If Americans are talking about poverty again with greater urgency than they have since the 1970s, it is because they are rightly angered by the cruelties of the 21^st-century economy. Wages have been stagnant for decades, steadily eroding what people can afford. Fewer and fewer jobs offer benefits. Even the success stories—young people who graduate from college—carry crushing levels of student debt that prevents them from purchasing homes or cars. Staggering health care costs have driven millions of American families into bankruptcy. And tens of millions of workers, even those in professional occupations, have become “contingent labor” with no job security. Their hours are changed whenever it suits management.

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This new economy has fueled massive protest both here and abroad. And sustained organizing by millions of low-wage workers, students, immigrants, and the homeless has reframed the issue of American poverty in ways that are reminiscent of the 1930s. Poverty, these activists argue, is an issue of fairness to workers and to the middle class—it’s caused by corporate greed more than anything else.

Without question, the global crash of 2008 contributed to the change in thinking about growing economic inequality in the U.S. and abroad. But it was not the crash alone that caused this change. Rather, it has been a dramatic upsurge over the past five years of grassroots organizing and protest. Without those, concern about poverty had little staying power in American politics between the 1970s and the present. Poverty was briefly rediscovered as an issue after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. A then-little-known senator named Barack Obama pronounced it a shame “that it has taken a crisis like this one to awaken us to the great divide that continues to fester in our midst.” But, if Americans were indeed ashamed, we were not ashamed for long. The year after the hurricane struck, President George W. Bush proposed zeroing out funding for the Community Development Block Grant program, which is used for affordable housing, infrastructure, job creation and many other local antipoverty programs.

Bush’s proposal was defeated, but the language and iconography used to stir up opposition to federal poverty programs after Katrina was deeply familiar to any student of 20^th-century American politics. It came down to a simple formula: blame women of color, especially single mothers. Columnist George Will argued that poverty could be defeated only if poor women stayed in school and did not have babies out of wedlock. And George W. Bush created the Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI), which siphoned off federal anti-poverty funds to private marriage counseling programs for poor women. Although the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services called for voluntary participation in these programs, women I interviewed in Reno said they were required to attend HMI sessions if they were enrolled in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) income assistance program.

The discourse about poverty in the U.S. did not really begin to shift away from that tired trope until around 2011 and 2012, when students, the unemployed, and the homeless began to move into Occupy Wall Street encampments from New York to California. Despite being mocked and excoriated by mainstream media for having “no clear goals,” these activists focused national attention away from the so-called “moral flaws” of the poor to the most important sources of 21^st-century American poverty: predatory lending, immorally expensive medical bills that were causing people to lose their homes, and wages that were insufficient to pay people’s bills.

Occupy introduced into American political discourse a simple, effective image of the American economy, juxtaposing most of “us”—the 99 percent—against the 1 percent, to which a staggering proportion of national wealth had been flowing since the Reagan Revolution began in 1980. The reason was clear: since the late 1970s, top marginal tax rates had been cut from 70 percent to little more than 30 percent, redirecting almost all American wealth to the top 1 percent of earners. This image took hold, and did as much to raise consciousness about economic inequality as twenty densely argued economics texts. But it also prompted a spate of more closely reasoned economic arguments about economic inequality—most famously from Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich.

Suddenly poverty in America began to look different, and many average Americans began talking about it differently too. Maybe it wasn’t poor people’s fault after all. Recovery from the 2008 recession did create millions of new jobs but 58 percent of them did not pay enough to keep a full-time worker clothed, housed and fed. By 2011, the results were crystal clear: college graduates were defaulting on student loans by the millions; full-time workers were living in homeless shelters or sleeping on relatives’ couches.

When police were called in to break up Occupy encampments, the movement was declared over—another flash in the pan. But that’s not what happened. Organizers shifted gears, unions invested resources, and the banner of economic justice was picked up by low-wage workers.

The movement for a living wage got its start with small protests by Walmart workers across the country. The first came on Black Friday 2012, the biggest shopping day of the year. Outside Walmart stores, McDonald’s restaurants, and other fast food chains, workers let the world know that 52 percent of them were forced to rely on government cash and food aid to supplement their meager paychecks. These small protests in New York, Chicago, and the working-class L.A. suburb of Pico Rivera, would soon spread across the U.S. and around the world.

Workers captured and broadcasted video and still images on social media, no longer dependent on corporate media. Unlike the long, grinding strikes of the 20^th century, flash strikes could be and were repeated again and again. Every few months there were more.

In May 2014, fast food workers walked off the job in 190 U.S. cities, and in 33 other countries, on six continents. In November 2014, Walmart workers held the first retail sit-down strikes since the 1930s, carrying photographs of Depression-era Woolworth sit-down strikers. In April 2015 and again in December, low-wage workers in fast food, home health care, airports and chain retail stores struck in 500 American cities; hotel housekeepers staged actions from Providence, Rhode Island to Long Beach, California and from Karachi, Pakistan to Abuja, Nigeria. All of these groups of workers are continuing to organize and—as a result—public opinion about raising wages has become ever-more positive.

