POVERTY: Position Paper - 10/8/92 [Charles Fishman, editor] Please Distribute 10/08/92 THE ESSENTIAL CLINTON: POVERTY "I'm tired of people with trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live!" THE VISION --------------------------- I want to reward work. This administration apparently wants to use welfare in this election as one of those divisive issues. Let's take that away from them. Let's set up a system that will make welfare a second chance, not a way of life, but in a way that rewards and empowers the poor instead of punishing them." "Let's say we're going to give everybody education and training and child support and medical coverage for their children, then require them to take jobs when they can and, if they can't find jobs in the private sector, provide dignified, important, significant community service work for people to do. If we do that, we can end welfare as we know it in a way that lifted all of our people instead of using welfare as a divisive issue." THE BUSH RECORD --------------------------- "This is a president who promised us 15 million new jobs, and after the last accounting is in . . . there has been a reduction of 35,000 jobs in the private sector in the United States of America. The only job growth--less than a million--has been in government, which [George Bush] so deplores." "There has been a reduction in personal income of $1,600 on average for American families in the last two years alone." "Construction and manufacturing and consumer confidence are down. There has been a reduction . . . of nearly 100,000 [people] per month covered by health care; almost 100,000 of us are losing our health insurance every month." "Poverty is up. There have been more than twice as many bankruptcies for every new job created in this country. One in ten of our people is on food stamps. The cost of health care, housing, education, and taxes has exploded for the middle class." "So jobs are down, poverty's up; income's down, bankruptcies are up; construction's down, food stamps are up; health care coverage is down, and the cost of health care is up. . . . They've turned this country upside down. We're going to put it right-side-up in November." THE CLINTON ALTERNATIVE --------------------------- [Housing] "I want to have a program which includes for the first time in a dozen years a real effort to get serious about providing affordable housing for Americans and putting people to work. I want to begin by looking at this vast inventory of government housing . . . all boarded up, not doing anybody any good. . . ." "We ought to turn some of that housing over to cities, to community organizations, and to churches who are willing to participate in rehabilitating the housing and making it available as affordable housing for the homeless, for the elderly, for the people in need. What good is that housing doing all boarded up?" [Community Development Banks] "One community leader in Los Angeles told me that in that vast place we know as the inner city, there were 177 check cashing stands in the neighborhood where the riots began and only thirty-three banks. In the Washington, DC, area, there are fifty major banks but only two have branches in Anacostia and neither of them has a lending office." "If free enterprise can tear down the Berlin Wall, if we want to bring it to Eastern Europe and to the former Soviet Union, if we insist on restoring democracy and free enterprise in Haiti, if we press for it still and wait for the day it will return in Cuba, if the President is so eager to nurture free enterprise in China that he will put up with intolerable violations of human rights, why shouldn't we cultivate it in Baltimore, or Washington, or Detroit, or Denver?" "Part of a new American order ought to be a national network of community development banks in all the cities of this country modeled on those which have worked. . . ." [Investment in People] ---------------------- "The President said years ago that we had all these problems but we've got more will than wallet. I tell you one thing: one of my iron rules of politics is, when a politician says it is not a money problem, he's always talking about somebody else's problems." "We're at $500 billion to the S&L's this year and, with all the deficit we've got, boom, overnight [we] found another $105 billion dollars but not $5 billion so that every child can be in the Head Start program." "We have $80 billion in tax reductions for the upper 1% of individuals in corporations but not a half a percent of that, $4 billion, to lift the working poor above poverty. . . . We have to have a plan that invests in our people again. ENDORSEMENTS: ---------------------- {Both UUP and the AFl-CIO have strongly endorsed the Clinton-Gore ticket} United University Professions (UUP) President, John M. Reilly: "[This election] will determine what the future holds for education, health care, poverty, public services, and labor-management relations." Lane Kirkland, President, AFL-CIO: "Working people want a government that fights to rebuilt the country's economic strength, provides fair opportunities and seeks--in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance--'liberty and justice for ALL.'" The Seattle Times (10/4/92): "Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, by addressing anxieties about jobs, unemployment, health care and education, has connected better with the hopes and frustrations of the ordinary citizen in the last few months than [President] Bush has in the last 4 years."