Framing

Social insurance “consists in protecting wage-earning families which have developed standards of living from losing them, and in helping wage-earning families without standards to gain them.”

--Social Insurance: A Program of Social Reform (1910), Henry Roger Seager

I've been digging Matt's series of posts on the safety net and John's last one on whether a frame like "expand the middle class" is really all that different from one along the lines of "reduce poverty." I'm hoping to do some longer posts over the next few weeks on these matters. As a starting point, I think it's important for us to put to rest the distinction between welfare and social insurance. Conventional wisdom has it that programs like Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance are categorically different than programs like TANF, food stamps, and Medicaid. A common way of expressing this difference is that the first set of programs are “social insurance” and the second set are “means-tested public assistance” or, more pejoratively, “welfare.”

This distinction is both artificial and ill-conceived. Means-tested programs like TANF and food stamps should be thought of as a necessary part of America’s system of social insurance rather than as “welfare” programs that exist outside of, and have little in common with, that system. Like Social Security and other social insurance programs, means-tested public assistance programs protect Americans against various risks that can reduce their economic security. This essential similarity of purpose is more important that some of the design differences that exist among programs serving an income-security purpose.

In True Security: Rethinking American Social Insurance, Michael Graetz and Jerry Mashaw define social insurance as a set of programs and institutions that “cover common risks to income security across the life cycle of individuals” (45). In this conception, social insurance is defined by its core purpose—moderating the risks of income loss or inadequacy—and not by its funding mechanism or other design features. The Graetz/Mashaw project is best understood, not as a sweeping reconceptualization of social insurance, but as an attempt to develop a conception of social insurance that is more conceptually coherent and useful, and perhaps even more historically grounded, than the current conventional conception of social insurance in the United States.

In their view, the argument that social insurance programs cannot be means-tested is an “ahistorical” one that reflects a political strategy to distinguish Social Security and other programs from unpopular “welfare” programs like AFDC.

As a matter of history, protection against current low income because of defined personal or family circumstances, irrespective of past contributions or earnings, has long been a cornerstone of American social insurance arrangements. The original Social Security Act was a compromise between those who thought social insurance should be structured primarily as a protection against low income and those who saw it primarily as a protection against loss of prior economic status and wanted social insurance closely tied to workforce attachment. (62)

While the strategy of distinguishing social insurance from “welfare” may have been politically beneficial at times, Graetz and Mashaw view it as a “serious mistake.”

This artificial and ahistorical division of the social welfare world between contributory and non-contributory schemes strands crucial poverty reduction programs in political backwaters. It creates confusion in both public discourse and public perception whenever progressive benefit and contribution formulas for social insurance are proposed and discussed. This political separation poses political dangers for ‘contributory’ schemes as well. It highlights ‘individual equity’ or bank-account considerations in social insurance arrangements—represented recently by the ubiquitous calculations of each individual’s ‘money’s worth’ from Social Security—while submerging the social adequacy commitment that should be the fundamental norm in the design and defense of social insurance.

This doesn’t mean that public assistance programs are solely social insurance, or even that all public assistance programs are social insurance. While Graetz and Mashaw believe social insurance is not limited to Social Security and Medicare, their conception of social insurance as a protection against income insecurity is “considerably narrower than all the public activities that might be said to support American family income.” As an example, they note that education programs are not social insurance, since they don’t provide insurance against “a current loss of economic well-being.” Instead, such programs are more appropriately viewed as an investment in future economic opportunity. (58)

This distinction isn’t completely clear-cut. Education obtained in one’s youth, after all, does enhance income security over the life cycle. But Graetz and Mashaw argue that such a narrowing of the definition is necessary for pragmatic reasons.

If the definition is too broad, ‘insurance’ becomes a useless metaphor.... Important ideas about good program design—identifiable risks, moral hazard, adverse selection, and so forth—lose their salience. If the criminal justice system qualifies as “social insurance” (protection against loss of income or assets through theft, embezzlement, and the like), the concept fails to define a distinctive area of public policy. (57)

Social insurance also is distinct from other types of insurance, including insurance provided in markets where there is considerable government involvement or regulation. The adjective “social” is important in making this distinction. Social insurance is different from other forms of insurance because it is a “social rather than an individual (or group) contract” and is made for “the purpose of collective provision, subsidy, or regulation.”

In part II, I'll discuss a specific case—why that quintessential "welfare" program, TANF, is best thought of in social-insurance terms.

I thought I'd wrap up my posts on the safety net with a couple of points.

