Without screaming at me (gulp) can I get some responses to this concern:

The Problem

Poverty Rising: There are nearly 37 million poor Americans. Most Americans living in poverty work, but still cannot afford to make ends meet.

Minimum Wage is Not Enough: Even when a parent works full-time earning minimum wage and EITC and food stamps are factored into their income, families are still $1,550 below the federal poverty line because of the flat-lined minimum wage.
Barack Obama's Plan
Expand Access to Jobs

* Help Americans Grab a Hold of and Climb the Job Ladder: Obama will invest $1 billion over five years in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Americans succeed in the workforce.
* Create a Green Jobs Corps: Obama will create a program to directly engage disadvantaged youth in energy efficiency opportunities to strengthen their communities, while also providing them with practical skills in this important high-growth career field.
* Improve Transportation Access to Jobs: As president, Obama will work to ensure that low-income Americans have transportation access to jobs. Obama will double the federal Jobs Access and Reverse Commute program to ensure that additional federal public transportation dollars flow to the highest-need communities and that urban planning initiatives take this aspect of transportation policy into account.
* Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Supports: Obama will work to ensure that ex-offenders have access to job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling, and employment opportunities. Obama will also create a prison-to-work incentive program and reduce barriers to employment.

Make Work Pay for All Americans

* Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit: Obama will increase the number of working parents eligible for EITC benefits, increase the benefits available to parents who support their children through child support payments, increase benefits for families with three or more children, and reduce the EITC marriage penalty, which hurts low-income families.
* Create a Living Wage: Obama will raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing.
* Provide Tax Relief: Obama will provide all low and middle-income workers a $500 Making Work Pay tax credit to offset the payroll tax those workers pay in every paycheck. Obama will also eliminate taxes for seniors making under $50,000 per year.

Strengthen Families

* Promote Responsible Fatherhood: Obama will sign into law his Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act to remove some of the government penalties on married families, crack down on men avoiding child support payments, and ensure that payments go to families instead of state bureaucracies.
* Support Parents with Young Children: Obama will expand the highly-successful Nurse-Family Partnership to all 570,000 low-income, first-time mothers each year. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to low-income expectant mothers and their families.
* Expand Paid Sick Days: Today, three-out-of-four low-wage workers have no paid sick days. Obama supports guaranteeing workers seven paid sick days per year.

Increase the Supply of Affordable Housing

* Create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund: Obama will create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund to develop affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods.
* Fully Fund the Community Development Block Grant: Obama will fully fund the Community Development Block Grant program and engage with urban leaders across the country to increase resources to the highest-need Americans.

Tackle Concentrated Poverty

* Establish 20 Promise Neighborhoods: Obama will create 20 Promise Neighborhoods in areas that have high levels of poverty and crime and low levels of student academic achievement in cities across the nation. The Promise Neighborhoods will be modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone, which provides a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth violence prevention efforts and after-school activities, to an entire neighborhood from birth to college.
* Ensure Community-Based Investment Resources in Every Urban Community: Obama will work with community and business leaders to identify and address the unique economic development barriers of every major metropolitan area. Obama will provide additional resources to the federal Community Development Financial Institution Fund, the Small Business Administration and other federal agencies, especially to their local branch offices, to address community needs.
* Invest in Rural Areas: Obama will invest in rural small businesses and fight to expand high-speed Internet access. He will improve rural schools and attract more doctors to rural areas.

A National Goal: End Poverty Within 30 Years

"Restoring our moral authority means leading by example and making clear that the hard challenges don't frighten us. There is no better opportunity than the challenge of poverty – the great moral issue of our time." -- John Edwards

In a speech at the National Press Club, former Sen. John Edwards called poverty "the great moral issue of our time" and challenged our country to cut it by a third in a decade and end it within 30 years. To get there, he has proposed major new initiatives to reward work, break up high-poverty neighborhoods, help families save, and encourage families to act responsibly. In his vision of a "Working Society," everyone who is able to work will be expected to work and rewarded for working. Edwards also called on communities to discourage the reckless behavior that threatens the future of many young people.

End Poverty by 2036: Edwards believes that ending poverty should be a goal our nation actively pursues. A national goal will rally support for the cause and help us measure our progress. In 1999, Tony Blair announced a 20-year goal to end child poverty in Great Britain and he has already reduced child poverty by 17 percent. Today, Edwards called for a national effort to:

* Cut poverty by one third within a decade, lifting 12 million Americans out of poverty by 2016.
* End poverty within 30 years, lifting 37 million Americans out of poverty by 2036.