Low-wage strikes have highlighted the fact that the prime welfare cheat, it turns out, is not Ronald Reagan’s fictitious Cadillac-driving, African-American single mother, but the world’s wealthiest corporations. Unwilling to pay their workers a living wage, they use federal poverty programs to subsidize their labor costs. The majority of low-wage workers, and the majority of living wage protesters, are in fact single mothers of color, and the next largest group are men of color. Who is cheating whom, the protesters ask? The answer is clear.

Since 2012, the campaign for a $15 living wage has had more success than anyone imagined it would. Los Angeles City and County, Seattle, San Francisco and many other cities and states have passed increases to the minimum wage and adopted the idea of a living wage. In the 2016 presidential campaign, we are once again discussing the ideas of universal health care as a right in the United States, federally-subsidized day care, free public universities, and progressive tax reform. And millions of protesters are taking us back in time to rehash debates that raged in the eras of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson.

Welcome to the new War on Poverty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To complete the journey, we await renewed presidential leadership.

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

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

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

The Progressives                                                

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

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

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

The New Dealers

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

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

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The Fight Today

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

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

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

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.

The Shriver Center, working with experts in twenty different subject areas, identified the House and Senate floor votes in 2013 that had the greatest impact on the interests of poor people.  Each Member of Congress was then graded based on their performance on those votes.

The ratings are based on floor votes on a wide range of issues. In 2013, the hottest areas were votes relating to reauthorization of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and budget and tax issues. The SNAP votes were on amendments that set program funding levels and sought to greatly restrict participation in the program. The budget and tax issues included spending cuts tied to raising the debt limit and Hurricane Sandy disaster relief, and budget resolutions and the budget agreement.

In addition, votes in many other areas were used, including funding for legal services, comprehensive immigration reform, international food aid programs, curtailing voting and labor rights, and the obligatory attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The results were not surprising. They showed that Congress is bitterly divided, with 97% of the Senators and 95% of the Representatives graded at one extreme or the other, receiving an A, D or F. Only a small handful of moderates received a B or C.

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As long as legislative districts lean heavily toward one party or the other, the only threat to a member’s reelection is a primary challenge from someone in the member’s own party who is more extreme. This inclines members to vote in an even more partisan way. In such an electoral environment, compromise is politically dangerous.

This partisan gridlock prevents Congress from passing laws that address our nation’s major problems. While this hurts everyone, it is especially detrimental to poor people who have the most to lose under the status quo.

Another major finding was that the Congressional delegations from states with the highest poverty rates tended to have the worst records in fighting poverty. Something other than the interests of a relatively large percentage of people living in poverty was motivating them.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson announced a War on Poverty and pursued a hugely ambitious legislative agenda to that end. While great progress was made in the first decade after this war was declared, and poverty was cut by one-third, the Poverty Scorecard demonstrates how Congress has now abandoned the effort to fight poverty.

Take a look at the Scorecard. See how your House member and Senators voted and hold them accountable.

One of the most significant successes of the first years of the War on Poverty was the strong emphasis on organizing and empowering people in poor communities to take control of many aspects of their lives (education, job opportunities and training, crime control, health care, and legal issues, to name a few).

The original intent of the War on Poverty was not only to create safety net programs.  It was to identify, train, and nurture the leaders and residents in low-income communities to mobilize and take control of their own destinies.

That kind of work was undertaken by local Community Action Agencies (CAAs) and it was so effective that it threatened the existing power structures.

One of the most dramatic images of successful organizing was in the late 1960s in Chicago, where I lived and worked for the Office of Economic Opportunity helping to administer funds for War on Poverty programs.  At the time, garbage was picked up once per week by municipal crews.  But if the weather was bad—not an unusual occurrence during winters in Chicago—garbage in the poorer neighborhoods was often not collected at all.  Local community activists organized a protest, funded in part by War on Poverty community action agency grants.  People brought their garbage bags downtown and left them on the sidewalk outside of City Hall.  There were pictures in the papers and images on TV every day showing the growing piles of garbage outside of City Hall.  It didn’t take long for the City to change its operation and make sure that everyone got their garbage picked up every week.

Other successful community organizing efforts throughout the country included:

• Rent strikes to demand sanitary, heated, and safe living conditions
• Migrant workers striking for improved living and work conditions
• Programs to enroll seniors in the newly established Medicare program, combat isolation, and promote access to regular meals
• Community-based mental health and substance abuse programs
• Job-readiness training programs
• Head Start programs which brought together families and the broader community to give children a better chance at success

Importantly, most of the people who led the organizing for these efforts were poor themselves and lived in the communities that they were trying to improve. They had very strong leadership qualities and were well-respected by local residents.   The local CAAs hired them and they worked within the communities to identify barriers to economic opportunity and to empower local residents to overcome those barriers.

Unfortunately, the success of community organizing and empowerment was seen as a threat to both urban/liberal and rural/suburban/conservative elected officials at every level of government.  Congressional members, fearing these new leaders as well as activism in poor communities, gutted funding for this crucial element of the War on Poverty starting in 1969.

What this history suggests is that combatting poverty now and in the future should once again be built around poor people organizing to address the challenges that they see their families and communities up against every day.

While government is unlikely to fund these kinds of efforts, non-partisan, private foundations should indeed support this type of grassroots organizing. If it works as well now as it did 50 years ago, it would force all of our elected officials, Democrats and Republicans, to listen to all of the people, not just those who have the money and organizational power to influence legislation.

And the country as a whole would benefit.

Day in and day out, legal services attorneys fight for the rights of poor individuals and families, providing legal help to people who cannot afford an attorney. Access to representation is vitally important.  But as we commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty, it’s time to renew the vision of legal services as antipoverty work.

While American legal aid has existed since the turn of the 20^th century, the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) as part of LBJ’s War on Poverty offered a bold new vision of legal services as an antipoverty strategy, and legal services attorneys as agents of systemic change. Catherine Carr, Executive Director of Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, describes this historic shift:

No longer were legal aid programs being designed to simply respond to the problems that individual poor people brought to intake offices; instead, the programs were to work with low-income communities to identify needs and strategically set priorities that protected and advanced the rights of poor people and poor communities as a whole.

In the years that followed, legal services proved to be an enormously effective antipoverty tool. Legal services programs lobbied elected officials, engaged in local and national social justice organizing efforts, won landmark victories in courts across the nation on behalf of their clients, and thereby brought about systemic change that benefited poor people nationwide. The watershed U.S. Supreme Court case Goldberg v. Kelly, for example, established that a poor person has a constitutional right to a fair hearing before his or her welfare benefits can be terminated.

Fifty years later, legal services attorneys continue to fight on behalf of low-income Americans who cannot afford legal help. But much of the work today more closely resembles the “legal aid” vision that existed prior to the 1960s rather than the “law reform” vision brought about by the OEO as part of the War on Poverty.

This shift is in large part due to conservative backlash against legal services as an antipoverty tool. It didn’t take long for conservatives to view a strong legal services movement as a threat.  In the decades that followed the launch of the War on Poverty, they placed restrictions on legal services programs, barring those that accept federal funding from engaging in much of the work that effects systemic change.

President Nixon prohibited staff attorneys from lobbying or engaging in political activities. President Reagan—who, as Governor of California, had battled efforts to improve the working conditions of poor migrant farmworkers—prohibited legal services programs from using federal dollars for legislative and regulatory activities as well as class action lawsuits. Even after the Reagan restrictions, many legal services programs found alternative funding sources to support their law reform activities. But in 1996, the Gingrich Congress hammered the final nail into the coffin, expanding the restrictions to any legal services program that accepted even a single dollar of federal funds.

While a small number of programs found ways to continue their law reform work—for example, by creating separate programs to receive unrestricted dollars—most responded by backing away from the kinds of systemic work that had proven most effective at impacting large numbers of poor people, in favor of the “legal aid” model of one-off individual client representation.

Today an ever-shrinking number of legal services programs—and legal services attorneys—view their role and mission as that of antipoverty work.  Access to representation has supplanted the bolder vision of law reform and systemic change.

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To be sure, a handful of programs still embrace the OEO vision. As a new lawyer fresh out of law school, I had the good fortune to land in one of those programs: Community Legal Services in Philadelphia (CLS). As a staff attorney at CLS, I learned firsthand the power of the “law reform” model that CLS continues to embody, providing representation to poor Philadelphians, and using that individual representation to inform large-scale systemic work—through class action and impact litigation as well as legislative advocacy on the local, state and national level.

The cutbacks and restrictions championed by Nixon, Reagan and Gingrich have without question made it much more complicated and challenging for many legal services programs to engage in law reform. As long as the restrictions persist, unrestricted programs like CLS must take seriously their responsibility to prioritize law reform work, given that there are so few programs free to pursue it.

But even restricted programs can find ways to maximize their role as part of the antipoverty movement. Media is a powerful example, as human stories have the power to bring abstract policy debates to life. As advocates who interact with low-income individuals and families on a daily basis, legal services attorneys are uniquely positioned to tell the story of how few poor families are actually helped by TANF, for example; or how struggling families have no room for SNAP cuts; or how inadequate the official federal poverty measure is. They can paint a picture of the barriers people face in seeking to get a job—people with criminal records, for example—or what it’s like to be working full-time and still unable to rise out of poverty. They can tell the story of how and why it’s expensive to be poor. Even better, they can empower their clients to tell their own stories. Talkpoverty.org offers a unique new outlet to tell these stories, and I hope to see a steady stream of contributions from legal services advocates and their clients in the months and years ahead.

