America we need to talk

Are you depressed, America? Seriously depressed? Clinically, perhaps suicidally, depressed?

Well, just cheer up, will you? Buck up. Smile. Get your shit together. Get back to work.

Focus on the positive! Think of Pharrell Williams. Rainbows. Unicorns. Flowers. Preferably all at the same time.^a As well-known sage Dolly Parton once admonished, “Smile! It increases your face value!”^b

Of course it didn’t work. Clinical depression is usually caused by a biochemical imbalance, a deep physiological or psychological trauma, or crushing life circumstances—and often a combination of two or three of those things. True depression can’t be overcome merely by thinking positive thoughts or even by reading a zillion self-help books (including this one). Depression can only be ameliorated through carefully targeted medicines, effective psychological therapy, lots of exercise and self-care, or a concrete improvement in life circumstances—and often requires a combination of those solutions.

In fact, the very worst advice you can give someone suffering from depression is to “cheer up.” Don’t believe me? Well, try saying that to a loved one who is depressed and see how that works in your relationship. Go ahead. Do it. I’ll wait.

Likewise, the very worst advice our leaders can give you, a depressed nation, is to merely be optimistic and “believe in the American dream.” Telling a country that has lost its middle class to cheer up is like telling someone who just lost his or her spouse to hurry up and marry someone else and, for crying out loud, quit moping. That’s why Americans are so angry at our leaders that we’ve essentially told them to sleep on the couch, or even worse, force them to sit in a debate green room with Donald Trump.

While experts believe that personal depression is often caused or exacerbated by physiological chemical imbalances, it is often the case that behavioral factors and life challenges play significant roles. If your husband dies or your company lays you off, you should be depressed, at least for a while.

That’s why depression is often defined as “learned helplessness,” a condition under which people feel that circumstances utterly beyond their control are in charge of their lives.

And when you, America, feel that you are no longer in control of your own destiny and national decline seems inevitable and irreversible, the entire country sinks into a funk. Personal and national depression are, in the end, about a lack of hope.

Now, mind you, feathers can be problematic. They tickle and itch. They make you sneeze. They can smell. After a really hard-fought pillow fight, they are impossible to vacuum.

But anyway, many people, from Emily Dickinson to Liberace, love—really love—feathers.^c

I get it. Feathers are colorful. They’re frivolous. They represent a lightness of spirit and the ability to instantaneously fly—and most of all, they represent the opportunity to get away from it all and leave your dreary circumstances behind.

So yes, while clinically depressed individuals may need pharmaceuticals and professional counseling, above all we need feathers. We need hope.

But real hope won’t come from holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.” Real hope will come when Americans know, truly know, that concrete, tangible improvements in their daily living conditions—and in the futures of their children—are attainable.

We know what happens when people—and particularly those who are oppressed because they are low-income, of color, LGBTQ, or women—are denied hope. As Langston Hughes said, they fester, rot, then explode. They shoot each other in Baltimore. They commit suicide on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. They riot in Ferguson. They go on a shooting rampage at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. They take crystal meth in Appalachia.

Since a main cause of depression is helplessness, it should be no shock that low-income Americans—who have the least control over their destinies—have higher rates of depression and other forms of mental illness (often untreated) than wealthier Americans.

The only thing worse about living in poverty than having no money is having no hope.

You have no hope to get a job that will pay for your rent and your food. No hope that your heat and hot water will stay on the entire winter. No hope that you will be treated fairly by the criminal justice system. No hope that you’ll live as long as the rich people in the fancy part of town. No hope for a promotion or a better neighborhood.

And while plenty of wealthy Americans commit crimes, are violent, lack initiative, and abuse alcohol and drugs—and while most low-income Americans never commit crimes, are peaceful, work hard (at one or more jobs), stay away from drugs, and only moderately use alcohol—the hard truth is that Americans living in poverty are somewhat more likely than the rich to engage in self-destructive behavior. There are many complicated reasons why, including the very-present and ever-harmful impacts of racism, sexism, and classism. But the two central reasons why low-income Americans can be more likely to self-destruct are actually pretty simple: lack of money and lack of hope. Their relationship with you, America, is fundamentally ruptured. And once again, America, it’s mostly your fault.

