Dear Sharra,
One of my favorite presidential quotes is from President Franklin Roosevelt, inscribed on the Roosevelt memorial in Washington DC:
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
As a nation, we seem to have forgotten those words.
Over the last 48 years we have transferred $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90 percent to the top one percent of Americans. Our public policies routinely make it easier for those who already have enough to get more, and harder for those who do not to even get by.
In the words of the late Supreme Court Justice, "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both."
The concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few leaves most of us without easy access to health, education, or economic opportunity. While our Declaration of Independence declares that government is instituted to secure the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a life of chronic economic anxiety is not a life in which happiness can be pursued.
That is one of the reasons I am running for president. A government should not be guided by the priorities of corporate interests; it should be guided by the priorities of a healthy family. We need to shift from an economic to a humanitarian bottom line.
In the 1970's the average American worker had decent benefits; they could afford a house, a car, a yearly vacation, one parent could stay home with the kids if they chose, and a family could afford to send their kids to college. Since then, however, we've been moving steadily backwards as trickle-down economics has made a few people very, very rich, while far too many people live with a constant fear of becoming poor.
This slide into oligarchy will not end unless we, the people, end it.
We need a massive dose of economic hope and opportunity to put into the life of the average American. While 20 percent of us live relatively well in today's economy, we are surrounded by a sea of economic despair. 68,000 people in this country die every year because they don't have healthcare. 43.5 million Americans have federal student loan debt. 40 percent of all Americans are having a hard time earning enough to pay for rent, food, healthcare, and transportation costs.
Meanwhile, the richest people in America increased their wealth by a total of $6.5 trillion in 2021. Our defense budget is now $858 billion, $45 billion more than what was asked for. Fossil fuel producing companies rake in hundreds of billions in revenue every year, with huge profit margins, yet we still subsidize them by tens of billions of dollars annually.
Again in the words of President Roosevelt, "A necessitous man is not a free man." People are waking up to the immorality of inequality in America, now greater than it has been in 100 years. As sociologist Matthew Desmond wrote recently in The New York Times article America Is in a Disgraced Class of its Own, "Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction. It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death come early and often."
By not eradicating poverty with the swiftness it deserves, we are making the choice that some lives are more valuable than others. That we can deem certain humans expendable for the comfort of others. That prolonged trauma and premature death of many shouldn't upend the luxury of the few.
And we know our political system understands the scope of this crisis. In 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government expanded the Child Tax Credit and unemployment insurance, causing poverty rates to plummet drastically. In less than a year, we reduced child poverty by half. But these measures were only temporary. With their eyes wide open, Washington took an axe to effective and bold policies that helped stabilize the lives of the American people. When the tax credit expired, no one bothered to permanentize it.
Poverty, like much of the suffering in our country, is an unnecessary derivative of soulless economic policy.
Money is not the issue; our problem is legislative recklessness and political corruption.
We can have universal healthcare like they do in every other advanced democracy. We can have free childcare. We can have family and sick pay. We can have tuition-free public colleges and trade schools. We can have a guaranteed living wage. We can enact fair taxes on the wealthy, corporations, and Wall Street, and reduce taxes on working people. These issues are considered moderate positions in every other advanced democracy, and they should be in ours as well.
They can be….
but only when we have a president who is willing to say so.
With gratitude and love,