But we must also look beyond the present. As we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the War on Poverty and the Office of Economic Opportunity, let’s pave the way for a renewed legal services movement—one that is unhindered by restrictions and plays a leading role in bringing an end to poverty.

We think we know what poverty is, but when pushed, it really isn’t easy to define. Poverty seems to be about not having enough, about deprivation. But sometimes it’s not easy to know how much is enough.

Poverty can be considered, and measured, as absolute—based on an agreed upon minimum level of resources that no one should be allowed to sink below, usually connected to a minimum level of basic needs. Or it can be considered as relative—based on some “standards of the community.” It can also be measured as “subjective”—based on levels of resources that individuals believe and report that they need in order to be healthy, satisfied, or happy.

In the US we use a “quasi-absolute” measure of poverty. It is historically based on an estimate of the cost of a minimally nutritious diet. So it is connected to a floor, or minimum level of resources that no one should be allowed to sink below, but a floor that supposedly supports a healthy life. This “official” poverty measurement emerged in the early 1960s based on the work and insights of Mollie Orshansky.

Working for the Social Security Administration , Orshansky was tasked with developing a response to a Congress member’s question about how much it costs a retired couple to live. Orshansky examined USDA data and found that in 1955 the average household of three or more people in the US spent about one-third of its annual income on food, which implied that it spent two-thirds on everything else it needed. So, if you knew how much a healthy diet cost, you could multiply that amount by 3 to arrive at the amount needed to meet basic needs, or the poverty threshold.

And it worked very well. Since she knew the cost of the USDA’s economy food plan (now known as the “Thrifty Food Plan”)—which was supposed to be the lowest cost, minimally nutritious diet—Orshansky multiplied its cost by 3, and she had the basic poverty threshold. Simple but elegant, and quite accurate in the 1960s.  It’s still the basis of the official poverty thresholds today.

But there is a problem with this approach: if the average proportion of income spent on food changes, then the multiplier would need to change, and so would the poverty threshold. And the proportion of income spent on food has indeed changed, as housing and health care costs have absorbed an ever-growing percentage of our annual incomes. In 2012, for example, the average share of expenditures spent on food for all consumer units was just 12.8%—far below the 33% in Orshansky’s day. Using her elegant logic, we would therefore need to multiply the cost of the minimally nutritious diet by 7.8—instead of 3—to accurately arrive at the basic 2012 poverty thresholds.

Using 2012 costs, if you multiply the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan for a family of four people by 3, you get $22,604—very close to the Census Bureau’s poverty threshold of $23,283 for a family of four. But if you instead multiply the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan by 7.8, the poverty threshold would be $58,771 per year for that same family.

While that may seem high, it is actually very close to the “Economic Self-Sufficiency Standard” that Diana Pearce estimated was $59,027 for a family of four in Albany County, NY in 2010. And it is a little more than the economic self-sufficiency income level of $54,636 for that same family in Allegheny County, PA in 2012. So Mollie Orshansky’s logic still seems to work reasonably well, it just hasn’t been adjusted to reflect the higher costs of basic necessities for contemporary families.

It is clear that if we accurately applied Mollie Orshansky’s approach to measuring poverty, much higher thresholds would result, and many more households and people would be categorized as living in poverty. In 2012, the median income level for all US households was $51,017.  If $58,771 (7.8 times the Thrifty Food Plan for a family of four in 2012) were the basic poverty threshold, more than half the households in the US would be classified as being in poverty. And that would probably be accurate in terms of the number of families that are unable to afford basic necessities.

Changing how we measure poverty would force a change in the narrative we tell ourselves as a nation.  When something affects half of the nation’s households, it becomes the problem of many more leaders, at all levels of government and society, forcing a recognition that poverty really was never about “them”, it is truly about “us”.  As it is, our measurement of poverty vastly understates the problem, allowing us to continue onward without effectively addressing it.

I frequently hear the argument that we can’t afford to reduce or eliminate poverty, and without doubt it would not be an inexpensive undertaking. But the unstated question this implies is “how much are we willing to pay not to eliminate poverty?” In 2007, four of the best poverty researchers in the country estimated that child poverty alone costs the US in excess of $500 billion per year. This estimate only includes costs arising from foregone earnings, crime, and health care, and is surely an underestimate of the actual total costs of poverty.

So the question we seem to be facing these days is this: “Do we value poverty more than not having poverty?” Are we as a country willing to pay more to have poverty than we are to eliminate poverty? It is an open question, but the answer is emerging rapidly.