America, you force low-income people to bow to the daily whims of a vast web of governmental and nonprofit social service agencies. Although created with mostly good intentions—and staffed largely by idealists who are sincerely trying to help—these massive bureaucracies are often called “command-and-control structures” because their detailed rules and regulations radiate from centralized federal administrative offices to centralized state administrative offices to city or county offices and then to neighborhood offices that actually serve clients. At each stop along the way, the bureaucracies accumulate inertia and further slow their actions. Collectively, these government and nonprofit agencies employ hundreds of thousands of people. They usually utilize antiquated, staff-heavy organizational structures and rarely employ the most modern technologies. While most aspects of modern living have been utterly transformed by technological improvements, visiting a government social service office is often like stepping back in time to 1970.^d

Robert L. Woodson, Sr., a black conservative anti-poverty activist, has written, “Since the War on Poverty was launched in the 1960s, a virtual poverty-industrial complex has emerged, staffed by armies of psychologists, social workers, and counselors . . . Priorities have followed from government grant possibilities, which has meant that providers are rewarded not for solving problems but, in effect, for proliferating them: The larger and more diversified the problem set is, the larger the grants and salaries must be, and the more extensive the staff to justify it all.”⁴⁶

While Woodson wildly exaggerates the percentage of funding that goes into bureaucratic overhead instead of benefits, and consistently overlooks the tremendous successes of safety net programs, there’s a kernel of truth to his point. While government program managers are mostly woefully underpaid, some heads of “nonprofit” social services groups now earn more than the $400,000 annual salary of the US president. While it is doubtful that many people who work in this system purposely perpetuate poverty to keep their jobs, the deeply entrenched nature of the social service status quo makes it far more difficult for people within it to envision and fight for fundamental overhauls of the system.

Meanwhile, America, you consistently provide your most vulnerable residents with sub-par service. If a wealthy dowager or even a middle-class electrician walks into a department store and applies for a credit card, he or she can usually be approved for credit on the spot. Yet, if a hungry person walks into a government social service agency to apply for SNAP, the state or county can, under federal law, take up to 30 days to determine whether they are poor enough to get benefits. That 30-day deadline was created in 1977, before e-mail was available and when bureaucracies still communicated through tan internal mail envelopes, which inexplicably had air holes.^e

Not only do such old-style systems take precious time away from struggling families while denying them needed benefits, they cost taxpayers a bundle due to their inefficiency. (Even nonprofit agencies are usually funded by government grants and contracts, and are subsidized through funders that receive tax deductions for donating to them, so they also waste taxpayer dollars when they are also behind the times and inefficient.)

Perhaps the most harmful defining feature of the social service status quo is the passivity forced on its recipients. If you live in poverty, you usually must go exactly where others want you to go, do what they want you to do, and do so at the precise time they want you to do it. You must quietly wait in line, rarely being told how long the experience will take, and even more rarely given an appointment so you can come back at a time convenient for you. You must accept whatever paltry amount of food, money, or other assistance is offered, and you must act grateful for that on top of it all.

America, the people who staff your more than 40,000 nonprofit soup kitchens and food pantries nationwide are extraordinarily big-hearted people. Most are unpaid volunteers. Many have been volunteering for decades and often take money out of their own pockets to feed their neighbors, even though they frequently come from modest means themselves. These emergency food programs help, just a bit, to fill in the holes in the government safety net, and the lives of hungry families would be even worse without them. Cherish and honor these selfless servants, America.

But at the same time, we must also consider what life is like on the receiving end for the people obtaining such services. At even the best-run food charities, getting help is usually a demeaning, disempowering experience. Clients are often forced to accept pre-selected food that someone else picked out for them, whether the recipient has a special medically restricted diet, whether they have no cooking facilities, or whether they happen to hate rice and beans. The system turns adults into infants, requiring someone else to feed them. And too few of the programs empower the recipients to help run or staff the programs.

Likewise in government programs, low-income Americans are also usually passive recipients of aid. Some programs incredibly discourage recipients from pursuing higher education. The system tries to create co-dependency of the worst sort, dampening down the natural desire of people to work hard, use their ingenuity, and express their independence. So much for men and women fighting for their own dignity and humanity. The message you send, America, is something very different: Just go away. Just give up. Or remain an infant forever, but one we never have to look at or think about. Despite all these obstacles, many impoverished Americans are so strong and so determined that they are somehow able to maintain their self-respect and continue to fight for their futures despite all attempts to strip them of both, but it’s a constant struggle.