• Safety net language is ambiguous. Work supports are sometimes synonyms for the safety net, sometimes subsets of the safety net, and sometimes entirely different from the safety net. I've succeeded in confusing myself many times just over this basic issue of what the difference between these categories is, and it seems there's no agreement on what the difference is.

• Similarly, the values that underlie the safety net can be ambiguous and hidden beneath the surface. A lot of this hangs on definitions, and it's generally a matter of what the most persuasive value statement is. If we're talking about risk pooling, the operative value should probably be security. If it's increasing earnings or assets, opportunity and shared prosperity are probably it. If it's child development, child and family well-being make sense.
• A great deal of safety net framing is excessively focused on individuals. The "make work pay" slogan and the "work-life dilemma" are cases in point, and I'd imagine they don't encourage systems-level thinking.
• Very little narrative shapes the discussion about the safety net. But there are some good examples. I thought John's paper had a great narrative on how North Carolina's economy has changed and why this requires new policy. And Jared Bernstein's work around risk-pooling that emphasizes how "we're all in this together" is appealing too.
• Finally, not much is known about what messages work and what don't. Does the "make work pay" slogan withstand an individualistic counterargument? Do people think building up assets is about opportunity or security? I can only speculate based on the general framing literature, because I haven't seen anything that's rigorously tested these frames out. Somebody needs to see what works!

Ok, I'm done.

One of the challenges of framing the safety net is how to ground policy that directly benefits a minority of folks in univeralist terms and values. The safety net can't be special policy for "them," but in practice, it won't make an impact on most people. Taking a stab at solving this problem in the Boston Review, Bruce Western frames the growth of mass incarceration as an issue of citizenship. He argues that social inequality is a violation of the rights guaranteed by common humanity and community.

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

In the conclusion, he fleshes this idea out more.

Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral significance of the prison. “Your Honor,” he said, “years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’s vision was radically egalitarian. Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all.

Be it health care, education, or job opportunities, universal provision in any domain of public policy—and the bonds of citizenship on which that sense of universality is built—joins us to a common destiny, and might be the best chance for the redevelopment of urban schools and labor markets. If the duty of the citizen is to stay in school and go to work, then the political will to maintain good schools and promote employment is woven into the social fabric. This political logic implies that special projects targeting special populations will not do the job. If poor schools are to improve, it is more likely they will do so as a result of an effort to improve educational opportunity nationwide. If we are to promote jobs for unskilled men in the inner-city, the attempt will receive its greatest impetus from a national employment policy that aims to improve the working lives of all citizens.

He goes on to acknowledge that the day when our common citizenship and humanity is widely recognized seems far off. But every policy victory that ties our fates together will expand who's included in the mainstream community. By the same token, more special policy for special populations could make it harder to achieve larger scale change. Tactics that make sense in the short term can weaken the beliefs that favor major policy shifts.

I'm not so sure that language that explicitly addresses citizenship is the ticket- it's a bit abstract. But the basic idea seems sound. What do you think? Is this a good way to frame the safety net?

The Urban Institute this week unveiled a series of papers on how to create a new safety net for low-income families. I was going to critique the paper that introduces the series, but I think I'd only be repeating myself.

Rather, I thought I'd address something I overlooked in my earlier posts- that the safety net is consistently defined as policy for "low-income families," i.e. "the other" and "them" or people who are very different from you and me. The Urban series is a shining example of this style of defining the issue, putting the merits of the policy aside.

In addition to avoiding the traps of individualism and race, we have to make the argument that the safety net is about "us." One way to do it would be to think differently about the values that compel us to create a safety net. The predominant thinking is that it's about "well-being," the humanitarian idea that there's a level of subsistence below which nobody should fall. This segregates anti-poverty policy. It puts the poor in the same league as the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the young, etc- people whose well-being is valued per se. It's for people who are "different," the exceptions to the rule, the subjects of charity.

I'd argue that a more universal value is security, and I'd define security as controlling the chance that the institutions we rely on will fail us- that the business we work for isn't offering any good jobs, that we'll get sick without insurance, that our families won't be there to cushion our fall. We could develop a narrative that assigns responsibility to these institutions, so that all of them, collectively, as one people, should feel obligated to step in.

This frame could also address the issue of being unclear about values. Safety net policy corrects some institutional failures and mitigates the consequences of others. A different set of policies is needed to make institutions perform at a higher level and create opportunities to join the middle class. This includes better education policy, more middle class-sustaining jobs, better economic management, etc.

