This is what a real opportunity society looks like
President Barack Obama talks with Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office in between meetings last April to discuss the ongoing budget negotiations. The White House
by JOE BIDEN 9:45 PM, Dec. 22, 2011
Mitt Romney recently laid out his plan for America. Reading about it, I thought of my dad. My dad was a hard worker. He took pride in what he did. And, like millions of Americans, that pride was put to the test when he found himself struggling to make ends meet.
When I was a child, he had to ask my grandfather to take care of my mom, my brother, sister and I while he moved away to find a better job in Wilmington, Del. My dad had a saying: “A job is about more than a paycheck. It’s about dignity. It’s about respect.”
He never believed he was owed anything, but he did believe if you worked hard and played by the rules, you were entitled to be treated with dignity and respect and a fair shake.
Today millions of Americans are meeting their responsibilities every day, yet falling behind. They are not looking for handouts or bailouts, but rather an economy in which their hard work is rewarded and the prospects for their children will be brighter than their own.
This is the basic compact that has made America great. These are the basic values that have helped make our workers the most productive, our entrepreneurs the most innovative and our economy the envy of the world. These are the principles on which our vision for the future must be built.
Romney appears satisfied to settle for an economy in which fewer people succeed, while the majority of Americans are left to tread water or fall behind. His proposal would actually double down on the policies that caused the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression and accelerated a decades-long assault on the middle class.
Romney also misleadingly suggests that the president and I are creating an “Entitlement Society,” whereby government provides everything for its people without regard to merit, as opposed to what he calls an “Opportunity Society,” where everything is merit-based and every man is left to fend for himself.
The only entitlement we believe in is an America where if you work hard, you can get ahead.
And we know from recent experience that his policy prescription for an “Opportunity Society” leads to less, not more opportunity for middle class Americans. How can anyone forget the economic catastrophe brought about by the same policies Mr. Romney’s proposing? His are the same policies that deregulated Wall Street and turned it into a casino that gambled recklessly with hardworking Americans’ money. As a consequence, Americans saw the equity in their homes evaporate and their 401(k)s plummet in value. Millions of jobs were lost.
Americans cannot afford a return to policies that rewarded the recklessness of a few while millions of small businesses and workers were left to clean up the mess. We’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.
The president and I firmly believe, like my father, that every man and woman is entitled to basic dignity. And we believe deeply in opportunity — that if you work hard and play by the rules, no opportunity should be out of reach. That is a fundamentally different vision than what the other side has proposed.
We believe in requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions and in making sure they provide coverage when people get sick. They want to roll back those protections.
We believe in America building the things the world buys, creating millions of good paying manufacturing jobs, like those in the American auto industry. They want to “let Detroit go bankrupt.” We believe in requiring banks and credit card companies to be transparent about rates, fees and terms and in policing mortgage and payday lenders with a consumer watchdog. They want to kill those protections.
We believe in reducing the deficit in a fair, balanced and responsible way. They refuse to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires to reduce the deficit, even if they are given $10 dollars in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases.
We believe in education and training for workers, so we’ve provided record numbers of students with college grants and loans. They want to shut off the funding. We believe in a $1,000 payroll tax cut for working families. They call that a “bandaid” and then block legislation that would prevent taxes from going up for these families next year.
Quite simply, the president and I believe this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. That is how we define opportunity. It’s an America where everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talents and drive will take them, and where the middle class is growing, not shrinking.
That’s been our primary goal since our first day in the White House, and it will be our primary goal until we leave. Everyone is entitled to the opportunity for a better life. That’s the American Dream my dad believed in back in 1957, and it’s the one the president and I believe in today.
JOE BIDEN is vice president of the United States. Contact: Go to www.barackobama.com [ http://www.barackobama.com/ ]
This Week in Poverty: the impact of stress and early intervention on poor kids, the state of children in America, and the GOP breaks out some Golden Oldie myths about poor people, black people and a lack of work ethic… But first:
The Vital Statistics
US poverty (less than $22,300 for a family of four): 46 million people, 15.1 percent.
Kids in poverty: 16.4 million, 22 percent of all kids.
Deep poverty (less than $11,157 for a family of four): 20.5 million people, 6.7 percent of population.
Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, poverty twice as high—nearly 30 percent.
Impact of public policy, 1964–1973: poverty rate fell by 43 percent.
Number of Americans “deep poor,” “poor” or “near poor”: 100 million, or 1 in 3.
GOP: Welcome to South Carolina
Kids 8 and younger living in poverty: 28 percent, tied for fifth worst in the US (including DC).
People living in poverty: 18.2 percent, eighth worst.
High school graduation rate (2008): 61.9 percent, third worst.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has an outstanding op-ed on the link between “toxic stress” in young children and their educational, health and social outcomes later in life.
Research shows how pliable the brain is in the prenatal and early years—how brain architecture can be changed for better or worse and then is increasingly difficult to modify over time. (For more info, check out these three videos from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child.)
Kristof writes that parental affection and presence are key since “the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.” Early intervention programs also make a huge difference. The Nurse-Family Partnership does home visits with poor women who are pregnant for the first time, until the child reaches age 2. Studies show that at age 6 participating kids are one-third as likely to have behavioral or intellectual problems as kids who weren’t enrolled, and half as likely to be arrested at age 15.
The American Academy of Pediatrics concludes, “Protecting young children from adversity is a promising, science-based strategy to address many of the most persistent and costly problems facing contemporary society.”