Dr. Mariana Chilton is a progressive anti-poverty researcher who created a pioneering program in Philadelphia to empower low-income women to document their own lives in photographs and helped them speak out to the media and to elected officials to call for policy improvements. She has said that she’s learned from her work that the “welfare system is a form of slavery.” Some on the far Right also use the word “slavery” in relation to the social service safety net.⁴⁷ ^f Unlike conservatives who claim any problems with the safety net are caused by the recipients’ laziness and dependency, Chilton argues the root causes of programmatic dysfunction are “racism, discrimination, and misogyny.” It is notable, though, that both sides agree that the anti-poverty status quo is fundamentally broken.

Even the most well-intentioned efforts can have unintended negative results. One example is the growing trend for food charities to create “backpack programs” through which low-income children receive school backpacks filled with canned and boxed food to take home to eat over weekends and vacations.^g What could possibly be wrong with something so positive? After all, hungry kids are fed. But few of the sponsors of these programs stop to think about the impact upon the parents. It’s one thing for their kids to eat someone else’s food when they’re away at school or at a summer meals site, but it’s another thing entirely for their kids to eat someone else’s charity food in their own homes. Many parents are surely grateful for this help, but, somewhere in the backs of their minds, they are being forcefully reminded that they are incapable of providing for their own children. Researcher Edward A. Frongillo, Jr. has found that hungry children sometimes falsely tell their parents they are full so their hungry parents will eat the food that is remaining. Imagine the humiliation and pain that a hungry parent must suffer when he or she is forced to choose between: a) sitting by while their children eat but they themselves don’t eat, or b) or asking their children to share a little bit of their food with them. Many hungry parents do indeed go without eating themselves to ensure that there is enough food for the children, but backpack programs only exacerbate that horrible parental dilemma. The parent-child relationship is turned upside-down. In addressing one problem (kids without food over a weekend or vacation), such programs sometimes create other, different problems, sapping families of pride and will.

Economic and psychological forces are always intertwined. For economically struggling Americans, the inability to earn enough money to support their families simply crushes hope.

I continue to preach that progressives must propose a fundamentally new way of governing—using mainstream values to achieve progressive goals. Core to such radical centrism is replacing the politics of resentment with what I call “aspirational politics”—which would convince Americans—including middle-class families who worry about falling into poverty, low-income families trying to climb into the middle class, and new immigrants looking to grab a slice of the economic pie—that their hard work will once again (as it did in previous generations) pay off with a chance to fulfill the hopes and dreams to which they aspire.

While the most obvious difference between wealthy and non-wealthy Americans is that the non-rich earn less income, an even far bigger difference is that the non-wealthy have bigger debt loads, own less, and have miniscule financial assets. Half of all Americans have zero net worth. According to the Pew Research Center, “the gap between America’s upper-income and middle-income families has reached its highest level on record. In 2013, the median wealth of the nation’s upper-income families ($639,400) was nearly seven times the median wealth of middle-income families ($96,500), the widest wealth gap in 30 years since the Federal Reserve began collecting this data. America’s upper-income families have a median net worth that is nearly 70 times that of the country’s lower-income families, also the widest wealth gap between these families in 30 years.”⁴⁸ The wealth and home ownership gaps by race are even vaster. America, your income gap is a deep valley, but your wealth gap is the Grand Canyon.

When wealthy and upper-middle-class families have assets to fall back on if they are down on their luck, they can always sell a boat, cash in an investment, or draw down on a savings account. But when people with debt instead of assets are down on their luck, they have no cushion, much less a full sofa of support, to fall back on.

Wealth usually generates more wealth, and poverty usually fosters more poverty. Of the wealthiest fifth of Americans, 87 percent own their own homes; of the lowest-income fifth of Americans, only 39 percent do.⁴⁹ When you pay down a mortgage for your home, you usually build up a long-term investment for your own family, but when you pay rent, all you are doing is increasing the wealth of your landlord’s family.