What would it mean in terms of policy? Take jobs, for instance. We could eliminate many extremely bad jobs by raising the minimum wage, promoting unionization in low-wage sectors, and investing in the skills of the low-wage workforce. While this may not create jobs that support a middle-class lifestyle, it would help reduce the chance that people will be forced into poverty-wage jobs. At the same time, it may be nearly impossible to eliminate all bad jobs. For instance, even if a job is paying $9 an hour, you may only get to work 25 hours a week. Programs like the EITC help mitigate the consequences of the institutional failures that we can't eliminate.

So what role does work play in this framing? And what about the safety net as an opportunity "springboard?" I'll try to tackle this in my next post.

I think I've blogged before about my preference for a term like "economic recovery" rather than the more technocratic-sounding "economic stimulus." A new message memo from pollsters Hart and Associations suggests recovery is also more resonant with the public than stimulus:

The survey results indicate that voters do not respond well to “stimulus” as an economic priority, while “economic recovery” does resonate.

I see two ways the safety net is legitimized by work. The first is in the context of fairness and a social contract based on work, and the second is in how the policy enables people to go to work.

"Making work pay" is a slogan that has a great deal of political currency in DC. The thinking behind it goes something like this: we reformed welfare and put everybody to work, but didn’t end poverty because people took low-wage jobs. So safety net policy aims to make low-wage work pay through targeted benefits and the tax system. Low-income folks are holding up their end of the bargain, so society owes them.

What’s wrong with this frame? First, it blurs the line between job quality and the safety net, and I think confuses the public. It's not clear what making work pay is all about. Are we creating a safety net to guard to ensure income security? Or give poor people better job opportunities? Or is this about meeting people’s needs, AKA family and child well-being? It could be all these things, and I’ve seen it framed in all these ways. This lack of clarity and complexity makes it hard on the public to categorize, interpret and judge the policy.

And second, I’m not convinced that the social contract aspect of the framing appeals to an American public that still thinks poor people are lazy and out of work. Welfare reform has not changed the individualistic perception that the poor are shiftless. I’d anticipate the debate to continue to focus on whether poor people work or not, instead of a quid pro quo arrangement between the working poor and society.

Work is also central to the argument that safety net policy promotes opportunity. The policy theory is that the safety net can enable people with families to go to work; similarly, by increasing the returns to work, it makes it worthwhile for poor individuals to become employed. That’s all well and good, but this argument too blurs the lines between security, opportunity and family well-being. And instead of tilting at windmills and denying individualistic assumptions, it tries to co-opt them. It essentially admits that people don’t work by choice- that the incentives they face encourage idleness and punish work, and that they don’t work because they would rather take care of their kids.

In the left-wing version of the story, the governmental role needs to expand to promote work; in the right-wing version, it shrinks. You can see right-wingers trying to "fix the parents," who should have known better than to have to face the work-parenting dilemma. Liberals will be, once again, on defense.

So to summarize, this framing relies on a weak argument for fairness and is stuck in an individualistic frame. It will not get people thinking about systemic causes (other than policy failures) or the public’s responsibility for addressing poverty. So what could? In the next post I’ll look at a recent attempt to reframe the safety net by the Urban Institute.

Over the next few days or so, I'm going write about how to frame the anti-poverty safety net. While a great deal of research has been done on how to frame issues around programs that expand economic opportunities, much less attention has been given to the safety net. I wanted to explore the ways groups frame the safety net now, critique them, and make some suggestions for new ways forward. And being that I'm a relative newcomer to the anti-poverty world, I'd appreciate your comments and thoughts as I try to make sense of very complex stuff with a long history.

I thought I would start by critiquing the "work supports" frame, the most common way anti-poverty folks frame safety net policy. Sometimes, work support language justifies policy in the context of meeting basic needs and promoting family well-being. The National Center for Childen in Poverty defines work supports as follows:

“Work support” benefits—such as earned income tax credits, child care subsidies, health insurance, and food stamps—can help families close the gap between low earnings and basic expenses.

Let's break this down a bit. NCCP is defining the problem as inadequate income. The solution is to raise incomes or lower the cost of basic expenses. The payoff is that families will get to meet basic needs. So where's the value statement? No mention is made of the values that shape our understanding of income- like security, opportunity and independence. Rather, meeting basic needs seems to be an implicit placeholder for child and family well-being. I plan on returning to this topic later, but for now, let's leave it at the point that neither the term nor its definition leads with any of these values.

There is also no attempt to explain who or what is responsible for the gap between earnings and expenses. There’s no reference to the economy, the institutions that produce racial inequality, or even barriers to work. Neither is there any mention of the values that assign responsibility to the public for addressing social problems, like interdependence and public responsibility. I’m speculating here, but the political message I take from it is that society is not responsible for creating the problem, nor will it gain anything by solving it. We're compelled to support solutions out of compassion and generosity. It is, in sum, the “sympathy for the poor” frame that generally does badly in focus groups.