Reform the Poverty Measure: The poverty measure excludes necessities like taxes, health care, child care and transportation. It also fails to count some forms of aid including tax credits, food stamps, Medicaid, and subsidized housing. The National Academy of Science has recommended improvements that would increase the count of people in poverty by more than 1 million. Edwards believes we need to measure poverty honestly, evaluate our performance, and hold politicians accountable for policies that change the number of people suffering hardship. He supports revisions along the lines recommended by NAS.


Creating a Working Society

Edwards has outlined a Working Society initiative to lift 12 million Americans out of poverty in a decade and beat poverty over the next 30 years. In the Working Society, everyone who is able to work hard will be expected to work and, in turn, be rewarded for it. The initiative includes major new policies in the areas of work, housing, education, debt and savings, and family responsibility.
Rewarding Work:

* Make Work Pay: Edwards will increase the reward for working by raising the minimum wage to at least $9.50 an hour by 2012 and then indexing it, tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for adults without children and cutting the EITC marriage penalty. In 2001, a $1 increase in the minimum wage alone would have lifted an estimated 900,000 people out of poverty.
* Create One Million Stepping Stone Jobs: Every American should have the chance to work their way out of poverty, but some willing workers cannot find jobs because of where they live, a lack of experience or skills, or other obstacles, like a criminal record. Edwards will create a million short-term jobs to help individuals move into permanent work.
* Create Opportunity in Rural America: Nearly 90 percent of America's poorest counties are rural. Edwards will invest more in rural community colleges, link training to actual business needs, and support rural small business centers.
* Strengthen Labor Laws: Union membership can be the difference between a poverty-wage job and middle-class security. Federal law promises workers the right to choose a union, but the law is poorly enforced, full of loopholes, and routinely violated by employers. Edwards supports the Employee Free Choice Act to give workers a real choice in whether to form a union.
* Enforce Workplace Protections: To help protect workers, Edwards will create a new Labor taskforce to target the industries with the worst abuses of minimum wage and overtime laws. He will step up enforcement of the misclassification of employees as independent contractors and strengthen workplace safety rules.


Overhaul Housing Policy:

* Create a Million New Housing Vouchers: Our current housing policies concentrate low-income families together, isolating willing workers from entry-level jobs and children from good schools. Edwards will create a million vouchers over five years to help low-income families move to better neighborhoods. At the same time, he will phase out housing projects that tie families to certain locations and are often lower quality and more expensive than private sector alternatives.
* Revitalize Devastated Neighborhoods: Edwards believes that it is better to invest in struggling neighborhoods than abandon them. He will reform and expand the HOPE VI program to replace dilapidated housing in areas of concentrated poverty.

Fight Abusive Lenders and Help Working Families Save:

* Create New Work Bonds: Edwards proposed a new tax credit to help low-income, working Americans save for the future. The credit would match savings up to $500 per year.
* Expand Access to Bank Accounts: As many as 28 million Americans don't have bank accounts. Edwards will subsidize bank accounts for working families.
* Defend Homeowners against Predatory Mortgages and Foreclosure: Edwards will pass a strong national law to prohibit the worst abuses in the mortgage market. The law will strengthen underwriting standards to ensure that borrowers receive affordable loans suited to their means and reach non-bank lenders and mortgage brokers. To help the estimated 2.2 million families already facing foreclosure, Edwards will create a Home Rescue Fund to help families get into more affordable mortgages and let families shed excess mortgage debt that exceeds their home's value through bankruptcy.
* Protect Families from Abusive Financial Products: Families need someone on their side to help them get a fair deal from lenders and investment companies. Edwards will create a new Family Savings and Credit Commission to protect consumers. It will review all financial services products marketed to consumers and oversee all types of financial institutions, whether chartered under federal or state law.
* Limiting Irresponsible Credit Card Practices: Edwards will restore balance in the credit card market through a Borrower's Security Act that creates a late payment grace period, limits penalty interest rates to new purchases, and ends the practice of universal default.
* Banning the Most Abusive Payday Loans: After the Pentagon concluded that exploitive payday loans undermined military readiness, Congress capped interest rates on payday and other loans to military families at 36 percent, a cutoff that many states use to prevent loan sharking. Edwards will extend this cap to all payday loans, which now average over 300 percent APR. He will also encourage states, local non-profits and responsible lenders to offer low- or no-interest emergency loans.


