost of the least expensive plan is around $333 per month in South Carolina.

As Gordon battles health issues like high cholesterol—which can lead to heart attacks and strokes—the state’s failure to expand Medicaid has left her in medical purgatory. In a scenario that is all too common, Gordon can’t afford medication and regular checkups without health insurance—in fact, she won’t be able to pay for an exam until next July. In the meantime, she has put herself on a diet to try to manage her condition. As she told TalkPoverty, “For those of us in states that didn’t take part in the Medicaid expansion, we just pray to God that we don’t get sick.”

If she or her children do fall ill, Gordon is not entitled to paid sick days, as employers are not required to provide them under state and federal laws. So if her oldest daughter, who has asthma, is sick at school, Gordon has to choose between earning a paycheck or taking care of her child.

The fact is that people like Yolanda Gordon need more than political posturing—they require higher wages, health care, paid sick and family leave, and increased investments in education, training, and other supports. This summit is an opportunity for conservatives to correct their legacy and set forth a policy agenda that matches their newfound rhetoric on poverty. Let’s hope they rise to the challenge.

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.

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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.

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

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Jared Bernstein’s Top 10 to Address Economic Inequality

Melissa Boteach and Rebecca Vallas: Top 10 Policy Solutions for Tackling Income Inequality and Reducing Poverty in America

Olivia Golden: Policies to Reduce Income Inequality

Kali Grant and Indivar Dutta-Gupta: Ten Ways to Fight Income Inequality

Erica Williams: What States Can Do to Address Inequality

Valerie Wilson: Top 10 Ways to Address Income Inequality

Jared Bernstein’s Top 10 to Address Economic Inequality

(Author’s note: many of these ideas fall under the heading of achieving full-employment in the job market, such that the matchup between the number of jobs and job-seekers is very tight. This is an essential intervention for both real wage stagnation and inequality.)

1. If the private market fails to provide enough jobs to achieve full employment, the government must become the employer of last resort.
2. When growth is below capacity and the job market is slack, apply fiscal and monetary policies aggressively to achieve full employment. Right now, this means not raising interest rates pre-emptively at the Fed and investing in public infrastructure.
3. Take actions against countries that manage their currencies to subsidize their exports to us and tax our exports to them. Such actions can include revoking trade privileges, allowing for reciprocal currency interventions, and levying duties on subsidized goods.
4. Support sectoral training, apprenticeships, and earn-while-you-learn programs.
5. Implement universal pre-K, with subsidies that phase out as incomes rise.
6. Raise the minimum wage to $12/hour by 2020 and raise the overtime salary threshold (beneath which all workers get overtime pay) from $455/week to $970/week and index it to inflation.
7. Provide better oversight of financial markets: mandate adequate capital buffers, enforce a strong Volcker Rule against proprietary trading in FDIC-insured banks, strengthen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and encourage vigilant oversight of systemic risk in the banking system by the Federal Reserve.
8. Level the playing field for union elections to bolster collective bargaining while avoiding, at the state-level, anti-union, so-called “right-to-work” laws.
9. Maintain and strengthen safety net programs like the EITC and CTC, SNAP, and Medicaid.
10. In order to generate needed revenue and boost tax fairness: reduce the rate at which high-income taxpayers can take tax deductions, impose a small tax of financial market transactions, increase IRS funding to close the “tax gap” (the difference between what’s owed and what’s paid), and repeal “step-up basis” (a tax break for wealthy inheritors).

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Melissa Boteach and Rebecca Vallas: Top 10 Policy Solutions for Tackling Income Inequality and Reducing Poverty in America

