Edwards presents ‘big ideas’
Candidate addresses U.S., world poverty
By Chelsea Conaboy--Concord Monitor
Friday, March 16, 2007----
Presidential candidate John Edwards spoke about reducing poverty in the United State and around the world at Saint Anselm College in Manchester yesterday. He presented what he called "big ideas" and acknowledged that they could come with a big price tag - more than $5 billion a year, not including his proposal for universal health care in the United States, for which estimates range from $90 billion to $120 billion.
Edwards, who became director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in February 2005, said he will release a detailed budget in the coming weeks, but he called the proposals "completely doable" and necessary.
His ideas included providing the poorest nations with cleaner water and better education, and raising the minimum wage, providing job opportunities for the unemployed and improving schools at home.
"There are still two Americas here at home," he said, referring to a platform on domestic poverty that he spoke of often during his 2004 presidential bid. "And there are two Americas in the world: the America that we aspire to be and has been a light to the world, and the one you've seen too often on the news lately."
Extreme poverty and civil war in African and Muslim countries has decimated school systems, posing not only a moral issue, but also a national security risk, Edwards said.
"A great portion of a generation is being educated in madrassas run by militant extremists rather than in public schools," he said. "As a result, thousands of young people who might once have aspired to be educated in America are being taught to hate America."
Edwards proposed a four-part plan for dealing with global poverty, starting with a "sweeping effort" to bring education to 23 million children in poor countries. He also suggested a worldwide summit on preventative health care in the developing world, providing economic opportunities through the micro-financing of small businesses and hiring a Cabinet member in charge of dealing with global poverty.
The plan would cost about $5 billion a year, the majority of which would be spent on education initiatives, he said.
In the United States, he set the goal of bringing 12 million people out of poverty in the next decade and "eliminating" U.S. poverty within 30 years.
About 37 million people in the United States are living without the basic needs of food and shelter, he said. Children attend classes at still-segregated schools, where there is one system "for people who live in the right neighborhoods and one for everyone else." He said the country needs to "move beyond a focus on testing" and concentrate on attracting and keeping good teachers.
He said he would raise the federal minimum hourly wage from $5.15, where it has been since 1997, to $7.50, create 1 million short-term jobs and boost funding for rural business centers.
Those domestic initiatives would cost about $15 million a year, he said.
He said he would be releasing a detailed budget in the coming weeks.
"These things are not revenue neutral," he said. "We will have to figure out ways to make that revenue up."
Unlike fixing the health care system or addressing global warming, Edwards said, "it is more difficult, honestly, to convince Americans that what we do to do educate kids around the world has value to us. But I think they understand that better than they have in the past because they see these radical violent ideologies and how much potential harm it is to us and to the rest of the world."
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