When I got an e-mail alerting me to John Edwards' latest speech on poverty, I expected the usual hand-wringing about a country so great and a shame so large and an inequity so massive and so forth. That's not to dispute the truth of it, but it's a debate that Americans have long ago been inured to and, unless Edwards was bringing something new to the table, rehashing it would be good for the soul but far from the center. And then I read this:
The trouble is that for too many Americans—not just in the Gulf but everywhere—the American Dream has become too distant. You can see it in the numbers: millions of parents work full-time but still live in poverty. The typical white family has about $80,000 in assets; the typical Hispanic family, about $8,000; the typical African-American family, about $6,000.
“Income is what you use to get by, but assets are what you use to get ahead.” This huge asset gap is one reason so many families are barely getting by. And again, it's not just the poor: middle-class incomes are stagnant, and more people file for bankruptcy than graduate from college each year.
Assets couldn't be more crucial. And almost nobody mentions them. Poverty is usually discussed in platitudes, a Bad Thing requiring either random cash or the magic of personal responsibility. Edwards, here, is light-years beyond that crap. Reading him, I got goosebumps for the first time since the debates. And they they kept a-coming:
In the 1960s we fought a war on poverty. Our intentions were good, but sometimes we expected government to do things that only individuals and communities can achieve.
Sometimes we gave too much money to bureaucracies, not people. Yet those efforts still helped cut the poverty rate by 43 percent from 1963 to 1973.
Again, in the 1990s, the Earned Income Tax Credit and welfare reform helped lift 7 million more people out of poverty. If we are going to fight poverty, we have to commit ourselves once more, more deeply than ever before.
What!? He's not fleeing from the Great Society? Not promising to outsource government? Not putting it all on black families? Surely you kid!
Sorry, I wasn't expecting to quote so much of this speech, but I also wasn't expecting it to be so good. More after the jump:
