As I mentioned before, I'm in Vancouver with no cable and a slow internet connection, so I haven't had a chance to watch Obama's acceptance speech yet. I'll withhold comment until then, but the speech certainly reads well. I dug the overall theme of "keeping the American promise alive":

... we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.

We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma. We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President - when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job - an economy that honors the dignity of work.

The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great - a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight.

And, I especially like this line—"America, now is not the time for small plans". It just may be that the era of the "the-era-of-big-government-is-over" thinking is over.

Public jobs have been putting marginalized people in the middle and working class for centuries- think of Irish-Americans in the police, African-Americans in social work, the military for rural whites, and so on. The topic doesn't come up much among anti-poverty advocates, but thanks to the long memory of the internet, it's pretty easy to read about these ideas. In 1996, William Julius Wilson gave an interview to Mother Jones defending a public jobs approach to ending inner city poverty.

Q: But why does the government need to provide work? Why not rely on the private sector for jobs?
A: A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Our study clearly shows that employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak.

The problems we see today are going to be a hell of a lot worse in 10 years if we're not willing to face up to them. These kids are just not going to be absorbed into the economy, so what are they going to be doing? Well, we know. They're going to be making life pretty miserable for a lot of people.

In the short term, we have to have public-sector employment to get people back to work. In the long term, we're going to have to have programs to ensure that our kids are ready to enter the private labor market.

The Clinton era economic boom may have convinced some folks that a wisely-managed market can solve the problems of poverty and inequality, but the persistence of these problems and the history of public jobs tell a different story.

This has been a busy week for progressive economic policy wonks. It started with a cover story in The New York Times Magazine about Sen. Barack Obama’s economic positions; moved to “Poverty Day,” the day on which the U.S. Census Bureau releases income, poverty and insurance data; and will end with the release of EPI’s newest State of Working America report. To boot, numerous speakers at the Democratic Party National Convention have spoken about the problems facing working Americans.

Despite this week’s torrent of data and commentaries – despite this week’s torrent of words – about economic conditions, a coherent story about the problems, causes and solutions is missing. Rather, it seems as if progressive-minded leaders are pulling their punches. In his speech last night, for instance, vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden spoke elegantly about the problems of working families but timidly about solutions. He briefly mentioned such fundamentally conservative solutions as tax cuts and welfare reform before moving on.

But at least Biden exuded passion. The night before, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner gave a keynote address that was essentially a laundry list of safe, small-bore (a.k.a. “bi-partisan”) economic policies divorced from any larger economic story. What point should working people in struggling communities like those in Virginia’s Appalachian or Southside regions take from Warner’s remarks? That education and rural broadband access are good?

The absence of an economic story illustrates a criticism voiced by economist James Galbraith in his recent book, The Predator State. Writes Galbraith:

Liberals continue to behave as though they face a philosophically coherent adversary and as though the politics of the day require formulating a program that responds to that adversary …. This leads to a paralysis of thought and action and to programs doomed to futility and failure from the beginning.

This failure of imagination when it comes to solutions leads to cautious, incremental steps ill-suited to today’s challenges. (A dynamic that Robert Kuttner describes in an article about balanced budgets in The American Prospect.) Until progressive economic critiques are coupled with a willingness to offer solutions flowing from the critiques, the prospects for meaningful reforms are limited, regardless of what the data say or which party controls the levels of government.

I'm not so sure Barkley would make a good chair of Half in Ten. From what I can tell, Barkley's highest priority is expanding opportunity so that poor folks can make it to the working and middle class. Mostly, Half in Ten is promoting policy that would increase income security and lessen material hardship. Their primary goal is to reduce poverty, not open doors for folks to move up and be integrated into mainstream society, and that isn't just a linguistic distinction.

That said, Barkley could chart a better direction for Half in Ten. And while we're dreaming, it would be extra cool to have him hanging around DC. Hopefully they could reconcile.

I'd been wondering for a while who might be a good replacement for John Edwards as chair of the Half in Ten anti-poverty campaign. I was initially thinking it should either be a Bono-like rock star, but American, or maybe a NASCAR driver, but Matt's post got me thinking that Charles Barkley might be a good replacement.

As Matt's post suggests, Barkley understands that poverty is mostly about opportunity structures and geography. He's also interested in a political career, at least according to Wikipedia, and, despite once being a Republican, now recognizes the damage that conservatism has done to America:

In February 2008, Barkley announced that he would be running for Governor of Alabama in 2014 as an Independent. He explained, "I don't like the way the Republicans are taking this country. Every time I hear the word "conservative," it makes me sick to my stomach, because they're really just fake Christians, as I call them.

On the con side, his gambling may raise some eyebrows—he claims to have once lost $2.5 million in six hours playing blackjack—but he's said recently he's quitting. Probably be a good idea to confirm that before any offer is extended.

Former NBA star and, in my view, the best basketball commentator on television, offers some good rhetoric for anti-poverty advocates in an interview with CNN. He focuses attention on systems better than most advocates do:

CNN.com: What do you think the Democrats need to do here to win the White House?

Barkley: I think they've got to just make sure to get those troops home from Iraq, that's a big deal. But No. 1, we've got to give poor people a chance. America is divided by economics, and we as Americans, we've got to do a better job of supporting poor people.

CNN.com: How?

Barkley: We've got to improve the public school system. If you're born in this country poor, whether you're white or black, you're going to be born in a bad neighborhood; you're going to go to a bad school. It's going to be very difficult for poor people to be successful.

Saying that he's "giving poor people a chance" is a good way of getting at unequal opportunity. If poverty is about anything, it's about being denied a chance to show what you're capable of.

Census released official income data for 2007 this morning. A few things I noticed skimming the report:

• The share and number of uninsured declined between 2006 and 2007, but it looks like all the credit goes to public health insurance programs—including Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP. The share of Americans with private coverage declined, but the increase in coverage by public programs more than offset this decline.
• Median income increased modestly and poverty overall remained about the same, but child poverty, as officially measured, increased substantially, from 17.4 percent of children in 2006 to 18 percent in 2007.
• Income inequality (measured by shares of household income) declined a bit, but it was all due to gains for the middle and upper middle (the third and fourth quintiles) and a decline for the top quintile—the share of household income for the bottom 40 percent of Americans remained flat.

Important to remember: things have gotten a lot worse over the past year, something these numbers don't reflect. And, income remains lower and poverty higher than in 2000.

I'm in Vancouver this week and don't have cable, but was able to catch Michelle Obama's great speech after the fact via You Tube. In an earlier post, I expressed some concern that the Dem's platform has lots of references to the middle class and poverty, but no direct mention of the working class. Michelle Obama's speech had no such limitation:

.... what struck me when I first met Barack was that even though he had this funny name, even though he’d grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine. He was raised by grandparents who were working class folks just like my parents, and by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills just like we did. Like my family, they scrimped and saved so that he could have opportunities they never had themselves. And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them.

For a great analysis of the class elements of the speech, see this post by David Kusnet. I particularly like his observation that:

... like all authentic populisms, the Obama’s appeals rest on pride, not pity. The stories Michelle Obama told--of her dad taking an hour to get dressed because he suffered from MS, of steelworkers struggling to find new jobs, and of day shift workers kissing their kids goodbye before they went to work the nightshift, too--describe people finding dignity and even joy in difficult circumstances. Implicitly, she dispelled not only the slur that she herself is bitter, but also the memory of her husband’s controversial remarks that some working class Americans are bitter.

PS: I liked this line from Ted Kennedy's speech:

For me this is a season of hope—new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few—new hope.

A recent piece in the Boston Globe's Idea's section is another fine example of how conservative the anti-poverty policy world is.

It focuses on men in poverty and a raft of new policy proposals that address their special problems. Needless to say, remedies are not directed at creating better jobs, helping men build skills, or providing them with a decent safety net. They're mostly going to end the "culture of poverty" and put in place the right incentives for work.

In recent books, papers, and conferences, specialists from across the political spectrum are urging a comprehensive array of new antipoverty policies targeted at men. The proposals include wage subsidies, forgiveness of child support debt, reentry programs for ex-offenders, and even a scheme that would force men to work under threat of prison.

As if low-income men aren't already "under the threat of prison" enough.

One silver lining- the article tells a decent story about the macroeconomic and policy changes that left so many men behind.

After World War II, the US economy flourished, and earnings rose across the economic spectrum. By 1973, the real earnings of blue-collar workers were more than 60 percent higher than in 1947. "The whole country was on an up escalator," says Gordon Berlin, president of MDRC, a policy research organization based in New York.