1. Create jobs by investing in infrastructure, developing renewable energy sources, renovating abandoned housing and significantly increasing affordable housing investments, and making other commonsense investments to revitalize neighborhoods.
2. Improve job quality and strengthen families by raising the minimum wage to $12/hour by 2020; ensuring pay equity by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act; strengthening collective bargaining; and enacting basic labor standards such as fairer overtime rules, paid sick and family leave, and right to request flexible and predictable schedules.
3. Make the tax code work better for low-wage working families by making permanent the 2009 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit improvements and expanding the EITC for childless workers and noncustodial parents.
4. Invest in human capital by expanding access to high-quality and affordable childcare and early education; creating pathways to good jobs such as apprenticeships, national service opportunities, and a national subsidized jobs program; and implementing College for All to ensure that any student attending public college or university does not need to pay any tuition and fees during enrollment.
5. Ensure that workers with disabilities have a fair shot at employment and economic security.
6. Reform the criminal justice system to end mass incarceration and remove barriers to economic security and mobility for the one in three Americans with criminal records.
7. Enact comprehensive immigration reform that provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
8. Expand Medicaid and ensure that all Americans can access high-quality, affordable health coverage.
9. Close tax loopholes that benefit the wealthy and special interests and raise taxes on capital income.
10. Protect and strengthen investments in basic living standards such as nutrition, health, and income insurance. This includes reforming counterproductive asset limits, and ensuring that programs such as unemployment insurance are there for more workers if they lose their job.

Olivia Golden: Policies to Reduce Income Inequality

1. Make work pay for all workers, including childless adults, by raising the minimum wage and strengthening the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit.
2. Ensure stability for workers and their families through access to paid leave and predictable job schedules. Pass federal bills such as the FAMILY Act, Schedules That Work Act, and Healthy Families Act that mirror strong state and local laws.
3. Identify and tear down the systemic barriers that people face because of race, ethnicity, language, and immigration status, for example by making college prep courses equally available in high schools attended mostly by students of color or by providing work authorization and a path to citizenship for immigrant parents.
4. Ensure that every working family can afford high-quality child care through significant investments in the Child Care and Development Block Grant, Head Start and Early Head Start, and preschool for all three- and four-year-olds.
5. Give children and their parents a simultaneous boost through two-generational policies and investments, including home visiting, support for parental mental health, and support for parents’ career development coupled with high-quality early care and education for children.
6. Help low-income youth and adults access employment and training opportunities that lead to economic success by fully funding the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) as well as subsidized and summer jobs programs.
7. Fully fund Pell Grants to help low-income students access higher education and develop the skills needed to compete in a competitive job market.
8. Ensure that everyone, including low-wage working families and single adults, has access to basic health and nutrition by expanding Medicaid in every state and increasing SNAP benefits.
9. Strengthen capacity of states to employ more streamlined and integrated approaches to delivering key public work supports (such as health coverage, nutrition benefits, and child care subsidies) so low-income working families can stabilize their lives and advance their career
10. Rebuild unemployment insurance and cash assistance to ensure a strong safety net that supports poor and low-income children, families, and individuals when they need it.

Kali Grant and Indivar Dutta-Gupta: Ten Ways to Fight Income Inequality

1. Correct political imbalances—strengthen and protect the Voting Rights Act, level the playing field for political contributions, and limit the influence of corporate lobbyists.
2. Ensure that the wealthiest people and profitable corporations that benefit the most from our political and economic system contribute their fair share: reform “upside-down” tax expenditures (spending through the tax code that disproportionately benefits those with higher incomes), limit corporate welfare, and enact a robust inheritance tax.
3. Amplify workers’ bargaining power by increasing fines for illegal anti-union behavior, encouraging minority unions, and reversing state laws that undermine unions and prevent them from collecting dues for benefits they provide workers at unionized workplaces.
4. Update labor standards—raise the national minimum wage to $12 and index it to wage growth, require fair scheduling for workers, target employee-contractor misclassification and wage theft, and enact the Paycheck Fairness Act.
5. Modernize the safety net—update Unemployment Insurance to reflect the changing nature of work; increase Social Security benefits and raise the cap on income subject to taxes; expand Medicaid in every state; and address flaws in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to refocus it on employment and child well-being outcomes.
6. Provide families tools to manage their many responsibilities—provide at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, universal early learning and care, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a child allowance, and comprehensive family planning services.
7. Expand opportunities for current and future workers—invest in infrastructure and other nationally needed jobs; enact income-based loan repayment to increase higher education accessibility and affordability; and pursue full employment.
8. Increase affordable housing and bolster consumer financial protection rules—promote fair and accessible banking, savings, and other financial vehicles and services for those excluded or abused by the current system.
9. Attack racial and other discrimination across the board and enact comprehensive immigration reform, normalizing the status of more children and workers to increase their educational and work opportunities.
10. Reduce the over-incarceration and over-criminalization by every level of government that restricts millions of Americans’ ability to support themselves and their families—especially among communities of color and high poverty areas.