Strengthening Our Schools:

* Strengthen Public Schools: Edwards proposed expanding access to preschool programs, investing more in teacher pay and training to attract good teachers where we need them most, and strengthening high schools with a more challenging curriculum.
* Promote Economic Diversity: Our nation has two school systems, segregated by race and economic status. While not a substitute either for racial integration or improving schools in every neighborhood, Edwards will promote economic diversity within school districts and across district lines by giving bonuses to middle-class schools enrolling low-income students and double current federal magnet schools funding to attract middle-class suburban students to high-poverty urban neighborhoods.
* Create Second-Chance Schools for High School Dropouts: As many as one-third of all students drop out of school, and the rates are even worse for poor and minority students. Large majorities of recent dropouts regret their decision. Edwards will create second-chance schools to help former dropouts get back on track.
* Expand College Opportunity: Edwards will enact a College for Everyone program to pay public-college tuition, books and fees for students who agree to work part-time during their first year at a school. Additional student aid can make the greatest difference in the first year of college.


Support Responsible Families:

* Encourage and Reward Responsibility from Fathers: Welfare reform required mothers to work and helps them find jobs, but it failed to do the same for fathers. Edwards will help fathers find work, require them to help support their children, and increase child support collections by more than $8 billion over the next decade and use those payments to benefit children.
* Fight Teen Pregnancy: The U.S. has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world. Edwards believes we should have more support for teenagers struggling to beat the odds.
* Home Visits for New Parents: Home visits improve prenatal health and the quality of care-giving after birth. Children receiving nurse visits are cognitively more advanced, have fewer behavioral problems, and are less likely to be abused or neglected. John Edwards will invest in home visits by registered nurses to low-income new parents, providing matching grants to states to serve 50,000 families.
* Invest in Family Literacy: Thirty million American adults have very limited literacy skills; the children of functionally illiterate parents are twice as likely to be illiterate themselves. John Edwards will restore funding for family literacy programs, which address the educational needs of both parents and children, and give them the support they deserve.

Recent Articles About Ending Poverty

Edwards Unveils New Policies For Fighting Widespread Hunger Among America's Families
Nov 21, 2007
Edwards Statement On Growing Problem Of Hunger In America
Nov 19, 2007
Edwards Statement On New Census Data On Poverty In America
Aug 28, 2007
Fighting For One America Tour - Work & Responsibility
Aug 15, 2007
On Day Three Of "Fighting For One America" Tour, Edwards Outlines Plan To Reward Work And Help Iowa Families Get Ahead
Aug 15, 2007
Upon Conclusion Of Road To One America Tour, Edwards Challenges Bush To Visit Impoverished Areas Of The Country
Jul 19, 2007
Building One America with Healthy Families and Communities
Jul 18, 2007
As "Road To One America" Tour Continues, Edwards Unveils Plan To Promote Economically Diverse Schools
Jul 17, 2007
Building One America By Creating Opportunity
Jul 17, 2007
Building One America By Rewarding Work
Jul 16, 2007
Building One America Starts in New Orleans
Jul 15, 2007
Edwards Announces "Road To One America" Tour As Part Of His Campaign To End Poverty In America
Jul 9, 2007
Giving A Raise To Millions Of Working Familes
Jul 2, 2007
Edwards Calls For Minimum Wage Increase As Part Of Plan To Build One America
Jul 2, 2007
More Than Just Talk
May 8, 2007
It was a nice moment. The sky was filled with thick, dark clouds and a monsoonlike storm was on its way, but there was the presidential candidate, John Edwards, in work boots, jeans and a navy blue shirt, talking with a handful of neighborhood people gathered outside a house that was being built in the Ninth Ward.
Ending Poverty In America Within A Generation
Mar 15, 2007

The Problem

Pay Inequity Continues: For every $1.00 earned by a man, the average woman receives only 77 cents, while African American women only get 67 cents and Latinas receive only 57 cents.

Hate Crimes on the Rise: The number of hate crimes increased nearly 8 percent to 7,700 incidents in 2006.

