[Mb-civic] Edwards got it right about poverty - Thomas Oliphant - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Edwards got it right about poverty

By Thomas Oliphant  |  September 20, 2005

WASHINGTON
IN ANY COLLECTION of Americans who have earned the right to say I told 
you so, John Edwards should make every short list.

But, in character, last year's Democratic vice presidential nominee 
passed up a nice chance to do that yesterday.

Instead, the person who insisted on pressing the country's diseased 
political culture to confront the moral issue of poverty long before 
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast used some nice spotlight time to 
continue pressing.

Edwards was right in saying at the Center for American Progress that 
Katrina not only exposed America's dirty secret but presented a 
''historic moment" when it is clear the country is ready to support 
action but is short on the leadership that can prompt it.

In a clue to his instinctive understanding of poverty, Edwards's summary 
of first principles includes the central concept (I first heard it from 
Hubert Humphrey on the subject of civil rights some 40 years ago) that 
confronting poverty is not something ''we" do for ''them."

''This is something we do for us -- for all of us. It makes us stronger; 
it makes us better," he said.

On Edwards's website, the One America Committee -- the idealistic 
synthesis for the sad, contemporary reality of the Two Americas he made 
famous -- there is a major plug for a very simple idea. Raising the 
minimum wage, after nearly a decade of stagnation, is the most obvious, 
but also dramatic, poverty-fighting step the country could take.

Another would be at least a doubling of the earned income tax credit, in 
effect a rebate for those with incomes too low to expose them to the 
income tax.

These simple ideas flow from a basic fact of modern life that is much 
too frequently forgotten -- nearly all officially poor people work full 
time.

''Nobody who works full-time should have to raise children in poverty or 
in fear that one health emergency or pink slip will drive them over the 
cliff," said Edwards.

Instead of Newt Gingrich's Conservative Opportunity Society or President 
Bush's even more narrow-minded Ownership Society, Edwards's conceptual 
framework surrounds the country most of us know every day: a Working 
Society. Bill Clinton famously aimed his 1992 presidential campaign at 
the Americans willing to ''work hard and play by the rules," and in the 
1990s there was finally some progress in what have to be the twin 
objectives of national policy -- promoting vigorous economic growth and 
making long-delayed progress against poverty.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/20/edwards_got_it_right_about_poverty/
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