Erica Williams: What States Can Do to Address Inequality

1. Make state tax systems less regressive. State tax systems tend to ask the most from those with the least because they rely heavily on sales taxes and user fees, which hit low-income households especially hard. States can move their tax systems in a more progressive direction by strengthening their income taxes, adopting state earned income tax credits (or other low-income tax credits) to boost after-tax incomes at the bottom, and rejecting tax cuts that disproportionately benefit higher-income families and profitable corporations.
2. Expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
3. Raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation. States can raise wages for workers at the bottom of the pay scale by enacting a higher state minimum wage and indexing it so that it keeps up with rising living costs.
4. Protect workers’ rights. States can raise wages by protecting workers’ right to bargain collectively and by strengthening and enforcing laws and regulations to prevent abusive employer practices that deprive workers of wages they are legally owed.
5. Improve unemployment insurance.Unemployment Insurance helps workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own to avoid falling into poverty and to stay connected to the labor market. States that have cut benefits should restore those cuts; others should build on recent efforts to fix outmoded rules that bar many workers from accessing benefits.
6. Establish subsidized employment programs for low-income parents and youth that provide temporary jobs of last resort (mostly in the private sector), such as those many states created in 2009 and 2010 through the TANF block grant.  These programs proved popular with participating businesses, families, and state officials of both parties.
7. Improve the safety net. States can streamline the process for enrolling in child care assistance and other work supports. They also can boost the prospects of poor children by raising the amount of temporary cash assistance available to the neediest families, improving access to food stamps, and helping low-income families afford to rent a home in neighborhoods near good jobs.
8. Spend less on prisons, more on schools.In recent decades, states imposed extremely harsh corrections policies that greatly increased both the number of prisoners and their average sentence, at great cost to state budgets.  By making these policies more rational, states could shift funding from prison to more productive investments, without harming public safety.
9. Improve school funding formulas.  K-12 schools in low-income neighborhoods are often poorly funded because the local property tax base is so weak.  As a result, children from these neighborhoods begin their education without the resources and supports they need to succeed.  States can help by adopting funding formulas that give extra support to low-income districts.  Many state funding formulas don’t push back very much against these inequities; some even worsen them.
10. Expand early education.States can help families work and kids learn by investing in quality, affordable early care and education programs, as well as after-school programs.

Valerie Wilson: Top 10 Ways to Address Income Inequality

(Author’s note: Given that the primary source of income for most Americans is the pay they receive from their jobs, wages seem like a logical place to start addressing inequality. These ideas are drawn from EPI’s Agenda to Raise America’s Pay.)

1. Raise the minimum wage: Raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would benefit about a third of the workforce directly and indirectly.
2. Update overtime rules: Moving the overtime threshold to the value it held in 1975—roughly $51,000 today—would provide overtime protections to 6.1 million workers and provide those workers with higher pay.
3. Strengthen and protect workers: Strengthen collective bargaining rights to help give workers the leverage they need to bargain for better wages and benefits and to set high labor standards for all workers, and support strong enforcement of labor standards to protect workers.
4. Regularize undocumented workers to lift not only their wages but also the wages of all workers in the same fields of work.
5. Provide earned sick leave and paid family leave, which would not only raise workers’ pay but also give them more economic security.
6. End discriminatory practices that contribute to race and gender inequalities through consistently strong enforcement of antidiscrimination laws in the hiring, promotion, and pay of women and minority workers.
7. Prioritize very low rates of unemployment when making monetary policy: Policymakers should not seek to slow the economy until growth of nominal wages is running comfortably above 3.5 percent.
8. Create jobs through targeted employment programs and public investments in infrastructure.
9. Reduce our trade deficit by stopping destructive currency manipulation.
10. Use the tax code to restrain top 1 percent incomes.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Women, people of color, and young workers are among those hardest hit by the recession and the subsequent weak recovery.

These data further confirm what many working families experience on a daily basis—the economy is off-kilter, with gains from economic growth concentrated at the top, and low- and middle-income families continuing to struggle with stagnant incomes and barriers to employment.

