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The 64-Gazillion Dollar Question
Fighting
income
inequality
by
S am P izzigati
Peter Edelman has
battled poverty for nearly half a
century — first as a top aide to
Senator Robert Kennedy, later as a
state and federal official, and cur­
rently as a key figure at a widely
respected law and public policy
center in Washington, D.C.
Over his years in and out of gov­
ernment, Edelman has probably
earned as njuch respect as anyone
in our nation's public policy com­
munity. Back in 1996, he did some­
thing few high-ranking federal offi­
cials ever do. He resigned in protest
when President Bill Clinton signed
a law that Edelman could not sup­
port in good conscience.
Edelman, then an assistant sec­
retary at the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services, pub­
licly warned that the "welfare re­
form" that Clinton signed into law
would be devastating for the nation's
most vulnerable children. He turned
out to be right. The number of
children living in deep poverty
— kids in families making under
half the official poverty thresh­
o ld — rose 70 percent from 1995
to 2005, and 30 percent more by
2010.
America's elected leaders didn't
listen to Edelman in 1996. Now they
have another chance. Edelman, cur­
re n tly a c o -d ire c to r at the
Georgetown University Law Cen­
ter, has just released a new book —
So Rich, So Poor — that aims "to
look anew at why it is so hard to end
American poverty."
You get the feeling from this can­
did new book that Edelman would
be astonished if our elected leaders
actually paid attention to his pov­
erty-fighting prescriptions. So Rich,
So Poor seems to address a different
audience: the millions of decent
Americans, from across the political
spectrum, who share his outrage
about our continuing deep poverty.
These Americans have a special
reason for paying close attention to
Edelman's new book. The author, one
of the nation's most committed ex­
perts on poverty, has changed his
mind — not about poverty and the
poor, but about wealth and the rich.
"I used to believe," Edelman
writes in his new book, "that the
debate over wealth distribution
should be conducted separately
from the poverty debate, in order to
minimize the attacks on antipoverty
advocates for engaging in 'class
warfare.' But now we literally cannot
afford to separate the two issues."
Why? The "economic and politi­
cal power o f those at the top,"
Edelman explains, is "making it vir­
tually impossible to find the re­
sources to do more at the bottom."
Figuring out how we can achieve
a more equal distribution of income
and wealth has become, Edelman
advises, "the 64-gazillion-dollar
question."
"The only way we will improve
the lot o f the poor, stabilize the
middle class, and protect our de­
mocracy," he notes, "is by requiring
the rich to pay more of the cost of
governing the country that enables
their huge accretion of wealth."
W hat about those antipoverty
activists and analysts who still
yearn to keep poverty — the ab­
sence o f wealth — separate from
the c o n c e n tra tio n o f w e alth ?
Many o f these folks, Edelm an
notes, argue that the rich as a
group have no reason to oppose
efforts to help end poverty.
Edelman's response? "More than
anything else," he observes, the
wealthy "want low taxes," and they
know the taxes on their sky-high
incomes will rise if government ever
starts spending money to really help
people in need.
"The wealth and income of the
top 1 percent grows at the expense
of everyone else," Edelman sums
up in So Rich, So Poor. "Money
breeds power, and power breeds
more money. It is a truly vicious
cycle."
Only average Americans have
the wherewithal to end this cycle.
Middle- and low-income Americans
need to join in common cause. If
they don't, Edelman bluntly adds,
"we are cooked."
OtherWords columnist Sam
Pizzigati edits Too Much, the Insti­
tute on Policy Studies weekly news­
letter on excess and inequality.