Due to the magic of compounded interest, people who start with a lot of money in the bank almost always end up with a lot more money in the bank. The stock market has always risen over time, and real estate values almost always increase. In contrast, people in poverty have to pay extra for basic things, such as check-cashing services, furniture rentals, and storage facilities.

Public policies only widen this divide. The Corporation for Enterprise Development has found that more than half of the $400 billion provided annually in federal asset-building subsidies—policies intended to promote homeownership, retirement savings, economic investment, and access to college—flow to the wealthiest 5 percent of taxpaying households. Meanwhile, the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers receive only 4 percent of these benefits, and the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers receive almost nothing. Black and Latino households are disproportionately among those receiving little or no benefit. Unless key policies are restructured, the racial wealth gap—and wealth inequality in general—will continue to grow.⁵⁰

For instance, the federal mortgage interest tax deduction cost US taxpayers about $76 billion in 2015. Households with incomes between $40,000 and $75,000 obtained average tax savings of just $523, while households with incomes above $250,000 enjoyed an average write-off of $5,459, or more than 10 times as much.⁵¹ Families who are too poor to own a home get no help at all from this program, yet billionaires can also take deductions for a vacation home in addition to their primary home.

In order to eliminate US poverty once and for all—and build a harmonious, long-term relationship between struggling families and the nation—we need to enable all families to accumulate assets and move from owing to owning.

America, you could move beyond your current stalemate in poverty politics by enacting an “Aspiration Empowerment Agenda,” which would give all families the opportunity to advance their dreams through learning, earning, and saving their way out of poverty. We must move beyond the conservatives’ selective focus on those rare stories of poor people who climb their way out of poverty, supposedly on their own, against all odds, just as we must move beyond the limited liberal focus on those rare people with so many problems they can’t possibly move to self-sufficiency no matter how much help they get. We need a clearheaded new approach, based on the reality that the majority of struggling Americans could climb out—and stay out—of poverty, but only with significant help.

The basic idea of empowering low-income people to develop assets has been around for decades and has been advanced by a number of national and grassroots organizations. But we need to go bigger and bolder, fully realizing our “Responsibility-for-All” ideal. A full Aspiration Empowerment Agenda would provide an array of government-funded benefits and work supports at levels higher than what is available today, sufficient to enable low-income families to develop assets and move out of poverty. The agenda would emphasize the importance of personal responsibility for all members of society (including the wealthiest), but also design public policies that reward—not punish—low-income people for positive behavior.

All federal and state social programs and tax provisions would need to be reformed to ensure that they aid low- and moderate-income Americans, not just those at the top. As Lauryn Hill put it, “We need to change the focus from the richest to the brokest.” We must also make it easier for all families—including those that obtain means-tested benefits—to save their money so they can pay for a down payment on a first home, start a business, pay for higher education for their children, or build a retirement account. We should eliminate provisions in means-tested social programs that automatically kick people off the rolls when they get raises at their jobs, get better jobs, or save money, and replace them with benefits that taper off slowly as people achieve greater economic security.

One example of the assets accumulation concept is the federal Individual Development Account (IDA) program, proposed by Professor Michael Sherraden, popularized by the Progressive Policy Institute (which gave me my first job in DC), and enacted into law in the 1990s by an ideological odd couple: then-President Bill Clinton and then-chair of the House Budget Committee (and later governor of Ohio), archconservative John Kasich. These accounts enable low-income families to match their own savings with funds from government and private sector sources in order to save for job training, home ownership, or business start-ups. Unfortunately, IDAs are still only available in a few dozen small pilot locations, and too few people have been able to utilize the existing IDAs because most people in poverty now lack even minimal disposable incomes to save. Furthermore, even though IDA projects are very labor-intensive to operate, most of the money given to nonprofit groups to run them is set aside for the benefits themselves, with little or no administrative funding going to the organizations. Thus, whether the country continues to use IDAs—or creates another type of savings-matching program—the federal government should make such accounts universally available as a benefit for people in poverty, both increasing the matching funds for families and also providing more realistic funding for administrative support to the entities that operate such efforts.

