Dear friends,
This month marks the one-year anniversary of the pandemic stay-at-home orders and the historic threat that COVID-19 posed to our public health and economic wellbeing. While there were 140 million people who were poor or low-income before the pandemic, we also knew that we would witness an acceleration of these crises of poverty, systemic racism and fundamental inequality in our ability to meet our basic needs.
One year later, we have surpassed 500,000 deaths and millions more are sick, hungry and without access to adequate housing, water or health care. Low wage workers are performing essential tasks that are keeping our economy afloat without essential wages. More than 18 million people are receiving unemployment, millions more are taking on unpaid care responsibilities, and we are facing untold emotional and mental distress.
It is amid these intolerable conditions that we celebrate the passage of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and its $1.9 trillion in desperately needed relief. We and other poor people’s organizations have been fighting for many of the key provisions of the ARP for decades. Long before direct cash payments and the child tax credit were popular programs, poor mothers with the Welfare Rights Movement demanded these policies as universal rights: not for just the employed or those deemed “deserving” but for everyone.
Long before direct cash payments and the child tax credit were popular programs, poor mothers with the Welfare Rights Movement demanded these policies as universal rights.
Now, the ARP includes, among other things, the temporary expansion of child tax credits independent of employment, direct relief payments, and the largest investment in child care since World War II. It also includes resources for expanded unemployment insurance, food security programs, housing assistance, public schools, students with disabilities, Head Start, and aid to state, local and tribal governments.
In fact, for the first time in decades, poverty is on the national agenda. As then-candidate Biden said in September 2020 at a Poor People’s Campaign voter protection training, in his administration, “ending poverty will not just be an aspiration. It will be a theory of change to build a new economy.” After months and years of building to this moment, the ARP is an opportunity to show how moral policy is good economics: with these poverty-reducing policies at its core, the ARP will benefit our entire economy.
While the $15 minimum wage was left out of the final bill, years of organizing by low-wage workers has forced a national conversation on raising the minimum wage that will continue in the weeks and months ahead. Indeed, it is significant that the ARP was passed on the national celebration of Harriet Tubman Day, the great freedom fighter who fought long and hard until slavery was ended. To follow in her footsteps means that we recognize that this is just the first of many more steps we must take.
Not only must these policies be made permanent, they must be greatly expanded. We must turn these relief measures into guaranteed adequate incomes, housing, and health care for all. We need debt relief to climb out of this past year and usher in a period of true and widespread economic revival. We must change how we measure poverty, so that our policies moving forward are based on an accurate assessment of the true conditions facing the nation.
This is our mandate, today and everyday.
Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
Director, Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice
Co-Chair, Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival