LCCR Story Featured on Blog Action Day Website

On October 15, 2008 over 12,000 blogs wrote about poverty for Blog Action Day. Among the top stories featured on the Blog Action Day website was the article posted by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Civilrights.org is one of more than 11,000 blogs and websites participating in Blog Action Day 2008, an annual event in which bloggers around the world post about the same issue on the same day to raise awareness and spark a global discussion. This year’s topic is poverty.

As the United States faces soaring gas and food prices, a mortgage crisis forcing millions out of their homes, major instability in the credit markets, and the failures of major banking and investment companies, it should come as no surprise that this year’s Blog Action Day focuses on the issue of poverty. Americans of all income levels are facing an economic climate unlike any seen in several generations.

And they are worried about their future. For many Americans, poverty was an abstract concept. Now it is all too real and imminent.

According to the Census Bureau, there were 37.3 million people in poverty in the United States in 2007, up from 36.5 million in 2006. Millions more struggle each month to pay for basic necessities or run out of savings when they lose their jobs or face health emergencies.

Almost 90 percent of respondents in a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on October 13 are “worried” about how the economy will perform over the next few years. Only 44 percent are confident they will have the funds to retire, down from 69 percent just three years ago.

And yet there are things that can be done to help economically struggling Americans, policies that could actually cut the current poverty rate in half in the next 10 years.

This year, four of the nation’s most prominent social justice organizations, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Coalition on Human Needs, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), have launched a campaign to do just that.

The campaign, Half in Ten, will mobilize the nation’s low-income, working-class, and middle-class Americans around policies that address poverty, including:

• Raising the federal minimum wage to 50 percent of the average wage — currently about $8.40 an hour. The federal minimum wage of $6.55 per hour is scheduled to rise to $7.25 in June 2009.
• Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. These tax credits are designed to help low-income individuals and families, but currently do not cover all eligible Americans.
• Increasing child care assistance for low-income families. Child care is expensive, particularly for low-income Americans. Current child care assistance leaves out more than 13 million eligible children.
• Increasing eligibility for unemployment insurance. Currently, only 35 percent of unemployed Americans receive unemployment benefits.
• Protecting low and moderate income families from foreclosure. Homeownership has long been overwhelmingly the largest – almost the only – asset held by low- and moderate-income families. When they lose their homes, or the value of their homes, they lose a lifetime of savings and security.

Cutting poverty is a challenging problem, but not an insurmountable one. In the past, anti-poverty policies had a real impact. Between 1964 and 1973, for example, poverty fell by more than 40 percent; between 1993 and 2000 it fell by 25 percent. Now is the time to channel public will toward proven policy solutions that ensure economic security for all.

Go to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights website.