Public Policy and the Poor People’s Campaign: Reducing Inequality through Political Action

by Aaron Noffke

This paper examines the work of progressive, grassroots organizations across America in order to generate a set of policy recommendations for reducing poverty and inequality. Using a case study approach and an assessment of recent poverty statistics, the paper describes the experience of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and its implications for future policy efforts. In the second section, campaign interviews and written testimony are summarized into four key points, which in turn support three sets of policy recommendations outlined in the final section.

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is a movement-based organization that aims to challenge policies related to poverty, systemic racism, militarism, and ecological devastation in America, as well as the structures that enable them. On May 14, 2018, the campaign began a six-week period of direct, nonviolent action at over forty state legislative buildings across the country.¹ The campaign is a product of a partnership between Repairers of the Breach and the Kairos Center, both faith-based organizations that emphasize coordinated civil protest, political education, and religious and cultural expression as a means for social change. Repairers of the Breach was organized by Reverend William Barber, former president of the NAACP North Carolina chapter and founding member of the Moral Mondays campaign. The Kairos Center is co-directed by Reverend Liz Theoharis, who founded its anti-poverty initiative.

On May 14, 2018, the Poor People’s Campaign began a six-week period of direct, nonviolent action at over forty state legislative buildings across the country.

In 2016, Repairers of the Breach organized a “Moral Revival” tour with the Kairos Center and other key organizations. Through the tour, they identified a network of organizational partners across the United States that was committed to participating in a national campaign. In May 2017, Repairers of the Breach and the Kairos Center announced the formation of a new Poor People’s Campaign, and began a series of mass meetings and political organizing trainings. The leadership team of the Poor People’s Campaign is made up of co-chairs Reverend Theoharis and Reverend Barber, as well as the director of organizing Roz Pelles.

The campaign is a state-based initiative, with each state organizing coordinated actions on a weekly basis. Each state operates with a tri-chair made up of one impacted person, one organizer, and one faith leader. Individuals who work on state campaigns do so voluntarily, with assistance from a national organizing staff. Various labor unions, faith-based groups, anti-war groups, civil rights groups, and environmental justice organizations have publicly endorsed and/or partnered with state chapters of the campaign in preparation for direct actions. The campaign does not endorse or collaborate with any elected officials from either political party, and does not participate in electoral politics.

Poverty, systemic racism, militarism, and ecological devastation are articulated as interlocking issues by the campaign, and current conditions are a source of both moral outrage and political injustice. The campaign employs an expansive concept of poverty, describing it as an economic and political position where individuals are relegated rather than defined by a specific income threshold at a moment in time. Poverty is understood as being produced by prevailing economic structures, and explanations for poverty as a byproduct of cultural habits or norms should be challenged. The campaign rejects the argument that America lacks the necessary resources to meet the basic needs of everyone.

Measuring Poverty

Given its distinct conception of poverty, it was essential for the campaign to offer a more realistic measure of poverty’s reach than currently provided by the federal government’s official poverty measure (OPM). Produced annually, the OPM uses a set of pre-tax income thresholds that vary by household size and composition; it is calculated by multiplying the cost of a minimum food diet in 1955 by three and then adjusting for inflation.² This anachronistic approach undercounts the extent of poverty because it fails to account for the current cost of goods and services essential for a family to meet their basic needs.

Acknowledging limitations in the OPM, the Census Bureau developed an alternative poverty measure to more accurately reflect the level of resources associated with a minimum level of economic well-being. The supplemental policy measure, or SPM, has been reported since 2010 and is widely considered by researchers to be a more precise measure of poverty. While the SPM still uses income thresholds, these estimates are based on an assessment of what people currently spend on food, clothing, shelter, and utilities rather than just their spending on food. SPM thresholds differ by family size, renter/homeowner status, and geographic location. Unlike the OPM, the SPM takes into account non-cash government benefits, such as tax credits and public assistance, and additionally factors in necessary costs of living, which includes taxes as well as out-of-pocket medical, child care, and transportation expenses.

The campaign rejects the argument that America lacks the necessary resources to meet the basic needs of everyone.

