CONTACT: Lauren Zeyhoue | lauren@kairoscenter.org
Response to President Biden’s State of the Union address from Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Director of the Kairos Center and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
President Joe Biden gave his inaugural State of the Union address on Tuesday in the midst of a pandemic that claimed over 2000 deaths just this week, an inflationary crisis that is throwing poor and low-income households deeper into poverty, a historic attack on democracy and a war unfolding in Ukraine.
The needs and priorities of the nation’s 140 million poor and low-income people, including tens of millions of low-wage workers who have been called essential but treated as expendable, were mainly left out of the President’s address. Although poor and low-income voters turned out in record numbers in the 2020 election, they have been essentially left out of our national politics.
Indeed, despite promises to meet with a diverse delegation of poor and low-income families, economists, faith leaders, voting rights lawyers and others, the Poor People’s Campaign is still waiting for that to happen.
Right now, families across America are unable to afford health care, housing, food, clothes, and other necessities, because the costs of living have outpaced our wages and government programs have been scaled back for decades. Our national priorities have become increasingly oriented around private wealth, corporate profits and war, rather than providing for the general welfare. We do not need more police or wars to make us safe; what we need is health care, living wages, adequate incomes, good public schools, affordable housing, debt relief and access to democracy.
When President Biden addressed Poor People’s Campaign assemblies in September 2020 and June 2021, he promised that his administration would make “ending poverty a theory of change.” He insisted that the nation needed policies that would build this economy from the bottom up and middle out. Yet, his Build Back Better agenda – which included expanding Medicaid, extending the Child Tax Credit, investing in early childhood education, providing paid family and medical leave and other public investments that prioritized poor and low-income people – has stalled in Congress and there was little mention of it in the State of the Union on Tuesday (as Senator Manchin – who has played a significant role blocking the much needed legislation sat with Republican colleagues in the Congressional chamber). This administration has failed to stop evictions, end the filibuster, relieve student debt, or raise the minimum wage to a living wage. In addition, it has allowed for the assault on voting rights to continue – at least 19 states passed voter suppression laws in 2021, impacting up to 55 million voters in those states.
As we have pointed out for years, before the COVID-19 global pandemic, 43.5% of the US population and 52% of children were poor or one emergency away from financial ruin. With the expiration of programs that mostly benefited the poor, we can expect the ranks of the poor and low-income to grow. Already, 3.7 million children have been pushed below the poverty line since the last payment of the Child Tax Credit went out the week before Christmas.
To be clear, poverty is neither inevitable, nor a necessity for an economy to be efficient and productive. It is a policy choice to ignore the needs of nearly one-third of the electorate in order to serve the interests of the 1%. And increased tension and war in the US and across the world must be seen as an enemy of the poor.
This is why the Poor People’s Campaign is calling for a Poor Peoples’ and Low Wage Worker’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls on June 18, 2022 to demand action from politicians. This is more than a day, it’s a declaration from the people of this country that we will not be silent anymore. We have a right to housing, health care, debt free education, fair wages, peace, justice and more.
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Rev. Dr. Theoharis is director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
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