Candidate Comparison: Poverty

This is the fourth in a series of posts about where the six front running presidential candidates stand on the issues. The information is from the Pew Forum. Previous posts were on abortion, the Iraq War and Gay Marriage.

---

Hillary Clinton
Clinton accuses the Bush administration of turning the middle class into "invisible Americans," and says if she is elected president, "they will no longer be invisible." In 2002, Clinton was criticized by liberal groups for supporting an increase in the work requirement for welfare; she said that she supported the measure because it was tied to $8 billion in funding of day care for welfare recipients. She advocated for welfare reform under her husband's administration. As a senator, Clinton voted for an increase in the federal minimum wage.

John Edwards
Edwards has made reducing poverty the signature issue of his presidential campaign, calling it "the great moral issue of our time." He has set a goal of ending poverty in 30 years by lifting one-third of the 37 million currently impoverished Americans above the poverty line each decade through a higher minimum wage, tax cuts for low-income workers, universal health care and housing vouchers for low-income families.

Rudolph Giuliani
Giuliani advocates requiring welfare recipients to work or engage in job training to receive benefits. New York City's welfare rolls were cut by more than half while Giuliani was mayor, and he touts his overhaul of the city's welfare system as one of his major successes. During his 2000 senate campaign, Giuliani indicated that he would support an increase in the minimum wage if studies showed it would not reduce the number of available jobs.

John McCain
McCain voted for a 1996 welfare reform bill that required more work for recipients and placed limits on the amount of time they could receive benefits. Although McCain voted for a bill to increase the federal minimum wage in February 2007, he has historically voted against minimum wage increases, arguing that they can hurt small businesses.

Barack Obama
In the Illinois Senate, Obama helped author the state earned income tax credit, which provided tax cuts for low-income families. Obama has supported bills to increase the minimum wage. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes what he calls America's "empathy deficit," writing that a "stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society."

W. Mitt Romney
As Massachusetts governor, Romney proposed a plan requiring more people to work in order to receive state welfare benefits, bringing Massachusetts policy in line with federal welfare reforms. He supports increasing the minimum wage in line with inflation, but vetoed a bill to raise it in Massachusetts, saying it called for increases that were too extreme and too abrupt.

---

I echo Edwards' sentiments calling poverty "the great moral issue of our time." It is an issue that should, for believers anyway, trump other issues but probably will not because it is not as definable as other issues like abortion and gay marriage. It is sad how, in the past, Republican candidates have aligned themselves with corporate executives and have given the appearance of being pro-business but anti-labor. Possibly that will change in this election.