The Half In Ten Campaign

by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, Benjamin Armbruster, and Sarah Dale The Half In Ten Campaign On Tuesday, a coalition of four national advocacy organizations -- the Center for American Progress Action Fund, ACORN, the Coalition on Human Needs and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights -- launched the Half in Ten campaign, a vigorous and concerted effort to cut the number of Americans living in poverty by 50 percent within ten years. Currently, one in every eight Americans, or 36.5 million people, live in poverty. Under the leadership of former senator John Edwards, the campaign, Half in Ten: From Poverty to Prosperity, seeks to unite a broad range of groups and individuals across the country in order to make this goal a reality. The foundation of the campaign rests on basic fundamental principles: promoting decent work, providing opportunity for all, ensuring economic security, and helping people build wealth. Combining federal, state, and public education agendas, the campaign is guided by the policy recommendations of the Center for American Progress's 2007 Poverty Task Force Report, which issued twelve recommendations including expanding tax credits, eliminating predatory lending, and ensuring that workers have the right to form unions through the Employee Free Choice Act. Half in Ten will advocate expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, raising the minimum wage, increasing the availability of child care assistance to low-income families, and increasing eligibility for unemployment insurance. In his kick-off speech in Philadelphia last Tuesday, Edwards spelled out the essence of campaign: "This is not just about highlighting the problem. It is also about highlighting the solutions -- because this is a problem we can solve." CHANGING THE GOVERNMENT: The very policies designed to prop up low-wage workers, unemployment insurance and tax credits, typically don't reach the poorest Americans who most need them. Restrictive rules often prevent part time and temporary employees -- the lowest paid and most poor workers -- from receiving unemployment benefits. Half in Ten recognizes that unemployment reform would bring an additional 560,000 largely low-income people into the system, distributing $1.03 billion in benefits and job training. The Child Tax Credit (CTC) currently excludes many of the least affluent Americans. Restrictions on the CTC mean that claimants with low or no tax liability, who make the most meager wages, are unable to receive any assistance. The Urban Institute estimates that 21 million children and 1.1 million parents would break through the poverty line if the federal CTC were made fully refundable. Finally, Half in Ten will work to provide childcare assistance. The campaign will work to obtain a federal-state guarantee of child care assistance for all working families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line and an expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. These expansions of childcare assistance would lift 2.7 million Americans out of poverty, reducing poverty by almost 8 percent, according to estimates by the Urban Institute. Half in Ten will continue to push the Senate, the House and the presidential candidates until they commit to these important federal changes. - more -