After 1973, however, this escalator came to a "grinding halt," says Berlin. Well-paying manufacturing jobs began to vanish. Immigration of low-skilled workers created competition for the low-paying jobs that remained. The inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage fell, as the importance of higher education rose.

Between 1975 and 2002, the real earnings of men with a college degree or more shot up by 62 percent, according to research by Sheldon Danziger, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. But over the same period, the earnings of males with only a high school diploma declined by 13 percent. For high school dropouts, they dropped 23 percent. Many men who would have been able to support families a few decades ago are in a very different position today.

Berlin's idea for coping with these massive structural changes? A higher EITC, premised on motivating men to work. Nothing on addressing the economics that got us where we are. So much for the silver lining.

I wanted to add an observation about intergenerational income/class mobility to Matt's last post. Conventional wisdom has it that most adults with incomes below the poverty line grew up as children in families with below-poverty incomes. In fact, most adults living in poverty grew up in above-poverty working and middle class families. Here's a quick synthesis of some of the research:

• Children who grew up in low-income households (say, the bottom quintile) are more likely to have low-incomes as adults.
• Yet, most low-income adults did not grow up in low-income households.
• This is because most children grow up in higher-income households (say, the top four quintiles) and a substantial share of these children will end up with low-incomes as adults (with the risk of ending up low-income declining as the income of one's parents increases).
• As an example, based on the Mazumer's recent analysis of the NLSY, slightly more adults in the bottom quintile grew up in households with incomes in the middle and fourth quintile (33.9%) than in the bottom quintile (33.5%). Similarly, based on Hertz's analysis of the PSID: 41.5% in bottom quintile as children remained there as adults, while 39.5% in second and middle quintile as children dropped to the bottom quintile as adults).
• Most low-income adults did not grow up in single-parent or non-working households. As Ludwig and Mayer explain: "most poor adults grow up as nonpoor children in the type of “pro-social” households that policymakers are pushing to attain. Moreover, little good evidence supports the idea that such parental behaviors as marriage, work, and religious adherence have strong causal effects on children's long-term economic success."
• But, in general, the "apple doesn't fall from the tree." While a majority of low-income children don't end up as low-income adults, they're not equally disbursed among the rest of the income distribution.
• Workers in other wealthy nations, with lower levels of inequality and more egalitarian policies, have greater levels of upward mobility than workers in the United States.

The big implication for me of this research is that policies and programs targeted narrowly on children living in poverty wouldn't do that much by themselves to reduce inequality or overall poverty levels, and will end up excluding the bulk of children who end up in poverty as adults. What's needed are more universal programs, and, even more importantly, a focus on the economic policies and institutions that largely determine our current levels of poverty and inequality.

Everyday, people making low wages move out of poverty and into the working class. How do they do it? And what happens to them after they do it? Last year, Katherine Newman gave a fascinating talk at the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center that sheds lots of light on the topic.

She found three pathways to the working class:

• Finding a semi-skilled unionized job
• Receiving a vocational or academic education
• Finding a well-paying public sector job
• Moving up a job ladder
• Changing family make-up

Despite having escaped poverty, working class folks aren't out of the woods yet. They face powerful threats to their newfound prosperity. Urban gentrification could displace them from opportunity-rich neighborhoods, a deregulated credit industry could drive them into bankruptcy, and it's still hard for them to develop assets. Things like the loss of a wage earner or a high medical bill can push them back into poverty.

And the children of folks in the working class are at high risk of downward mobility. Their overworked parents generally aren't around to supervise them after school and help them with their homework. At the same time, overstretched schools are putting pressure on parents to improve their children's test performance. When kids don't do well enough, they are held back, increasing the likelihood that they'll drop out. Many end up in the criminal justice system.

Newman argues that once folks make it into the working class, "we don't think about them." I'd take issue with this for two reasons. First, much of the Clinton administration's policy benefitted them, including the EITC, SCHIP, and even welfare reform. And second, the policies that opened up the opportunities they seized to reach the working class were either neglected or attacked by the Clinton administration, downsizing the public jobs sector and the unabated decline of unionization being a few examples. Certainly the problems of the working class deserve more attention, but the people who've been neglected the most are those who're aspiring to join it.