In this context, here are three things you need to know about the new data for 2013 and how they affect looming policy choices:

1. The economic recovery is not translating into income growth more broadly, as a result millions of families are trapped in economic insecurity;
2. Young workers are still struggling to stay afloat, even though they are more educated than in previous generations;
3. Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act, there has been some progress for women and people of color, but persistent racial, ethnic and gender disparities remain.

These trends and their implications are examined below.

Economic growth isn’t being shared

Adjusting for inflation, median family income stayed flat between 2012 and 2013 and remained lower than in both 2007 and 2000. This decline in family income is due in large part to stagnant wage trends.

Given that the vast majority of Americans, including those at the bottom of the income scale, rely on their paychecks and work-related benefits as their primary source of income, wage stagnation is obstructing our ability to improve economic security and cut poverty. As economists at the Economic Policy Institute recently documented, real wage growth has been negative since 2000 for workers in the bottom 30 percent of the wage distribution and basically stagnant for workers in the middle. Only workers in the top 5 percent have seen solid gains.

Flat incomes combined with rising costs have also meant that household balance sheets are in trouble. Flat wages mean that low- and middle-income families must borrow to keep pace with the rising costs of basic goods and needs such as child care and health care. This leaves families more vulnerable to economic shocks, which can send them spiraling below the poverty line. Moreover, as Figure 1a shows, increasing income inequality has exacerbated the increase in wealth inequality, with families in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution experiencing particularly large declines in net wealth between 2001 and 2013.

Absent policy action, these trends are likely to continue. In August 2014, low-wage industries such as food services, retail, long-term care, home health care, and temporary help comprised 37 percent of new jobs in the private sector. Fortunately, there is evidence that establishing and strengthening basic labor standards is part of the solution. A recent Economic Policy Institute analysis showed that in the past year, real hourly wages declined for all workers except those in the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution, with workers in states that raised their minimum wages accounting for the increase. This underscores that public policy—and specifically, minimum-wage increases—have an important role to play in combating wage stagnation.

As the economy slowly recovers, improving job quality and boosting wages must be a central strategy to ensure that the gains of economic growth reach struggling families.

Young workers are still struggling to stay afloat, despite more education than previous generations

While children experienced significant declines in their poverty rates in 2013, these gains were less dramatic for youth transitioning to adulthood. According to the new Census data, 19.4 percent of people ages 18 to 24 had incomes below the poverty level last year, and young adults ages 25 to 34 did not see an improvement in their poverty rates, which were stuck at 15.8 percent in 2013. High poverty for these groups is particularly striking given their education levels. Young people today are much more educated than their counterparts 50 years ago; yet 18- to 34-years-olds today face higher poverty rates than people of the same ages and educational levels did 50 years ago. Figure 2a charts poverty trends for 25- to 34-year-olds by education level between 1968 and 2013. It shows, for example, that even poverty rates for young people with college degrees or more were about twice as high in 2013 as in 1968.

While some of this increase is due to continued high unemployment, there has also been a clear long-term trend toward higher poverty rates for young people at all levels of education. The vast majority of young people living in poverty today have a high school diploma or more, and more than one-third have some postsecondary education, including 14.5 percent with a bachelor’s degree or higher.  (See Figure 2b.)

Higher education is still a key pathway towards economic security, making it possible for millions of Americans to join the middle class. As Figure 2a shows, the more education one has, the less likely he or she is to be poor, with workers who have at least a four-year college degree experiencing the lowest poverty rates.

The high poverty rates of young people carry long-term consequences. Researchers have found that college graduates who started their careers during recessions earned lower wages over the next 15 years compared to college graduates who entered the workforce in a better economy.

Improving the mobility and opportunities of young workers will require improving job quality. This can be done by raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, adjusting it annually to keep pace with the costs of living, and enabling young, childless workers to access the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); providing more avenues for young people to access employment—for example, through expanding apprenticeships; and addressing their crushing levels of student debt through refinancing options.

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Despite some progress for women and people of color, persistent disparities remain 50 years after the Civil Rights Act

The poverty rate is too high across the board, but certain groups face much higher risks of poverty and economic insecurity than others. These include women and people of color.

Fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it is important to acknowledge the progress that has been made in cutting poverty, particularly for African Americans. From 1966 to 2013, the share of the private sector workforce comprised of people of color rose from 11.2 percent to 29.7 percent, and women’s share grew from 31.2 percent to 48.2 percent. As Figure 3 shows, black poverty rates fell from 55 percent in 1959 to 27.2 percent in 2013, due partly to greater civil rights protections and opportunities in the labor market. And Latinos were the only racial or ethnic group to see a statistically significant decline in their poverty rate in 2013.

That said, Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans are still significantly more likely to live below the poverty line than white non-Latinos. People of color are more likely to live in neighborhoods and places with very high poverty rates, often for reasons related to systemic discrimination; to face employment discrimination; and to bear the brunt of policies that have led to mass incarceration. As with young people, their poverty rates remain relatively high despite considerable educational advancement. For example, in 1965, only one-third of working-age African Americans had a high school diploma or additional education; today, nearly 90 percent do. In short, there is still plenty of work to do to ensure equal opportunity.

The story is more mixed for women. As Figure 3b shows, while elderly women’s poverty rates dropped from 32 percent in 1966 to 11.6 percent in 2013—a testament to Social Security and other federal policies’ effectiveness—the poverty rate for non-elderly women remains elevated. While the poverty gap between non-elderly men and women has narrowed some over time, this has more to do with the deteriorating economic positions of many men than with improvements for women.

For women, basic labor standards and the workplace environment have not caught up to the reality of their central role in the labor market. The United States is the only developed country with no paid family and medical leave and no paid sick days, which forces workers to make impossible choices between work and family responsibilities. The lack of these family-friendly policies is an important factor of the persistent gender wage gap, as well as making it more difficult for families to escape poverty.

These disparities for women and people of color also affect our overall economy. By 2042, people of color will make up the majority of our workforce. Allowing racial and ethnic disparities to linger now will undercut our economic competitiveness in the future. Similarly, if we close the gender wage gap, we can cut the poverty rate of working women and their families in half and add nearly half a trillion dollars to our gross domestic product.

Conclusion

While the past decade of economic growth has left low- and middle-income Americans behind, there are policy solutions that can reverse these trends. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 and indexing to inflation would lift 4.6 million people out of poverty; expanding the EITC for childless adults and lowering its eligibility age would allow more young workers to achieve economic stability; and policies such as paid family and medical leave and paid sick days, investments in child care and early education, and criminal justice reform would help close persistent racial, ethnic, and gender disparities while improving our economy.

Our nation cannot afford another year of stagnation. These data should serve as a wake-up call that policy action is needed to provide greater economic stability and opportunity for all Americans.

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.

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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.

With the swipe of a paintbrush or click of a camera, your child can make a difference in the fight to end poverty.  Not only that, they have the chance to win exciting prizes, and have their artwork showcased in a national campaign.

As part of its mission to build the political and public will to cut poverty in half in ten years, the Half in Ten Campaign is hosting our first ever nationwide art competition with the theme Our American Dream—What Will It Take To Get There?, and the June 30^th submission deadline is only two weeks away. We are calling on everyone, ages 4 to 24, to unleash their creativity and engage in a national conversation with their families, teachers, and community members about poverty and what we need to do as a nation to tackle it.

We need your help to encourage your children to participate. Moms and dads across the nation play an essential role in achieving our goal to reduce poverty as we know firsthand how important it is that children have enough nutritious food on the table, that we and/or our partners have good jobs with good wages, and that our families are secure and stable. Together, we must work to build the country that we want our kids to grow up in, and Half in Ten’s art competition is the perfect opportunity to engage our children in the process.

Aside from the chance to win prizes such as an art kit, an iPad, or a trip to DC, we will feature several winning selections in our campaign materials and reports. It’s time to build a movement against poverty—to raise our voices for the millions of fellow parents and children who struggle to make ends meet. And with your help, we can harness our kids’ collective energy and imagination to push forward.

The decisions our policymakers make today have a profound impact on children. Half in Ten’s National Art Competition offers an opportunity for children to reflect on what poverty means to them and the changes they envision for their community and the country so that everyone can achieve the American Dream.

With that, it’s time to break out the art supplies and register!  Please visit our website for further guidance, details, and frequently asked questions about the competition.