Complete Interview: The Temperature Transcends Race
(Page 3 of 7)
Mar-.Apr. 2008
interview by Hannah Lobel
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What do you mean by “a whole different way of being in the world”?
It means, for example, that if you’re going to go take on a challenge like concentrated poverty, you’ve got a take a cold hard look at what the factors are driving it. Traditionally, the left has looked at poverty and had a kind of corporate conspiracy explanation or reduced it to racism or globalization and deindustrialization. And on the right, conservatives have reduced concentrated poverty to things like culture or welfare dependency. A more holistic approach would understand that there are a number of factors driving the persistence of poverty and that we need to be taking all of them very seriously, even when they might lead us to some fairly uncomfortable conclusions.
The left has not really yet come to grips with how destructive past government social policies have been, including welfare. The first people to tell you about the destructive impact of welfare would be people living in poor communities of color. But I think most liberals and progressives haven’t really dealt with how badly designed many of those government programs were. [Bill] Clinton had welfare reform in 1996, which aimed to restrict how long any individual could receive welfare payments, but what he never did was to really create a new social contract that would reward work.
We argue in Break Through that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should have good health care, you should have retirement security, and you should have very high quality care for children—what we call early childhood education. Those things do not exist. The green jobs agenda has to marry itself to an agenda aimed at a new social contract, one that is focused on expanding assets and rewarding work.
Those are wonky terms. What do you mean by “expanding assets,” “rewarding work,” and a “new social contract”? What do they look like?
Well, this is a big challenge and the truth is I don’t have a huge number of answers around what the policies look like. One idea that has been kicked around for a number of years but has never really been advanced politically is the idea of a baby bond, where every baby born in the United States would get somewhere between $3,000 and $6,000 in a savings account that he or she could not spend until he or she becomes 18, at which point the money would have grown if it were invested at, say, 5 percent a year. That money could then be spent when the child turns 18 on going to college, starting a business, or perhaps even buying a home.
One of the big barriers and obstacles to equality, one of the great disparities, is that whites have greater assets than African Americans. And that’s persisted in the 40 years since desegregation. And assets are important, because if you have even a small amount of wealth you feel more secure; you’re more able to take risks like starting a business; you’re more capable of paying your way through college. An asset-based policy like baby bonds is not welfare; it’s something that both empowers the individual but also seeks to remedy long-standing disparities between African Americans and whites.
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