America, your national leaders should also create a federal “Kids Accounts” program in which every child born in the nation automatically receives a savings account with a small deposit in it. Each child’s parents would be provided long-term incentives (with additional rewards for low-income families) to save more for education, job training, home purchases, or retirement. In the United Kingdom, a Labour government created such a program in 2005, but it was scrapped by the Conservatives there in 2011 in order to save money over the short-term, well before the program could prove its long-term advantages. If such a program was created in the US and if it were truly universal, then it could earn broad-based support from the public, as has been the case with other universal programs, such as Social Security.^h If you want to prove that you value all your children, America, put your money where your mouth is, and enable all kids to start their lives with a nest egg.

The assets agenda proposed here would also build upon the good work that some state and local governments and nonprofit groups are already conducting to ensure greater availability of low-cost banking services. We must also crack down on payday loans, high-fee check-cashing facilities, and other financial services that rip off poor folks.

America, you should also dramatically ramp up governmental and private efforts to provide microloans to start very small businesses, so-called “microenterprises.” Helping someone open his or her own shoeshine stand or sidewalk food cart or home-based computer repair service could help budding entrepreneurs enter the economic mainstream and perhaps later expand their efforts by hiring employees. What’s more American than a Chinese fried dumpling truck, growing into a brick-and-mortar restaurant, and then expanding into a chain of restaurants across a city or even across the entire country, turning an immigrant family with very little means into a financially secure household name?ⁱ

I’ll even agree with the conservative critique that too many people starting out in trades and starting small businesses face too many government licensing requirements and that some regulatory and tax burdens are too heavy. Worker and public safety, wage protection, and environmental regulations should be tougher than ever, but any regulations or fees that are more about earning income for the government and protecting jobs for bureaucrats should be rolled back. (Happy now, Koch brothers?)

If all these steps are taken together, the agenda would be both revolutionary in its ambition and mainstream in its values. The goal is to give all families the tools they need to achieve and maintain at least a middle-class lifestyle—with a good job, a safe place to live, and a hopeful future for their kids and grandkids.

In a “normal” political climate, efforts such as these, which promote both personal responsibility and economic opportunity, would be supported by liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike as bold, common-sense solutions to poverty. But these are not normal political times. Even reasonable, mainstream reforms are now doomed by the nation’s political paralysis, which is caused mostly by the intractability and illogic of the Right. That’s why, in other chapters, this book argues that it is the job of every American to take concrete actions to fix our political system.

Beyond the challenging politics of getting an assets agenda implemented, a major caveat to this type of program is that, even if it is fully enacted, an assets agenda will only work in the context of broader economic and poverty policies that increase what people earn and decrease what they pay for basic necessities. For instance, if a family earns $20,000 per year in salaries but pays $24,000 in rent, then not only won’t they be able to develop assets, they will go into debt. Thus, an absolute prerequisite for assets building to succeed is ensuring more jobs, higher wages, and an adequate safety net that helps families afford necessities such as food, housing, childcare, utilities, transportation, healthcare, medicine, and clothing.

America, the time is long overdue for you to replace the failing, antiquated social service landline status quo with an up-to-date smartphone benefits access system. We must use modern technologies and business practices to simplify the lives and boost the long-term self-sufficiency of our most struggling neighbors. One powerful way to do this is for our federal, state, and local governments to create HOPE (Health, Opportunity, and Personal Empowerment) accounts and action plans that I am proposing here. Building upon the Assets Empowerment Agenda, a HOPE program can transform national anti-poverty activities by incorporating both a liberal focus on economic mobility and investments in proven safety net programs with a conservative focus on personal responsibility and reduced bureaucracy. Most critically, HOPE would enable the lowest-income families to simultaneously obtain both economic resources and a long-term vision for prosperity and happiness. This proposal would help strapped Americans dream big dreams again, and access the resources and tools necessary to make those dreams a reality. “Responsibility-for-All” isn’t just rhetoric; putting it into action would not only increase hope and confidence but would also give everyone a stake in their country’s future.

Here’s how HOPE would work: The federal government would authorize HOPE accounts and action plans that combine improved technology, streamlined case management, and coordinated access to multiple federal, state, city, and nonprofit programs. Participating low-income workers could voluntarily choose to also have their paychecks deposited directly into the accounts, which would be held by private banks and credit unions that volunteered to participate in the program. Families could also use the accounts to increase their savings, which would be matched by government and private sources, incorporating both IDAs and Kids Accounts. Job training and placement services would be modernized to connect real people with real jobs, and the locations of such services would be easily accessed through the accounts online. All these efforts would work together in harmony to better give people in poverty the tools they need to take charge of their futures and to implement long-term plans to climb into—and stay in—the middle class. If the federal government fails to do so, states or localities could step up to the plate with similar programs.