Despite improvements in the SPM over the OPM, researchers have identified circumstances when the SPM underestimates poverty levels by failing to account for the prevailing costs of housing, transportation, health care, and other necessary goods and services. For example, the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator estimates that a two-adult, two-child family living in the Washington, D.C., metro area would need over $105,000 in family income to achieve an adequate standard of living.³ In comparison, the SPM poverty threshold for a two-adult, two-child family renting in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria area is $33,382.⁴ Reliable assessments have found that doubling the SPM is a minimum benchmark for meeting a family’s basic needs. Below this amount, families and individuals are forced to make trade-offs between basic needs. As such, the term “low-income” is often used to refer to individuals whose income is below 200 percent of the poverty threshold. This paper uses the term “poor or low-income” to refer to all people living in families with incomes below 200 percent of the SPM poverty threshold.

Based on census recommendations for state-level calculations, which include using five-year averages from 2012 to 2016 for additional statistical reliability, the tables in the appendix present the empirical results.⁵ Forty-six percent of Americans—140 million people—live in families with incomes that are insufficient to meet their basic needs. In each of the five states with the highest poverty levels, over 51 percent of their populations are poor or low income. The highest rate is in California, where 55.4 percent of people are poor or low-income, accounting for 22.4 million people.

Poor or low-income rates differ significantly by race. As shown in Table 2, white people make up the largest percentage of poor or low-income people, at 49 percent. Yet only 38 percent of white people are poor or low-income. In comparison, Table 3 reveals that 62 percent of people of color (POC) are poor or low-income, and 18 states feature a greater number of poor or low-income people of color compared to white people, despite have a majority white population. Washington, D.C., Arizona, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have the highest disparity between white and POC poor or low-income rates. Gender disparities exist as well, as reflected in Table 4. Forty-eight percent of women and girls are poor or low-income, with rates in the top quintile over 52 percent; and 56 percent of children are poor or low-income.⁶

These numbers demonstrate that poverty is a widespread experience in America. In some states, the majority of people are poor or low-income. Disparities by race, gender, and age are evident in every state, with racial differences particularly stark. Poverty statistics themselves, however, do not reveal the full extent of economic suffering, much less the causes and potential solutions. While disparities in poor or low-income rates are important to recognize, simple cross tabulations do not explain the relationship between poverty, systemic racism, militarism, and ecological devastation. A singular focus on disparities reveals little about how patterns of inequality are institutionally structured. To advance an understanding of these relationships, it is valuable to elevate the perspectives of political organizers and activists working in the field to address poverty and inequality in America. In the following section, SPM numbers are augmented with insights from people engaged in grassroots political activism and anti-poverty work.

Evidence from the Field

In April 2018, The Poor People’s Campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies published The Souls of Poor Folk: Auditing America’s History 50 years after the Poor People’s Campaign Challenged Racism, Poverty, The War Economy/Militarism, and Our National Morality, tracing policy trajectories from 1968 onward that have exacerbated poverty and inequality.⁷ As part of this project, individuals from over a dozen political organizations were interviewed, some of whom had participated in the original 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. Their backgrounds include work in welfare, organizing, immigrant rights, water rights, health care, housing, civil rights, workers’ rights, ecological justice, and anti-war activism. Additional written testimony was acquired from seventeen other individuals. Nearly all of these individuals were from organizations and communities made up of poor people and represented conditions and experiences of millions in America. Interviews took place over the phone and lasted approximately one hour. An analysis of these interviews and written testimony reveal four key themes/conclusions about prevailing trends about poverty and inequality in America.

Cuts in Social Safety Net Spending Have Increased the Number of People Unable to Meet Basic Needs.

Interviewees described the effects of federal and state social safety net cuts since the 1970s. For example, from 1978 to 1989, funding for housing assistance delivered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) dropped from $57 billion to $9 billion, with similar cuts made to education, health, transportation, and various urban aid programs.⁸ Paul Boden, director of the Western Regional Advocacy Program, highlights housing, saying, “there was a direct connection between the people that were living in subsidized housing, the massive cuts to affordable housing, and the need to open emergency shelter programs. The correlation is unmistakable.” Similar statements were made by welfare rights organizers who witnessed the impact of Welfare Reform legislation passed in 1996. Mary Grant, campaign director for Food and Water Watch, observed that since public infrastructure funding began to decline in 1977, water rates and cut-offs have increased, with a greater number of individuals at risk of losing access to water.

From 1978 to 1989, funding for housing assistance delivered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) dropped from $57 billion to $9 billion, with similar cuts made to education, health, transportation, and various urban aid programs.

Decreases in public welfare spending were put into context alongside other economic policies, such as The North American Free Trade Act, the proliferation of tax increment financing and public-private partnerships for economic development, privatization of public services, sectoral shifts in the economy, and federal income and corporate tax cuts. These policies were identified as sources of rising poverty and inequality. In contrast, increases in military, law enforcement, and mass incarceration spending were described as factors that reinforced poverty and inequality.