Kristof’s article made this reader wonder how we as a society help parents “protect young people from adversity.” One important question: where will the good jobs come from considering our decimated manufacturing sector? It’s tough to be a constant, protective presence for your children—especially as a single parent—when you’re working two or even three low-wage jobs that don’t pay enough to lift your family out of poverty. It’s also tough to provide adequate childcare when only one in seven families that qualifies for childcare assistance actually receives it. Finally, we don’t help parents on welfare when job-training and education aren’t allowed to count toward their work requirement, making it even more difficult for them to obtain better jobs to support their families.
Children’s Economic Well-Being Deteriorating
A recent report from Brookings Institution Fellow Julia Isaacs—commissioned by First Focus—suggests that the recession continues to take a heavy toll on children and families, including an increase in 2011 in both child poverty (the official stats don’t come out until September) and the number of children receiving food stamps.
More than 1 in 4 American children now receive food stamps (SNAP)—that’s nearly 21 million kids, and 2 million more than last year. The program is open to individuals with incomes of less than 130 percent of poverty—about $2000 per month for a family of three.
Using state-specific data on unemployment rates and SNAP caseloads, Isaacs also predicts that child poverty increased in 2011 by 340,000 children, which would raise the child poverty rate by about a half percentage point. (Isaac writes that her prediction might be a conservative one—her colleagues have estimated a rise of as much as 2 percentage points to 24 percent child poverty.)
Finally, 6.5 million children were living with unemployed parents during an average month in 2011, 3 million with a parent looking for work six months or longer. The report observes that poverty and a parent being unemployed both affect a child’s development in the short-term—including psychological stress and academic performance, and increased incidences of abuse and neglect—and in diminished career opportunities and earnings as an adult over the long-term.
A Little Help From Obama
When President Obama proposed his American Jobs Act back in September, he included $1.5 billion toward summer jobs and year-round employment for low-income youth ages 16–24. That was important, considering that just 49 percent of that age group was employed in July, the month when youth employment usually peaks, including only 34.6 percent of African-American youth and 42.9 percent of Hispanic youth.
The bill was dead-on-arrival given a GOP majority in the House and a filibustering Senate. So now President Obama is trying to use the bully pulpit to secure commitments from government, businesses and non-profits to hire “Opportunity Youth”—the 6.7 million young people ages 16-24 who are unemployed, not enrolled in school, and do not have a college degree. (They comprise 17 percent of the 39 million 16–24 year olds in the nation.) So far, employers have responded with 70,000 paid summer jobs and 110,000 unpaid summer or year-round work opportunities. The administration’s goal is to reach 250,000 jobs by summer, including 100,000 paid jobs and internships.
“It’s a good start in terms of focusing some attention on an issue that desperately needs it—before we get into the summer,” says Desmond Brown, consultant to Half in Ten, a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years. “We still need a lot more job training and work opportunities for low-income and less educated workers, but given the political landscape, this is a good kick-off.”
The White House is making the case that investing in these jobs saves money over the long-term. It estimates $93 billion in lost tax revenue and higher government spending to support these 6.7 million disconnected youth in 2011 alone. Without intervention, over their lifetime there will be “a $1.6 trillion burden to meet the increased needs and lost revenue from this group.”
An additional note on how job opportunities like these can reduce poverty: last year, Half in Ten made a significant finding that only 4 percent of households with more than one earner are in poverty as compared to 24 percent with a single earner. While conservatives seize on that data to say that marriage is the way out of poverty—it isn’t the only path. Summer and year-round programs aimed at connecting disadvantaged youth to education and work experience are critical in this regard.
GOP Would-Be Presidents Peddling Myths [my red]
“The African-American community should demand pay checks and not be satisfied with food stamps,” said Newt Gingrich; “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” declared Rick Santorum; and “We are…dragged down by a resentment of success,” offered Mitt Romney.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow does a superb job debunking myths—explaining that, for example, “the largest group of SNAP beneficiaries is by far non-Hispanic whites” and “most SNAP participants are either too old or too young to work”—and also lays out the GOP’s use over the years of a “historical mythology which evokes the black bogyman, who saps the money from the whites who earn it.”
Joy Moses, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, brings a dose of reality to Santorum’s rhetoric as well. She points out that “most people receiving public benefits aren't collecting somebody else’s money, but their own” in the form of Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance—programs that beneficiaries and their employers have paid for with taxes taken out of their paychecks. Also, unemployment insurance and TANF (cash welfare for families)—which represent just 4 percent of federal spending—pay such small amounts and are time-limited so that people couldn’t live off of them even if they wanted to. (TANF benefits don’t raise a family’s income above 50 percent of the poverty line in any state!)
As for Romney, he seems to be onto something: the cause of the economic collapse, a shrinking middle-class and rising poverty is that we simply drag ourselves down due to success envy. It’s got nothing to do with economic mobility, low wages, lack of access to higher education, unequal public schools, a deteriorating safety net, gutted financial regulation, etc. In fact, at bedtime tonight I told my children that some day they too can sell toxic securities that they themselves bet against, watch people’s lifetime savings go down the tubes and be rewarded with mega-bonuses for doing it—and be proud!
Quote of the Week
“Race is usually less about facts than historical mythology, which evokes the black bogyman, who saps the money from the whites who earn it. Ever since blacks first arrived on these shores in chains, they have been perceived as lazy and dependent on whites—first as slaves, and then as ‘entitled’ citizens.” —Charles Blow
Get Involved
Half In Ten Coalition on Human Needs First Focus Children’s Defense Fund
More Reading
Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs No Longer the Land of Opportunity SC Senate Panel Approves Unemployment Bills Legal Momentum: Women and Poverty Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Poverty and Income
This Week in Poverty posts every Friday Morning. Your constructive comments—agree or disagree—are appreciated. Please follow me on Twitter as well.
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