Peter Edelman

by Jeremy Leaming

The nation’s middle class should demand far more of the tiny group of American’s that controls the vast majority of the nation’s wealth. If not, the growing wealth gap, according to numerous leading economists, is destined to seriously undermine democracy.

For example, Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz has warned on numerous occasions about the dangers economic inequalities pose to a healthy democracy. And the number of Americans living in poverty is at its highest since the Great Depression. The Census Bureau reported last year on the nation’s shrinking middle class and growing number of Americans that have been thrown into poverty. 

One of the nation’s greatest advocates for solving poverty, Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University and ACS Board Chair, is urging the middle class to become more vocal in calling for an end to right-wing economic policies that advance the out-of-touch interests of the super wealthy and exacerbate poverty.

The Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin reports on Edelman’s comments at a recent event hosted by ACS and the Center for American Progress. Edelman (pictured) said a broader group of people should stand against Republican economic policies, calling the policies destructive. He also said the right-wing’s rhetoric advancing those policies is “just weird.” See video of the event here.

Froomkin noted that the former Bain Capital director Edward Conard has lauded the nation’s economic inequality, saying that more people should strive for the obnoxious sums of money he has earned. Conard in an interview with The New York Times offered little in the way of defense of economic policies that make his group even wealthier. Essentially risk-takers, like Conard should be celebrated, even though their work does little to nothing for the common good.

But Edelman, Froomkin says, provides “the exact opposite approach” in his new book, So Rich, So Poor. Edelman said the goal “should be to raise taxes on the rich and strengthen” the social safety net, Froomkin reports. That safety net, as Edelman intimately knows, has been tattered by years of economic policies advanced by the Right and accommodating Democrats.

by Jeremy Leaming

A couple of national newspaper columnists examine some numbers and commentary on poverty and economic inequality, as the Occupy Wall Street protests hit their one month anniversary with noted momentum.

The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., notes in this piece, some comments on poverty rates of families made during a recent Republican presidential debate by former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. Essentially Santorum, a longtime advocate of Religious Right activists, argues that government should push policy that supports only families headed by mothers and fathers. “You can’t have a wealthy society if the family breaks down,” Santorum said.

Dionne says Santorum “is broadly right,” citing a study by the National Center for Children in Poverty covering “the 2005 – 09 period,” that “5 percent of married family households were poor at some point within a given year, compared with 28.8 percent of single-parent households. For 2010, the figures were 8.4 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively.”

But instead of going off on a tangent about how government recognition of marriage for gay couples will render straight marriages meaningless, as Santorum often does, Dionne says “Liberals should acknowledge, as Obama has, that strengthening the family is vital to economic justice. Conservatives should acknowledge that economic justice is vital to strengthening families.”

And Dionne points to some work in this area by Harry Holzer, a professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and Peter Edelman, an ACS Board member and longtime advocate for tackling poverty in America.

In a 2006 book published by the Urban Institute, Holzer, the late Paul Offner, and Edelman (pictured) tackle “the thorny challenge of getting ‘disconnected’ young men back in school or the workforce.”

The book, Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, focuses on African American and Hispanic men “because young women have made more progress in recent years and their prospects have been spotlighted in discussions of welfare reform and other social changes,” a press statement about the publication says.