And Newman promotes the talking point that investment in the lower rungs of the workforce is good for the economy. This point should be made- it's good to counter the belief that there's a trade-off between doing what's right and what's good for everyone, and it can help build alliances with new allies, like businesses experiencing labor shortgages and undertrained staff. But the most powerful issue is still the moral one. Excluding millions of Americans from opportunity and mainstream society should not happen in a county founded on the ideals of unity and opportunity for all.

This post of mine was originally published on August 21, 2006—it remains relevant today:

This Tuesday marks the 10th Anniversary of the enactment of federal legislation that replaced the AFDC program with the Temporary Assistance program. The conventional story is that this month also marks the birth of “welfare reform” and that the key element of that reform was conservative, the ending of the basic entitlement to assistance provided by AFDC. The National Review, for instance, gloats that August “marks the 10th anniversary of the most extraordinary cultural and policy shift in recent American life” and that “the rebels who changed the welfare status quo were conservative intellectuals and officeholders.”

Oh, and I almost forgot, Congress did do one good thing in 1996—good enough that it's worth doing again. They increased the minimum wage. But strangely, nobody in the conservative media is celebrating the 10th anniversary of that.

In David Leonhardt's massive article about Sen. Obama's economic outlook, there's a revealing passage about mainstream liberal economic policy.

To understand where Obama stands, you first have to know that, for 15 years, Democratic Party economics have been defined by a struggle that took place during the start of the Clinton administration. It was the battle of the Bobs. On one side was Clinton’s labor secretary and longtime friend, Bob Reich, who argued that the government should invest in roads, bridges, worker training and the like to stimulate the economy and help the middle class. On the other side was Bob Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs executive turned White House aide, who favored reducing the deficit to soothe the bond market, bring down interest rates and get the economy moving again. Clinton cast his lot with Rubin, and to this day the first question about any Democrat’s economic outlook is often where his heart lies, with Reich or Rubin, the left or the center, the government or the market.

Liberal economic policy has a nice symmetry. Rubin, Reich- people know who they are and what they stand for. The policy world generally gravitates toward one or the other.

Liberal anti-poverty policy is not so simple. There are plenty of Rubins running around, but what passes for Reichs tend to be ideological agnostics who embrace Rubin-esque and Reich-esque policy. What do they stand for? How can they distinguish themselves from the centrists when they act like them? Most importantly, how can the debate be pushed left without clearly defined options?

Many of the folks in the center also align themselves with Rubin on fiscal policy. But it's not clear that the undefined left backs the Robert Reichs- indeed, many of them support Rubin-esque policy.

The anti-poverty left could be conceptualized in parallel with Reich. Increased intervention in markets. State investment in human and physical capital. Robust safety net programs. But because there's no Reich, this option for addressing poverty isn't clearly defined, and the debate continues to tilt right.

From one of Mark Penn's memos written as chief strategist to Hillary Clinton:

All of these articles about [Obama's] boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting it in a new light.

Save it for 2050.

It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. ....

How we could give some life to this contrast without turning negative:

Every speech should contain the line that you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century. ....

Let's explicitly own "American" in our programs, the speeches and the values. ....

A new AFL-CIO policy platform voices support for education and skill development programs. The preamble:

In the face of continuing job losses, rapid technological change, global competition and stagnating wages and benefits, today’s workers and their families—along with young workforce entrants—live with anxiety and uncertainty about their future quality of life and their prospects for good jobs and upward mobility. Yet our national government remains dangerously blind to the pressing need for greater systematic public investment in education and skill-development programs linked to economic policies that support high-wage job creation, improved living standards and stronger worker bargaining power. This neglect has weakened our economy, eroding our nation’s ability to generate and sustain middle-class jobs and compete internationally, and has threatened our national security.

To meet this challenge, our nation needs a cohesive national strategy that links substantial investment in job creation to an improved educational system and significant public resources directed toward skill-development programs. Implementing that strategy will require farsighted presidential leadership; a substantial financial commitment; a new working partnership among stakeholders in labor, business, education and government; and the kind of bipartisan comity that has been absent too long from our national life. Otherwise, the future will not be kind—either to job seekers without skills or to a nation without the will to create the workforce it needs.

From pushing the Democrats to embrace universal health care, to leading the charge against Social Security privatization, unions are acting like a force for all American workers more and more.