Work also legitimizes the safety net - it supports work by either “making work pay” or enabling and encouraging people to go to work. I’ll address this in my next post.

I've been reading the book The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, & the United States, and there's a chapter on deregulation that shows the dangers of pursuing progressive policy goals within a conservative frame.

The short version of the story is that in the 1970s, some liberals took a critical look at the regulatory state and decided that rather than protecting the public, it was in effect subsidizing companies that didn't need it (contrary to what I thought, it was liberals that deregulated certain industries in the 1970s). Ralph Nader lead the movement from the left, but as it turned out he had a lot in common with a pre-presidential Ronald Reagan. Take this mind-exploding exchange from 1975:

Reagan: I agree with you about business and the fact that business is responsible in part for going along with regulations that finally have led to some advantages for them such as preventing entry of new businesses into the field, competition, price fixing, and so forth. I still think those businesses are wrong. And I think ti's led to what I call an interlocking bureaucracy. That the bureaucracy in government is now being matched by a bureaucracy employed by business to do business with the bureaucracy here and now you have two bureaucracies feeding on each and neither one of them wants the other to go away because then they wouldn't have a job.
Nader:If you make that your campaign theme next year you'd be making a major contribution to the American dialogue.
Reagan: Well. I-
Nader: Speaking out against corporate socialism and government subsidies of big business where big corporations are so big they can't be allowed to fail; only small businesses can go bankrupt, but if you're big like Lockheed and those other companies you can go to Washington instead....Massive outflow of the taxpayer's revenue into the coffers of these giant corporations...people who say they're conservatives do not speak out enough against monopolistic practices, highly concentrated industry; they don't speak for the enforcement of the antitrust laws for beefing up the Justice Depeartment's budget; they don't speak against the massive, inflated contracts and subsidies that pour out of Washington which makes up the bulk of government...And if you speak out against that, politics will be enriched.

Nader then lists the parts of the federal government he wanted to see eliminated. Indeed, Reagan and Nader agree that the solution is to eliminate government, rather than reduce corporate influence. Their biggest disagreements were probably over which programs to eliminate.

This movement kicked off a sweep of deregulation that didn't benefit consumers. As the author puts it, "Public opinion in favor of the populist consumers' movement, and this movement's late-1960s to mid-1970s salience...lit the torch under the deregulatory effort. Executive control of deregulation and the 'frame ambiguity' of the cultural Left allowed Ronald Reagan to shift this effort in favor of business."

There's a lot to unpack here. I think the whole episode is analogous to the anti-poverty debate. Anti-poverty advocates, many of which are Nader's contemporaries and are set back by the same "frame ambiguity," construct their arguments according to a progressive understanding of the conservative impulse to do charity, which John thoughtfully wrote about. Their case for reducing poverty centers around a magnanimous donor (the public) and a deserving recipient (the poor). Conservatives easily reinterpret this framing to support their policy goals.

But I also think it shows that progressives should be careful when we frame policy that unfairly benefits corporations and the rich, something that got considerable attention when Bear Stearns was rescued. 2008 is a different political environment than 1975, but then again, the public has extremely negative feelings about government. Anti-government rhetoric from the left could be wrapped around conservative policy yet again.

One of the good things about the Half In Ten campaign is that it doesn't just cast poverty as a social issue. That's not to say poverty isn't a social issue- just that it has economic impacts. Right now, it seems smart to me to play up the relationship between poverty and economic growth, because the economy is first on everyone's mind. Half in Ten uses the "from poverty to prosperity" language, and it promotes a paper that makes the case that reducing poverty grows the economy. This point can't be made loudly enough, and it's definitely a good thing it's being made.

I just wonder if they couldn't do a better job making the argument. First, they claim that everyone benefits by raising the productivity of workers at the bottom of the labor market. But productivity gains are a necessary but insufficient condition of widespread wage gains. Who knows where the gains would go? Second, some growth comes from a reduction in crime and the assorted dysfunction that poverty fosters. All this may be true, but I wonder if framing it this way seems like rewarding bad behavior. Some research suggests that people want to punish deviant behavior even if it conflicts with their self-interest.

And most importantly, there's no meta-frame. Jared Bernstein suggests two ways to frame economic policy: the you're-your-own frame and the we're-all-in-this-together frame. It's not clear which one the campaign embraces. The authors argue for policies that would ensure shared prosperity- they propose a higher minimum wage, better collective bargaining rules, and a bigger and more inclusive EITC. But they're framed as a way to raise the productivity of low-skill workers and their families. This focuses attention on individual low-income folks, their contributions to the general welfare, and what they deserve. Given the stereotypes about shiftless low-income people, I doubt this thinking would lead to a productive conversation about poverty and the economy. I also worry that appealing so directly to economic self-interest gets people thinking about what they would gain as individuals. People may default to thinking in the conservative you're-on-your-own frame.

Framing poverty reduction as economic growth promotion requires a full embrace of we're-all-in-this-together economics, I think. What we want is an economy that reflects the belief that we as a nation rise and fall together, where shared prosperity creates a virtuous cycle of shared growth. From within this frame, it's much more appropriate and effective to promote the shared benefits of increased productivity and even reduced crime.

In a previous post, I noted that the Half in Ten Campaign's website was, well, not so hot—particularly its use of images that seem likely to reinforce popular stereotypes and misconceptions about poverty (no white men, mostly African-Americans, etc). They've recently added some new images, including a white male construction worker, but I still end up being decidedly non-enthusiastic about the site.

The fact that the newly added white dude is the only person clearly presented as a worker is part of the problem—why not a white guy protesting in favor of increasing the minimum wage and a black guy in a hard hard? they do exist, after all—but even if the images accurately represented poverty in the United States, they might not help Half in Ten's case.

To see why, compare Half in Ten's site with the site for ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History. ONE avoids using any of the standard images used to depict global poverty in developing countries. My guess is that they made a very conscious choice to avoid using images that evoke a sympathy/charity frame, or what's been called an "individual victim" frame. Instead what you get are images (and text) that position ONE as a public campaign, one that calls on public leaders to do more to fight the social phenomenon of global poverty. Most of the photographs on the ONE site are of people in the United States campaigning to end global poverty. (I think the photos are mostly submitted by visitors—the site makes great use of flickr, facebook and other social networking sites). By contrast, the bulk of images used on the Half in Ten site seem likely to evoke sympathy, charity, and the individual frame, rather than public action.

This discussion of Shanto Iyengar's research on media depictions of poverty, from a Frameworks brief, suggests that framing and images that reinforce an "individual victim" understanding of poverty will likely be counterproductive:

"To identify the frames in which television news embeds the issue of poverty," Shanto Iyengar reprised an earlier analysis of 191 poverty-related news reports. Using an experimental method that allows scholars to empirically compare the impact of specific news reports on political attitudes, Iyengar and his colleagues exposed viewers to poverty reporting that featured either societal frames or individual victim frames. After exposure to a newscast in which only one story addressed poverty, the informants were asked "In your opinion, what are the most important causes of poverty?" and "If you were asked to prescribe ways to reduce poverty, what would you suggest?"

The societal frames - which Iyengar also calls "thematic" - featured "information bearing on national trends (e.g., the poverty rate, the number of states experiencing significant increases in hunger, changes in the government's definition of poverty, etc.) or matters of public policy (the Reagan administration's proposals to curtail various social welfare programs, allegations of fraud in welfare programs, etc.) These are essentially...stories in which the object of the coverage is abstract and impersonal."

"In the individual-victim frame, by contrast, poverty is covered in terms of personal experience; the viewer is provided a particular instance of an individual or family living under economic duress." This type of coverage, which Iyengar has termed "episodic" is the dominant form of news coverage for most social issues. In fact, in a recent review of more than 10,000 stories of foreign affairs on five local television stations, a report for the FrameWorks Institute found episodic stories were 97% of the coverage. As Iyengar concludes, "poverty is clearly an individual-level rather than a societal phenomenon."

The problem with the over-representation of this kind of coverage is that episodic coverage tends to reinforce notions of individual responsibility. "When poverty was described in societal terms, individuals assigned responsibility to societal factors - failed government programs, the political climate, economic conditions, and so on. Conversely, when news coverage of poverty dwelled on particular instances of poor people, individuals were more apt to hold the poor causally responsible."

Iyengar also found that "race appears to be a meaningful contextual cue when Americans think about poverty....When the poor person was white, causal and treatment responsibility for poverty were predominantly societal; when the poor person was black, causal and treatment responsibility were more individual." Iyengar discounts the easy explanation that the informants were "anti-black"; rather, he suggests, "the observed racial differences fluctuated with the particular victim (suggesting) that race more effectively evoked stored knowledge concerning responsibility for poverty..."