Federal cuts to the social safety net also hampered political activism. Many improvements to social welfare policies were secured through grassroots political activism in the 1960s.⁹ In turn, these organizing efforts provided individuals with more time and resources for political involvement, and a greater sense that political engagement could change policies. As significant cuts were made, the opposite dynamic took hold. Sylvia Orduño states that through the enforcement of workfare requirements, time limits, and funding cuts, the network of welfare rights organizations shrank from over 500 chapters to less than two dozen. The political effects of these cuts have continued, with an upward redistribution of wealth resulting in a weakened working class that faces barriers to political activity. Simultaneously, political decision-making increasingly favors a smaller set of wealthy and corporate interests.¹⁰

Race and Gender Help to Structure Patterns of Economic Inequality, With Militarism and Environmental Injustice Multiplying the Effects of These Structures

Every interviewee remarked that race and gender play a role in the structure of economic inequality. Voter suppression laws that target Black and Brown communities result in policies that limit poor or low-income people’s ability to participate in electoral politics. Border control and detainment efforts have increased worker exploitation, with average incomes in some border communities ranging from $8,000 to $12,000 dollars. Women are disproportionately represented among the poor, based in large part on the devaluing of care work. The question of how resources are allocated in the economy is negotiated through race and gender, with racism and misogyny deepening the impact and reach of poverty in America.

Interviewees describe how racism and misogyny have historically divided groups with otherwise common political interests. Racism was identified as a common barrier in organizing low-wage workers in the south. Interviewees spoke about how these barriers must be addressed within the work rather than assumed away through victories. Paul Boden observed challenges to organizing around housing rights:

“I don’t think we can build power and wait until we have power, and then talk about racism. You’re not going to get power unless you address the race and class issues in the organizing that you are doing. I think a lot of groups make that mistake. You have to make sure that’s part of the internal work you are doing.”

Militarism and ecological devastation are positioned as intensifiers of economic conditions. Jacqui Patterson of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program stated that communities that are already facing challenges related to employment opportunities are more vulnerable when natural disasters hit their communities. Women’s health and safety were lifted up as an often overlooked natural disaster issue, as rises in domestic violence and sexual assault occur during these periods. Similar statements were made by Jesús Vázquez of Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecológica in regards to food security in Puerto Rico, where previous inequalities were exacerbated by Hurricane Maria. Interviewees also linked the relationship between ecological devastation and militarism through the pursuit and extraction of natural resources, a leading cause of war and of environmental harm.

Military violence as a method of social control was highlighted as an intensifier of inequality. Fernando Garcia of the Border Network describes militarization at the border as a response to the racist narrative of immigrants as a security threat. He states:

“When the border is portrayed as the opposite of lawful, it becomes especially criminal…over time, we have seen an expanded militarization into the United States…we saw that they learned out of the border experience how to militarize a police department and give them the tools to repress and persecute people in the interior of the United States.”

The criminalization of Black, Brown, and low-income communities was equally observed in cities, especially with regard to homeless people. The increase in gender-based violence in the military—both among women in the service and civilians overseas—was also linked with the rise in military spending. In their attempts to organize, some interviewees shared personal experiences of being targeted by law enforcement.

Human Rights Are a Useful Framework for Understanding Poverty—and for Ending It

Most interviewees utilized rights-based frameworks in their work, which provide the opportunity to link people’s experiences across issue areas. Nijmie Dzurinko of Put People First! PA describes how an unmet essential need in an individual’s life has an impact on a host of other needs. Referring to health care, she states:

People are choosing between paying for medications and paying for utilities. They are stretching out medications, choosing between buying food and getting health care for their kids. This makes life very hard, when you need to choose between one need or another need, when they’re really all needs. People are saying they are forced to stay in relationships because of insurance because otherwise they won’t have benefits. It’s also a real question for workers, who are constantly bargaining away their other rights for their health care.

The question of how resources are allocated in the economy is negotiated through race and gender, with racism and misogyny deepening the impact and reach of poverty in America.

Contrasted with means-tested programs, rights-based approaches are useful in that they ensure that everyone can meet human needs, regardless of income or civil/social status. For these reasons, rights-based claims have been critical in linking together specific needs that poor or low-income people face and in connecting people across regional and demographic differences through shared experience.

