Rahm Emanuel on Welfare & Poverty Democratic Rep. (IL-5); Chief of Staff-Designee

Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit

EMANUEL: We are getting to a point where we can make a pension payment or pave a road but we can't do both. I am not tough on pensions. I am realistic. There is a difference. It is also realistic from a fiscal side that, if all we do is make no changes, I would have to raise taxes at a level that would harm the economy.

Q: Are we seeing cleavages within the Democratic Party? On pensions? Negotiation with the unions?

EMANUEL: There are divisions, or I would call them differences. Too much of the debate in Washington is about ideological gradations. I have a piece today [in the Chicago Sun-Times] about the Earned Income Tax Credit. I have negotiated to expand it. Now, is that considered left or right?

Q: Uh--

EMANUEL: I consider myself a progressive. I have a passion for people who work. To me, this is about forward versus backward looking. Ideological gradations are the wrong way to look at it.

Voted YES on providing $70 million for Section 8 Housing vouchers.

Proponents of the amendment say:
• This amendment would enable an additional 10,000 low-income families to afford safe, decent housing.
• To offset this increase, the amendment cuts a poorly managed computer upgrade program. The committee has been very ingenious in squirreling away money in different accounts and the bill would still provide $94 million in funds for IT projects.
• We have a choice: Do we want to help thousands of families obtain affordable housing, or do we think it is more important to have a somewhat faster computer upgrade in HUD?
• Our amendment does not seek to restore the amount to the amount that the President recommended, which is $144 million more than the committee recommends, it seeks merely to restore $70 million, or about half of what the difference is to what the President recommended.
• This is less than the bare minimum of what is needed. We have hundreds of thousands of families on waiting lists, waiting up to 10 years for decent housing for Section 8 vouchers.

Opponents say:
• The existing bill fully funds the renewal of Section 8 vouchers. Additional funds are simply not necessary.
• The cost of Section 8 vouchers are remaining constant and in some markets are actually decreasing. As such, this funding level will provide funds to restore vouchers that may have been lost in recent years.
• The proposed reduction will cause delays in critically needed efforts to modernize antiquated legacy computer systems.

Voted NO on promoting work and marriage among TANF recipients.

Finish welfare reform by moving able recipients into jobs.

Help Working Families Lift Themselves from Poverty
In the 1990s, Americans resolved to end welfare dependency and forge a new social compact on the basis of work and reciprocal responsibility. The results so far are encouraging: The welfare rolls have been cut by more than half since 1992 without the social calamities predicted by defenders of the old welfare entitlement. People are more likely than ever to leave welfare for work, and even those still on welfare are four times more likely to be working. But the job of welfare reform will not be done until we help all who can

work to find and keep jobs -- including absent fathers who must be held responsible for supporting their children.

In the next decade, progressives should embrace an even more ambitious social goal -- helping every working family lift itself from poverty. Our new social compact must reinforce work, responsibility, and family. By expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, increasing the supply of affordable child care, reforming tax policies that hurt working families, making sure absent parents live up to their financial obligations, promoting access to home ownership and other wealth-building assets, and refocusing other social policies on the new goal of rewarding work, we can create a new progressive guarantee: No American family with a full-time worker will live in poverty.

Goals for 2010 Finish the job of welfare reform by moving all recipients who can work into jobs.
• Cut the poverty rate in half.
• Double child support collections and require every father who owes child support to go to work to pay it off.