Iyengar concludes that "the national debate over social welfare policy has traditionally been formulated in terms of specific beneficiary groups such as children, women, minorities, or the disabled. The results reported here suggest that framing welfare programs in terms of particular beneficiary groups will weaken rather than strengthen public support for welfare."

What Iyengar cautions against—formulating the national debate in terms of "specific beneficiary groups such as children, women, minorities, or the disabled"—isn't what CAP and Half in Ten intend, but the design of their website will leave many viewers with the impression that the debate is being formulating in that way.

In a thoughtful piece, CAP's Joy Moses compares the 1968 Poor People's Campaign with the Half in Ten anti-poverty campaign (kicked off on the 40th anniversary of the Poor People's Campaign demonstration in DC):

America is not reeling [like it was in 1968] from the loss of some of its greatest leaders or functioning in an environment of ongoing political unrest in the form of riots and protests. However, there are some notable similarities between the 1968 and 2008 campaigns to end poverty; both derive their goals from the following basic principles:

-There is no justification for poverty in America, and we should make every effort to eradicate it.

-Poverty isn’t a black problem, a white problem, a southern problem, or a northern problem; it is an everybody problem that requires a joint effort to eradicate it.

-Increasing worker wages is key to eliminating poverty.

The two campaigns were also born from similar political contexts. Both anti-poverty campaigns were formed in the shadow of war. The Vietnam and Iraq wars accumulated significant costs to the American people, negatively affecting domestic spending and the quality of social programs. Both campaigns also began as the nation prepared for important presidential elections that would ultimately have a great effect on a whole host of issues, including the effort to end poverty.

The similarities that tie these efforts together may be somewhat discouraging. It is apparent that the 1968 effort did not end poverty and the concerns about wages and income for low-income people still exist to such a degree that Half In Ten became necessary.

In 2008, certain factors should lead to more positive results. By some accounts, the nation has been embracing a political agenda focused on change. Half In Ten organizers have developed vast grassroots networks throughout the country and the capacity for valuable research and federal and state-level policy development. The organizations involved are building valuable partnerships with one another as well as with other leading advocacy groups, faith-based organizations, think tanks, and academics focused on the goal of ending poverty. And John Edwards, a significant poverty advocate, has joined the team.

There's an additional important difference between '68 and '08, one that could lead to more negative results for the Half in Ten Campaign. America in the mid-to-late 1960s was still in "The Great Compression"—a nearly three decade period of relatively shared prosperity when economic inequality fell and incomes rose across the board, with the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution gaining more than the very top. By contrast, today's America is much more unequal in economic terms. Income gains for the top 20 percent have far outpaced the modest gains for the bottom half. Since 2000, median household income has actually declined, despite overall economic growth.

This difference in economic context calls for a different framing for the Half in Ten campaign. Instead of a narrow and literal anti-poverty frame, what's needed is a broader and more populist economic one. Such a frame would call for a new social contract to expand and strengthen the middle class, and view the working class and middle class as allies in a movement for greater economic security and opportunity for everyone.

In his 1995 book Middle Class Dreams, pollster Stanley Greenberg notes that:

... In the end, the identification of the Great Society with the poor alone marginalized the beneficiaries, dissipated public support, and blocked any broad, enduring alignment of black and white support for dependable social insurance.

Moses argues that the development of "vast grassroots networks throughout the country and the capacity for valuable research and federal and state-level policy development" will make Half in Ten more successful than the War on Poverty and the Poor People's Campaign, but I'm not persuaded. If grassroots networks and research were what it took to make progressive policy happen, we'd have seen a lot more progressive policy—and a lot more progress on reducing poverty—over the last couple of decades.

What linguists call conceptual metaphor refers to the "understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain [the "target domain"] in terms of another" [the "source domain"]. Here's a striking recent example in which John Wagner, Director of the California Social Services Department, manages to use two metaphors derived from animal husbandry—"wean" and "carrot and stick"—to describe Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposal to cut Temporary Assistance income supplements:

The assistance boost would apply to people whose incomes are low enough to qualify for food stamps but have already been weaned from the CalWorks program, which provides temporary financial assistance to needy families, Wagner said.

....

Along with the carrot of more assistance for some working families, the stick could be strengthened as well. California currently cannot cease all assistance from families who fail to comply with work or other activity requirements, one of only a handful of states with such lenient policies, Wagner said.

