NATION SHOULD SPEND $720 MILLION A DAY ON ENDING POVERTY, NOT ON IRAQ WAR, QUAKER GROUP SAYS

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(Free-Press-Release.com) August 28, 2007 -- PHILADELPHIA [AUGUST 28] — Congress should redirect the $720 million a day the U.S. is spending on the Iraq war to programs that reduce poverty at home, urged the Philadelphia-based American Friends Service Committee (www.afsc.org), responding to Census Bureau data released today. The Service Committee is a cofounder of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, which helped win the federal raise and numerous state raises.

“For $720 million, we could provide over 400,000 children with health care, or over a million children with free school lunches,” notes Joyce Miller, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) assistant general secretary for justice and human rights. “America’s shameful poverty rate should lead everyone to ask ourselves how we want to spend our tax dollars — on war or on education, health care, job training, affordable housing, and the like.”

About 36.5 million people — over one-third of them children — in the United States are officially “poor,” according to today’s Census Bureau report, which covers data for 2006. The U.S. poverty rate declined slightly from 2005, but remains unacceptably high. Nearly one in eight people, or 12.3% of the population, live in poverty. About one in twenty people, or 5.2%, live in “deep poverty,” with an income less than one-half the poverty threshold.It also shows that median earnings of full-time, year-round workers declined for the third year.

“The data also shows continued inequality and concentration of wealth,” notes Roberta Spivek, the AFSC national representative for economic justice. “On an income-distribution scale, the top twenty percent of households received 50.5% of income, while the lowest twenty percent received just 3.4%.”

“The impact of race, ethnicity and gender is extremely disturbing,” Spivek notes. “Although the Hispanic poverty rate declined about one percent, Blacks and non-white Hispanics are about three times more likely than whites to be poor.”

“Being a single mother also has an alarming effect,” Spivek notes. “More than 28% of female-headed families with no husband present are in poverty, compared to about 5% for married-couple families.”

“Reducing poverty is not rocket science,” Miller notes. “We can go a long way by investing in education, health care, housing and job training; increasing the earned income and child tax credits; transforming minimum wages into living wages; protecting workers’ rights to organize; and strengthening the safety net after six years of Bush administration attacks.”

“President Bush has threatened to veto modest increases in human-needs spending bills this fall because our nation can’t afford it,” Spivek adds. “It’s a question of political will and citizens action. It’s a question of redirecting our resources away from war and tax breaks for the highest-income households, toward the common good.”

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