The CAP Poverty-Reduction Report

The Center for American Progress Task Force on Poverty releases a "national strategy to cut poverty in half" this Wednesday. Rest assured Inclusion will have plenty of commentary on the report this week. I applaud the big-picture, long-term thinking on national policy that the report is likely to demonstrate. This is something that has been missing for a long time in progressive think tank circles, as the post-Katrina response inside the beltway demonstrated. And I'm sure I'll support most of the concrete policy recommendations in the report.

But I think the decision to frame the problem that we're trying to fix as poverty and the national goal that we need to set as a poverty—reduction goal will end up being counterproductive. It's too bad this opportunity doesn't appear to have been used to examine which of the powerful alternative frames—like reducing inequality, rebuilding the middle class, and promoting social inclusion—would have been the most useful in building public support and political will for the policies that we support, and which of these frames would have been least likely to be co-opted by conservatives (as the poverty framework has been ever since Charles Murray wrote Losing Ground in the 1980s).

PS: Earlier today, I ran across this from a piece by the progressive communications experts at the Frameworks Institute, it's good advice:

When you have the option, do not state your issue as being "about poverty." So strongly connected is this issue to notions of individual responsibility and moral weakness that reframing the subject matter is the first challenge of reframing. For example, state your issue as being about education, work, education for work, expanding opportunities for work, the economy, etc. Any of these topics affords fewer negative stereotypes and better entrenched "defaults" than poverty.

PPS: The membership of the CAP Task Force is admirably diverse in terms of race, gender and ethnicity—much more diverse it must be said than most anti-poverty research organizations inside the beltway. But I couldn't help but notice a striking lack of generational diversity on the task force—I can't say for sure, but it looks to me like only one of the members, the 20-something Wizipan Garriott is under the age of 50. Which reminds me of what Mark Schmitt had to say a while back in the American Prospect about the progressive generation gap:

Not long ago, I attended a meeting of 20 or so progressive advocates and experts on a major policy issue. I looked around the room and realized that I was, I’m quite sure, the youngest person there. And that’s happened before. But I’m 43 years old. It’s fun to feel like a prodigy, but I’m not.

In other settings, such as among bloggers, I’m the oldest. But rarely, on the cusp of middle age, do I find myself in the middle of a broad range of ages, or in a room dominated by my coevals.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s rarely talked about publicly: the great progressive generation gap.

....

One has to wonder—if the task force had been more generationally diverse—including members of what Schmitt calls the "bridge generation"—would it have ended up wrapping what are likely to be excellent policy recommendations in a 1960ish War on Poverty cover?