While the "safety net" metaphor has limitations, it's at least a better and more respectful metaphor to use in discussing programs for the adult people Wagner is referring to. Parents trying to get by on a low-wage job are walking a tightrope. Programs like Temporary Assistance provide both a "balancing pole" that makes it possible to continue moving forward and a safety net that catches them if they become unemployed. Even better, if less metaphorical, is the concept of social insurance, which has the added benefit of suggesting a collective endeavor to provide protection against labor market risks.

Hopefully I'm not piling on, but I'd like to add to Shawn's comments about the Half In Ten Campaign.

Both the CAP report and this campaign are pushing policy that would not only help people currently in poverty, but would help prevent folks in the middle class from slipping into it. As a result, "poverty will be cut in half." A more strategic way to say this is to call for expanding the middle class by making opportunity widely available and providing enough economic security to sustain a broadened middle class. This is how the Drum Major Institute's middleclass.org defines their issues/constituency. Basically, both CAP and DMI are talking about the same stuff, but in different terms.

DMI's frame is more effective in part because it reflects the apirational side of American political culture. This has been persistently documented. Very few people identify as poor. Rather, low-income folks see themselves as making their way to the middle class. People on the edge of poverty see themselves as moving toward stability. Nobody likes being called poor, as Shawn said. Plus, everybody supports the idea of helping people move up. More than 85 percent of the public thinks society should make sure "everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed." That language could be something you'd want to lead with, but what do I know?

Security is also an effective frame. People who've already made it to the middle class value security- health security, job security, child care security, etc. Clearly policies in the CAP proposal would achieve these goals. Yet it's not highlighted and nothing really articulates how folks in the middle class would benefit. On the website, we see pictures of sad-eyed children, not abandoned factories.

And I'd echo what Shawn said about the ONE campaign's inclusion of the "we're all in this together" thought. A campaign like this has to make an argument about whose role it is to address the problem. Is it the individual's or society's problem? Government or charity to the rescue? I think the language of interdependence and solidarity make an effective argument for a strong governmental role, so there's definitely a viable option to use. But there's little mention of it, and I'm afraid that people will default to thinking that addressing poverty is a matter of individual responsibility.

Which brings us to the core question: who is this campaign supposed to inspire and persuade? Because it's not low-income folks who're trying to get to the middle class. And it's not folks who're losing their foothold in the middle class.

The sad irony here is that the policy proposed is politically savvy. It bridges class divides that for so long have stymied progress. And now is exactly the right time for a proposal like this, just when everyone's feeling like the American dream is slipping away. But its ideology and language do not address today's political moment or American culture, and as a result we may miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Earlier this week, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, ACORN, the Coalition on Human Needs, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights kicked off the political arm of a campaign to expand the middle class by nearly 20 million people over the next decade. Well, they don't actually it that, but that's the basic idea.

The campaign's new website notes that the campaign "will focus on the issues facing the poor and middle class in America, building an effective constituency to advocate for specific policy changes." The part about focusing on issues facing the middle class is a notable addition and something that was lacking from CAP's earlier report on poverty.

It's a good sign that John Edwards is chairing the campaign. Edwards could bring the kind of partisan and populist voice to this work that has been lacking on the national level. As Larry Bartels' new book suggests, advancing the cause of economic justice in the next decade will require a Democrat in the White House and more partisanship rather than less.

Edwards should help ensure that the campaign doesn't become a kind of mushy attempt to find "common ground" between Republicans and Democrats on economic justice. The reality is that there really isn't any common ground on economic justice right now or in the near future at the national level given the conservative extremism of the national Republican party and their allies. (I say this as a matter of fact rather than advocacy—there are thoughtful efforts by progressive R's to change this, but it's a decades-long project, not a short-term one). The biggest challenge for the CAP campaign isn't finding common ground between Republicans and Democrats, it's making sure that conservative Democrats don't obstruct efforts to expand the middle class (which is one of the reasons, by the way, that this campaign needs to be framed as a campaign to expand the middle class).

While I'm a fan of the policy ideas put forward by the campaign, I'm less enthusiastic about much of the communcations aspect of the campaign. The name of the campaign, "Half in Ten," while easy to remember, sounds more like a technocratic goal than a statement that combines vision and values. This can be demonstrated by comparing it with ONE: The Campaign to Make [Global] Poverty History and Green for All's goal to "build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

ONE is both a values statement (we're in this together, "united as ONE") and a true vision statement ("make poverty history"). Similarly, Green for All's goal combines vision and values—a strong and inclusive economy—in a slogan that clearly positions poverty as an economic issue. By contrast, "Half in Ten" has no obvious values content and will sound to some like "give us half a loaf in 10 years." This may be fine as a compromise governmental goal adopted by political leaders, but may be less effective as an advocacy slogan. I wish the wealthy backers of estate tax repeal had rallied under the banner of reducing the estate tax by 50 percent in 10 years, but unfortunately they went for the whole loaf and were much more successful as a result. Of course, a 50 percent reduction in poverty in ten years would be a fantastic accomplishment, but the slogan the campaign, like all good advertising, doesn't need to be so literal.

