Edwards' Endorsement: It's Not the Poverty....

As John Edwards left the race to be our next President, he reported that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had “…pledged to me and more importantly through me to America, that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.”

Here’s hoping Clinton and Obama intend to do more than establish a limited and limiting goal of cutting poverty. And that neither makes a promise to adopt the flawed “cut poverty” goal in order to extract his endorsement.

It was never clear why Edwards made establishing a national goal to cut poverty a feature of his campaign.

After all, Edwards often talked about workers whose household incomes exceed the official definition of poverty. And he was definitely focused on promoting policy solutions to systemic problems in the labor market and our economy. This makes sense, if our goal is a stronger economy and inclusive democracy.

Unfortunately, Edwards got in the way of his own message by putting up the poverty banner.

There are two problems with the goal to end poverty. First – it’s very limited. Moving people above the poverty line won’t do much to strengthen our economy, communities, or families because it was designed to establish the income necessary to avoid material deprivation, nothing more. Moreover, the formula is seriously out of date because it was developed using 1950s household expenditure data. At that time, families spent more on food and much less on housing, transportation, and child care. Yet, the formula—based on the percentage spent buying enough food to survive-- has never been updated.

Using the poverty measure to judge our success also opens the door to conservative critics who will promote marriage and “hard work” as the solutions to poverty – effectively ignoring systemic causes of income inequality like stagnant wages and declining employment benefits, and other societal shifts that are barriers to economic and social mobility.

Second, merely changing the definition of poverty to fit these policies won't work. It really doesn’t matter who or what the proposal serves. When we target the poor, too many people think they know who that is: those people who made bad choices in life by dropping out of school, or getting pregnant at a young age without benefit of a supportive, stable partner. Even the so-called "working poor" are suspect, because Americans believe that if you work hard, you will do well. So, by that definition – people who are working hard won’t be poor. And it doesn’t seem to matter how many research reports we throw at the issue – we haven’t been able to build the necessary public support or political will for the policy solutions we want.

All of which suggests, we need a new way to talk about our goal. Poverty is too limited (by U.S. definition) and limiting (by U.S. public understanding) a notion and opens the door to opposing arguments in a big way.

Defining the problem as “poverty” sets up a losing scenario for policymaking. My crystal ball predicts competing proposals in any Congressional debate over the best way to cut poverty in half:

1) The Law to Halve Poverty Over Ten Years with good schools, universal pre-k, financial education, health coverage for all, expanded child care, increased minimum wage, unions; and
2) Making Poverty History Act with marriage and work.

Conservatives would demolish a comprehensive proposal because it goes far beyond the stated goal of raising income above the poverty line (about $20,000 for a family of 4) and the public won’t support such spending proposals because they believe people are poor due to personal failures.

This debate would feel frustratingly familiar to anyone who followed the evolution of welfare legislation in the last decade.

It is time to move beyond the fight over issues of poverty and “personal responsibility” and reset the goal as one of economic mobility and social inclusion. We shouldn’t blow this opportunity by sticking to an old – and failed – framework for this debate. The candidates will benefit greatly from developing an alternative lens on the issue, one designed to build support for broader policy solutions, in addition to the many good ideas that we haven't yet created political will to enact.