Recognizing that a broad and coordinated strategy is needed to dramatically reduce poverty, The Task Force on Poverty also recommended a set of 12 key policy initiatives to get us to that goal. The Task Force then asked the Urban Institute to model the poverty cutting impact of a number of these proposals.

The Urban Institute found that acting on just 4 of the 12 Task Force recommendations would cut poverty by more than 26 percent. If we raised and indexed the minimum wage, so that it once again provided an adequate wage floor; expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit to help more of the lowest income working people make ends meet and reworked the Child Tax Credit so that it is available to the families of all children (and no child was too poor to qualify for it); and helped cover the cost of childcare for working families with incomes up to 200 percent of the poverty line, we would cut poverty by more than one quarter. Over 9 million fewer people would be poor, the racial poverty gap would narrow, and child poverty would drop by 41 percent.

The Half in Ten campaign will advocate for these and other specific, tested policy solutions—at the federal, state, and even local level—that will increase opportunity and cut poverty.

Immediate Policy Priorities:

Increasing Economic Security:

Make unemployment insurance work for low-wage workers; expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Unemployment Insurance is crucial to the security of working families, alleviating hardship while people look for new jobs, and stabilizing the economy in periods of downturn. But the UI system has not kept pace with a changing economy, and now only about 35 percent of unemployed people get UI benefits. Low-wage workers are more than 40 percent less likely than higher wage earners to get UI. Many UI rules around reasons for work separation are also particularly likely to penalize women and all caregivers. With unemployment levels climbing, the problem grows more pressing every month.

The House has already passed UI Modernization legislation that would provide incentives for states to address these issues (along with ‘rewards’ for those states that have already done so), and help make the system work for everyone. Getting these reforms passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law early in the next administration, and improving state UI systems so they provide adequate benefits to all unemployed workers, along with opportunities for training, are top priorities. Meanwhile, Congress should act immediately to extend unemployment benefits for the hundreds of thousands of workers who have not been able to find jobs in this worsening economy.

The Earned Income Tax Credit provides an earnings supplement for low-income working families that raises incomes and helps families build assets. EITC expansions during the 1990s helped increase employment and reduce poverty. But the current EITC does little to help workers without children. The maximum payment for workers without children was $428 in 2007. We recommend tripling the EITC for childless workers, and expanding help to larger working families. Doing so would cut the number of people in poverty by over two million.

Providing Opportunity for All:

Expand the reach of the Child Tax Credit; make quality child care available and affordable to a growing number of low-income families.

The Child Tax Credit provides a credit of up to $1,000 per child to help with the rising costs of maintaining a household. But because of the way it was designed, some 10.5 million children in the poorest families in the country were ineligible for the credit in 2007, and another 11 million children received only a partial credit. The package of tax cuts extended as part of the Wall Street bailout legislation includes a provision that solves a part of the problem, making 3 million children newly eligible, and adding to the amount of the credit for 10 million more. The current improvement, however, expires after one year. We need to secure this extension for the long term, and then make the tax credit available to all children.

Childcare eats up a huge portion of working families’ budgets, and without help to cover the cost of quality care, too many parents must worry about their children’s safety and well being. Federal support for childcare has been frozen for nearly a decade. It is time for this to change. We propose that the federal and state governments guarantee child care help to families with incomes below about $40,000 a year, and also expand the child care tax credit so that it reaches more low and moderate-income families. At the same time, states should be encouraged to improve the quality of early education and broaden access for all children. Policies like these would raise employment among low-income parents and help nearly three million parents and children escape poverty.

Promoting Decent Work

Open up hundreds of thousands of new ‘green’ jobs, and save money and energy with investments in green infrastructure, including mass scale efficiency retrofits of homes where families struggle with high heating bills; raise and index the minimum wage to half the average hourly wage.

Green Jobs and Efficient Homes: Climate change and the high costs of imported oil both demand action on energy efficiency and alternative energy; a commitment to opportunity demands that we work proactively to make the developing green economy accessible to people too often excluded from the current career ladders; increasing unemployment makes investment in jobs particularly timely; and an approaching winter of higher than ever fuel costs demands immediate action. For all of these reasons a tremendous scaling up of investment in retrofitting homes and other buildings – along with providing the job training and access needed to create the workforce to do these jobs – is an immediate priority.

The minimum wage, at $6.55 (effective July 24, 2008), is still close to its lowest levels in real terms since 1956. The federal minimum wage was once 50 percent of the average non supervisory wage, providing a floor that supported decent pay for all, but it has fallen to something closer to 30 percent of that wage. Congress should restore the value of the minimum wage to its historic levels, about $9.00 an hour in 2008, and index it to inflation from that point, so that it does not fall behind. Doing so would help over 4.5 million poor workers and nearly nine million other low-income workers.

Building Wealth:

Protect low- and moderate-income homeowners from foreclosure.

Foreclosure rates continue at unprecedented levels; 6 percent of homeowners, or 3 million households, are now behind on their mortgages. For borrowers who were sold subprime loans—the delinquency rate is above 30 percent. We all know that the foreclosure crisis is now undermining the functioning of whole economy; we should not forget its particularly pernicious impact on eroding the hard earned wealth of people struggling out of poverty and into the middle class. 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.

None of the measures adopted thus far by the Federal Government in response to the crisis have done what is needed to insist on loan restructurings that create new mortgages that families can afford, and allow them to continue to pay their loans, and stay in their homes. Legislation and regulation to accomplish this fundamental goal (including bankruptcy reform, and changes in tax and accounting rules) must be enacted quickly, along with protections against continuing predatory practices. Meanwhile, states and localities can and must take action to slow foreclosures themselves, including for example instituting programs like the successful Philadelphia Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion program.

Full List of Poverty Task Force Policy Solutions