Efforts Continue to Suppress the Vote: A recent study discovered numerous organized efforts to intimidate, mislead and suppress minority voters.

Disparities Continue to Plague Criminal Justice System: African Americans and Hispanics are more than twice as likely as whites to be searched, arrested, or subdued with force when stopped by police. Disparities in drug sentencing laws, like the differential treatment of crack as opposed to powder cocaine, are unfair.
Barack Obama's Plan
Strengthen Civil Rights Enforcement

Obama will reverse the politicization that has occurred in the Bush Administration's Department of Justice. He will put an end to the ideological litmus tests used to fill positions within the Civil Rights Division.
Combat Employment Discrimination

Obama will work to overturn the Supreme Court's recent ruling that curtails racial minorities' and women's ability to challenge pay discrimination. Obama will also pass the Fair Pay Act to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work.
Expand Hate Crimes Statutes

Obama will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice's Criminal Section.
End Deceptive Voting Practices

Obama will sign into law his legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and full information so they can vote.
End Racial Profiling

Obama will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.
Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support

Obama will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.
Eliminate Sentencing Disparities

Obama believes the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.
Expand Use of Drug Courts

Obama will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.
Barack Obama's Record

Record of Advocacy: Obama has worked to promote civil rights and fairness in the criminal justice system throughout his career. As a community organizer, Obama helped 150,000 African Americans register to vote. As a civil rights lawyer, Obama litigated employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and voting rights cases. As a State Senator, Obama passed one of the country's first racial profiling law and helped reform a broken death penalty system. And in the U.S. Senate, Obama has been a leading advocate for protecting the right to vote, helping to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and leading the opposition against discriminatory barriers to voting.

Protecting The Constitution And Respecting Our Freedoms

"We are not the country of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. We are not the country of secret surveillance and government behind closed doors. We are Americans, and we're better than that." -- John Edwards

America must do whatever it takes to defeat terrorism, but securing a lasting victory will take moral as well as military strength. President Bush's failure to respect the Constitution and our commitment to the fundamental rule of law has badly damaged our security and our standing in the world. President Bush has sent a message that torture and other human rights violations are acceptable, creating a precedent of disregard for the law that is being exploited by terrorists and repressive governments across the world. We must restore our moral leadership in the world, and we should begin here at home. If we want to spread democracy abroad, we must strengthen democracy in America, including our constitutional freedoms and the rule of law.

Say No to Torture

The Bush-Cheney Administration has undermined our standing in the world and endangered our own troops by sanctioning the use of interrogation techniques long considered torture. Edwards will protect our troops and our values by upholding the Geneva Conventions anywhere American security forces—military or civilian—are engaged. He will issue an executive order setting clear guidelines for interrogations and prohibiting torture. He will also ban the shameful practice of outsourcing torture to other countries through "extraordinary rendition."

Restore Habeas Corpus and Shut Down Guantanamo

The Bush Administration has claimed the power to seize and indefinitely detain anybody it labels an "enemy combatant" with no due process and no lawyer, even if they were seized here in America. It built a prison at Guantanamo Bay outside the reach of our courts, creating a symbol that galvanizes our enemies and alienates our allies. As president, Edwards will shut down Guantanamo and work to resolve the status of the detainees, hundreds of whom have been held for years without being charged. He will also restore the writ of habeas corpus to reinstate judicial review of detention, rather than allow unchecked executive power.

Protect Americans' Privacy and Freedom

Our government should protect the privacy, communications, and personal records of Americans—not spy on them without court supervision as the Bush Administration has done. Edwards will end the warrantless wiretapping of Americans' phone calls and e-mails and the data-mining of Americans' communications and personal records, restoring judicial review to surveillance of American citizens. He rejects retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. He will fix the Patriot Act by restoring important safeguards to the provisions most susceptible to abuse: the "sneak-and-peek" delayed-notice searches, National Security Letters, and the business and library records provisions. He will also end racial profiling by law enforcement.

Defend the Constitution

Edwards will end the practice of issuing presidential "signing statements" that claim the administration can ignore the law. He will respect the proper roles of the Congress and the courts. He will not shroud the actions of the White House in secrecy. He will not abuse the executive privilege to hide information from Congress and the courts. And he will not interfere with the professional judgment of attorneys at the Justice Department or impose a partisan agenda on their interpretation of the nation's laws and Constitution.