Ending Poverty in America
How to Restore the American Dream,
edited by John Edwards, Marion Crain, and Arne Kalleberg


(Click for Amazon book review)

BOOK REVIEW by OnTheIssues.org:

This book is a collection of essays about poverty in America. Sen. Edwards edited all the essays and wrote the "Conclusion" chapter, which summarizes all of the essays, as well as summarizing policy prescriptions about ending poverty. Presumably Edwards chose the topics of each of the essays, and hence the conclusion encapsulates Edwards' anti-poverty policy. The book reads, in fact, like Edwards chose essay topic to document and substantiate his policy ideas -- Edwards outlines the big picture, and each essay provides the details.

Edwards has made fighting poverty the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. He announced his candidacy in New Orleans, in a low-income neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina and still not recovered. And during the campaign, he focuses numerous issues around poverty, attempting to make it a unifying theme of his candidacy. Some other candidates in this race similarly focus their campaigns on immigration or abortion as unifying themes -- they tend to change the topic to immigration or abortion because they consider those the source of most other problems in America. Edwards' poverty theme is more general, which means it feels less like a non-sequitir, but also feels less focused. You can decide for yourself, via the excerpts below, if Edwards succeeds at creating a unifying theme.

There's a classic political problem with focusing on poverty -- people in poverty have lower voting rates than financially stable people. A lot of people care about immigration or abortion, and people who care about immigration or abortion vote a lot -- so those are viable issues on which to base a presidential campaign. It's not yet clear that Edwards can rally people about poverty as an important enough issue to warrant getting their vote. We'll see in the primaries if he can pull that off.

-- Jesse Gordon, jesse@OnTheIssues.org, August 2007

OnTheIssues.org excerpts:  (click on issues for details)

Budget & Economy     Asset gap: Poorest 25% of Americans have negative net worth.

Civil Rights     Equal opportunity needs to be active principle, not passive.

Corporations     Record corporate profits don’t benefit tenuous middle class.

Education     Invest in rural community colleges as practical job training.     College for Everyone pilot: $300,000 to 80 N.C. students.     Create “Second Chance” schools to get dropouts back on track.

Environment     Katrina gave a face to millions in poverty.

Families & Children     Our nation was built on institution of strong families.     End marriage penalty for absent poor fathers.     Invest in proven programs to reduce teen pregnancy.

Jobs     Strong unions can make services foundation of middle class.

Social Security     Social Security has lifted 13M seniors out of poverty.

Tax Reform     EITC lifted 4.4M out of poverty and helped 22M others.     Shift burden from taxing work to taxing wealth.     Progressive tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

Welfare & Poverty     37M in poverty is a plague on America.     Poverty is America’s greatest challenge--for citizens & govt.     Poverty is such low priority, we have no accurate statistics.     Principles against poverty:work, opportunity, thrift, family.     Give poor a stake with “automatic 401k” & kids’ savings.     Housing vouchers, not housing projects.     30-year goal: Ending poverty in America.

Click for quotations from other sources by: John Edwards