I walk into Memorial Union this afternoon just as Senator John Edwards is about to give a speech. The former Vice Presidential Candidate is in Madison on a stop of his new Opportunity Knocks college campus tour. Admission is free so I go in and listen.
The Senator, to his credit, does not engage in Bush bashing and only mentions the War in Iraq twice in toss off comments to predictable polite applause. He then rambles for half an hour around the idea that “America is looking for something bigger than their own self interest”, and “the cause” that should capture this desire for a new “sense of national community”, is poverty. In other words, ending poverty is the great moral issue for our times. The Senator uses the word “moral” multiple times but never seems to understand that stopping religious based killing is also a great moral issue for our times.
Nothing illustrates the current state of the Democratic Party better than what happens next. First there is an accurate description of the problem. The ugly truth of poverty is that the poor do not have cars, or credit cards, or bank accounts. The poor do not have assets. Second, the admissions that prior attempts to banish poverty lead to the creation of dependency and bureaucracies that ended up absorbing the funds. Furthermore, public schools are doing a poor job educating the poor. Finally, his simple and straightforward statement that “I don’t know the answers”.
A US Senator and former Democratic Party Presidential Candidate stands in front of about a thousand students and asks them to come up with solutions. The only two specific ideas he tosses out are raising the minimum wage and creating something called “work bonds” so the poor can start building assets. Well this is my first suggestion. Stop the government from taking assets from the poor.
The number one positive thing to do is to exempt the first $30,000 of income from any taxation. This means no social security taxes on the poor. If this type of Real Change is too much Real Change for the political class, then perhaps the social security tax money can be directed to individual accounts for the sole benefit of the worker. A little bit of computer re-programming and presto chango: instant assets. We can call the accounts work bonds if that phrase keeps the Democrats happy.