A related communications issue. Most of the images used on the campaign's website seem likely to reinforce popular stereotypes and misconceptions about people living below the poverty line. The banner of the site rotates a set of photographs that appear to be: a black child, a white mother hugging a child, an elderly white woman in a wheelchair, a black man, and a black woman (the classroom setting suggests that she may be an immigrant). None of the pictures portray people who are clearly at work or in work clothes.

A final point that involves framing in a deeper sense: while it's positive that the campaign "will focus on the issues facing the poor and middle class in America, building an effective constituency to advocate for specific policy changes", they need to go one step further and describe the cross-class constituency they're trying to build as "the working class and middle class." Where I grew up in the tundra of rural Minnesota, there were plenty of people living below the poverty line, but if you called one of them a "poor person" you would probably get either a punch in the face or an insulted glare. The same goes for the hundreds of clients I represented as a legal services attorney in west central Minnesota. Most people with incomes under even the miserly federal poverty line describe themselves as working class or middle class rather than "poor." The descriptions used to describe people—and how they describe themselves—change considerably over time. Negroes, paupers, and, increasingly, homosexual, are examples of terms that have been replaced in general public conversation or are in the process of being replaced. Poor people is another term in need of such evolution.

The New Republic's John Judis has an instructive piece on race in American politics today. This part about how Obama can overcome racial resentment has some bearing on the poverty and inequality debate.

Can Obama surmount these obstacles? If the strong version of Mendelberg's thesis is correct, then the very fact that Obama is African American will undercut any appeals to racial fears or resentments. And, if elections were held in the manner of the Iowa caucus, where voters publicly debate their positions and where Obama won substantial white working class support, then Mendelberg's stronger thesis might well prove true. But elections are held in the privacy of a voting booth, where a voter can give voice to fears and resentments without danger of being heard. Obama may be able to sway some white voters to his side by drawing attention to race, but probably not enough to fully compensate for the disadvantage he faces.

If addressing racial resentments directly is not the answer, what is? As Mendelberg also suggests, it's changing the subject--doing what the Republicans of the 1870s and the Democrats of the 1990s did. This year, that means diverting voters' attention from the politics of race to the plight of the economy and the continuing quagmire in Iraq.

In the end, the lesson of political psychology for Democrats is not to avoid nominating black candidates. It is simply to understand that America's racial history continues to influence the calculations of voters--sometimes near the forefronts of their minds, sometimes in the deep recesses of their unconscious. For liberals, acknowledging these obstacles is the first step to blunting them.

Similarly, just having the discussion about "the poor" and what their obligations are is a minefield. Like clockwork the conversation turns to how to motivate poor people to become less dependent. Government programs are put on defense. Why? The reality is, a huge population believes in the racist and individualistic idea that the poor are shiftless, and there are limits to the utility of calling out racism and selfishness for what it is. Changing the subject to the economy, opportunity and security for all, and/or national solidarity are necessary and complimentary ways to go.

There are justifiable fears that those frames, however, are too narrow. Every frame should be examined for what it includes and excludes. If it excludes policy that's desired and viable, it's not worth it. But what viable policies would be excluded? Policies that are perceived as too targeted might not fit, but these are the same policies that frames being used now have failed to move on the national stage.

I would concede that the poverty frame is more inclusive behind the scenes. Targeted programs are viable if the action stays where a poverty frame may still do some good. Indeed, many targeted programs by their very nature are small enough to not require national mobiliatization and persuasion. This is where the anti-poverty world is at its best- this is what it was built to do.

Certain popular programs also don't seem to need to be reframed. SCHIP and the minimum wage, for example, can receive national attention and be extremely popular. Last year, when these policies were more or less the Democratic domestic agenda, no real attempt to reframe the debate proved necessary.

But in general, the poverty frame is far more exclusive on the national stage. Policy will not reach scale unless inequality and poverty become national issues once again. But if we bring social problems into the light of day, we have to grapple with the racial divide and American individualism- two extremely powerful ideas that militate towards retrenchment and perserving the status quo, and that the poverty frame reinforces.

Like Obama on race, we will have to change the subject so we're not talking about individualism or race. It's probably no secret that I like FDR and Obama's language the best but there are many other options.