Rights-based claims have been used as an alternative to a paradigm of governance that emphasizes profit motives at the expense of human welfare. Decisions to privatize basic infrastructure and health systems, reduce services, and increase fees are primarily made within a set of fiscal incentives that does not necessarily take into account human impact. In other cases, the pursuit of profits has resulted in the restriction of basic rights through unequal enforcement of laws, such as the forced removal of homeless folks from urban city centers. By framing policy issues as human rights issues, interviewees describe a system of governance that ought to be framed around the experiences of people, rather than profit.

Poverty Is Political, and Political Organizing Is Necessary

Rather than a natural outcome of a just economic system, a set of beliefs or attitudes, or a series of unfortunate circumstances, interviewees describe poverty as an explicitly political problem. Laws and institutions uphold an unequal distribution of rights that benefit some at the expense of others. Political organizing—understood as the process in which a constituency builds power by mobilizing members to act—becomes a necessary tool for eliminating poverty. Most often, traditional political infrastructure doesn’t engage with poor communities. Interviewees expressed criticism of the Democratic and Republican parties’ efforts to take poverty seriously.

Political organizing is essential for reframing poverty as a political issue. Uniting common experiences across demographic differences is a major obstacle for organizations, with perhaps the most emphasized difference being between rural and urban areas. Most nonprofit organizations are located in cities, with rural areas and small towns lacking access to community organizing groups. This imbalance is often credited to the density of urban areas, which makes outreach more efficient. Interviewees articulate real differences in terms of living in an unincorporated area compared to a metropolitan city and named policies designed to benefit one setting over another. Nonetheless, interviewees expressed a need to link impactful economic processes, such as public divestment, unemployment, deindustrialization, and redistribution of wealth, across urban and rural landscapes. These experiences are often mutually shared and can form a basis for solidarity. As Catherine Flowers of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise states:

The water issues we see in Standing Rock are connected to the ones we see in places like Flint, in Detroit, and in Lowndes County. Traveling to California, I saw migrant farm communities with poisoned water. In Arizona, people’s water has been poisoned by uranium … they try this in poor communities first, because there is going to be fewer resistance, and they don’t have as much of a voice. But ultimately, what these people are talking about is sinister and it’s going to impact everybody.

Policy Recommendations

Given the preceding analysis, three strategic approaches can be identified that, if pursued meaningfully and at an appropriate scale, can dramatically reduce the extent of poverty and inequality in America. All three are broad categories of policy recommendations and are meant to operate in tandem.

Reinvest in the Social Safety Net

The Poor People’s Campaign has pushed for a set of policies that would expand the social safety net and promote economic security and opportunity through public investment. According to activists interviewed by the project, reinvestment in the social safety net is the number one policy recommendation for reducing poverty and inequality. The Poor People’s Campaign has positioned living wage laws, a guaranteed income, and a federal full-employment program as the backbone of an expanded, twenty-first century public policy agenda to address poverty. Free tuition for public higher education, single-payer universal health care, reinvestment and expansion for public housing, and relief from household, consumer, and student debt are additional pillars. Although rarely considered a part of the social safety net, the Poor People’s Campaign emphasizes criminal justice reform, immigration reform, military divestment abroad and at home, and a just transition to 100 percent renewable energy as part of a comprehensive agenda for reducing poverty and inequality. Although not exclusively so, funding sources are linked to a redesigned progressive income and wealth and corporate tax plan.

Demands for equal pay for equal work, equal treatment and service for people with disabilities, and equity in public school and community funding are emphasized as a means to address discrimination and exclusion. Additional universal programs that could strengthen the social safety net and reduce racial and gender inequality include a progressively structured “baby bonds” program, universal childcare, and paid family leave. Adopting a set of principles for policy design that are grounded in the interests and capabilities of those who are most in need of assistance is necessary for any universal social welfare program.

Institute a Human Rights Approach for Accessing Poverty in America

While supplemental policy measure data has improved the measurement of poverty, its method is still hampered by the use of income thresholds. Fundamentally, incomes operate as a means for achieving a dignified standard of living at a moment in time. Its instrumental nature limits its effectiveness for assessing the actual fulfillment of people’s needs and the quality of their lives over time. As economist Amartya Sen writes, “If life consists of various things that people are able to do or be (such as being able to live long, to be in good health, to be able to read and write, and so on), then it is the capability to function that has to be put at the center stage of assessment.”¹¹ If poverty is understood as the absence of basic human fulfillments, then a human-rights based measurement is needed to assess poverty in the United States. A federally backed initiative to measure the extent to which people in the United States are incapable of accessing basic needs is the second policy recommendation. This recommendation is in line with interviewees who emphasized a human-rights framework for conceptualizing health care, housing, and other basic needs.

Central to the goals of many interviewees, a positivist human-rights framework inherently contains a theory of justice that emphasizes universality, capacity, and human well-being prioritized over private profit. The United Nations Development Program Human Development Report represents a prominent capabilities approach for measuring poverty that could be incorporated in the United States.¹² This measurement would serve two functions: First, if properly funded, it would provide a more complete estimate of the extent to which individuals are living in poverty. Second, a human-rights based approach for measuring poverty could provide a new basis for holding relevant actors responsible for decisions that reduce essential human capabilities, such as municipalities and private firms that shut off residents’ water.

Promote Policies That Increase Political Power for Poor or Low-Income People.

As emphasized in interviews, poverty is not only an economic circumstance, but a political position, one in which individuals are disproportionately excluded from political decision making. Currently, there are a number of barriers that limit the role of poor or low-income people in electoral politics. The elimination of voter suppression and disenfranchisement laws, comprehensive voter registration, campaign finance reform, and the strengthening of labor unions have all been identified by the Campaign as important policies for increasing political power for people living in poverty.

Research suggests that institutional change and the promotion of social equality are directly linked to the extent to which poor and low-income people are organized or able to engage in collective action.¹³ Simultaneously, people’s patterns of political engagement are partially shaped by their interactions with public programs.¹⁴ While policies that aim to reduce barriers to participation in electoral politics are essential, so, too, are policies that create opportunities for direct political engagement. Revising and expanding the role of community action programs under a rubric of community organizing would serve as a direct source of political power for individuals who are most marginalized from today’s political process.

While policies that aim to reduce barriers to participation in electoral politics are essential, so, too, are policies that create opportunities for direct political engagement.

The work of Community Action Agencies, originally formed in the 1960s, has substantially changed over time.¹⁵ Today, most programs primarily operate as a means for connecting individuals with service providers and for developing new service programs. In addition to this work, a principle of political empowerment that emphasizes leadership development, strategic planning, and network building could be adopted as a means for increasing coordinated political action.¹⁶ Such a principle would harken back to the original “maximum feasible participation” mandate that originally governed the initiative. A reinvigorated Community Action Program approach would fund fully trained community organizers, work across regions to leverage political power at the appropriate level of governance, and use various methods of community outreach to ensure political accountability. Working within the existing network of over a thousand Community Action Agencies, these efforts could serve to bridge divides across geography through an increase in funding for regional coordination.

While all three sets of policy recommendations may be politically infeasible in the current moment, revising Community Action Programs may be the least feasible. This is primarily due to the fact that resources needed for this program would come from a set of structures that would be both targeted for change and also invested in maintaining the political status quo. Nonetheless, anti-poverty programs have, at certain moments, historically guided resources toward successful political organizing.¹⁷

Conclusion

This paper has drawn upon the intellectual and field resources informing the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival in order to generate policy recommendations for reducing poverty and inequality. Poverty is far from a marginal experience in the United States. In fact, it is the extent of this shared experience that may create opportunities for political mobilization. Unemployment, unaffordable health care and housing, rising household and student debt, incarceration, police violence, polluted water, and workplace harassment and sexual assault are just some of the issues that define the struggle of living in poverty. These issues are negotiated through race and gender and are directly related to laws and institutions that perpetuate inequality. Expanding social welfare policies, institutionalizing positivist human rights, and redistributing political power are necessary tasks for reducing poverty and inequality in America.

Appendix: Distribution of Poor and Low Income Population in the U.S.¹⁸

Table 1: Poor or Low-Income Population per State

Table 2: Poor or Low-Income Statistics per State for People of Color¹⁹

Table 3: Poor or Low-Income Statistics per State for Non-Hispanic Whites

Table 4: Poor or Low-income Statistics per State for Women & Girls²⁰

Aaron Noffke is a 2017-18 Millennial Fellow at New America. He would like to thank all of the organizers and activists whose contributions were featured in this project; their work continues to inspire and impress. This includes Shailly Gupta Barnes, whose tireless efforts at the Poor People’s Campaign made this report possible. He would also like to give a major thank you to Melody Frierson and Reid Cramer for managing the Millennial Fellowship and for edits and feedback on multiple projects. Finally, he would like to thank Saurav Sarkar and the entire Institute for Policy Studies team for all of their lessons, kindness, and support.