Specifically, HOPE accounts would enable families to use any smartphone, tablet, or computer to learn about the public and philanthropic programs for which they are eligible—including aid to improve health, nutrition, job training and placement, housing, income, etc.—and then apply for all of these programs at once from the convenience of their device. If supporting documents need to be submitted with the application, then families could take pictures of those documents and submit the pictures with the application. A surprising number of low-income people already have smartphones and/or home computers, not because they are luxuries, but because they are essential tools of learning and working in modern America. But families that don’t own a smartphone, tablet, or computer could be provided one, along with a subsidized low-cost Internet or cell phone data access plan.^j Those who are uncomfortable with or unable to use technology could go to a library, government office, or nonprofit agency to be helped through the system. For the elderly, people who are homebound, or who otherwise who can’t access the technology for any reason, government or nonprofit employees and/or AmeriCorps national service participants (or Service Patriots America members) could make home visits to help. As noted previously, our existing national service program should be expanded dramatically to aid these and other vital efforts.

To make it easier to access healthcare, HOPE accounts could also clearly specify medical benefits and any out-of-pocket costs in plain language for each of the user’s eligible health plans and empower participants to easily select the plan that works best for them.

The accounts would also enable working families to file for federal EITC refunds, and in states and localities with their own supplemental EITC payments low-income taxpayers could simultaneously file for those as well. Since the accounts will already have posted online all the financial information needed to file for those payments, families could easily do so with this program, thereby saving the time and money they would otherwise have to spend on third-party tax filing services.

Technology has fundamentally revamped the lives of most Americans, usually for the better. Now it’s time for technology to also revolutionize the lives of our lowest-income inhabitants.

While HOPE accounts are a new idea, the concept builds upon existing programs, such as the IDA program, and incorporates technological improvements in social services delivery that some forward-thinking states, cities, and counties are already implementing. For example, in New York City, the government is already using updated technologies to allow families to apply online for multiple government benefits through a portal called “Access NYC”,⁵² which allows users to pre-screen their eligibility for an array of government programs and provides online applications for some. New York has even started a pilot project to allow people to apply for SNAP and cash assistance (but not other programs) by smartphone. But even in New York, the number of benefits to which someone can actually apply online remains limited, and applicants still must follow different procedures and timelines to access different programs and still must visit or call multiple offices before the various application processes are completed.

Building on such innovations, but moving beyond them, HOPE accounts would enable families to rapidly apply for—and quickly learn if they are accepted into—all federal, state, and local government programs, as well as offer users information for a wide variety of services provided by nonprofit groups. HOPE accounts would also include a calculator system to help families understand the financial impact of receiving one benefit upon other possible benefits they may be getting.

All program benefit funds would go into the same system, with healthcare, food, housing, and other specific benefits accounted for separately from the cash. Overall funding for these safety net programs should be at the very least maintained, or preferably increased. Federal entitlements, such as SNAP or Medicaid, are benefits that must be given to anyone who qualifies; the programs do not require annual appropriations from Congress and the amount spent by the feds increases when our country goes through tough economic times and shrinks when more people are able to work and support themselves. Under my suggested system, these benefits would continue to be classified as entitlements, which people would still have a legal right to obtain.

Families would also be encouraged to put their own cash savings into the accounts, which could then be matched by the government. Any cash in the account set aside for education, job training, starting a business, or buying a home would be non-taxable. Sure, that’s a bit complicated, but it’s still a heck of a lot easier for a family than figuring all this out on their own, considering they would be filing their taxes through the program as well. And if they still need help, some government and nonprofit social workers would remain available to help them navigate the system.

HOPE accounts would allow low-income families to easily access and monitor—in one central online account—the status, amounts, and recertification deadlines for all their benefits and savings. They could also use the accounts to pay all bills online, saving outrageous check-cashing fees and enormous amounts of time traveling to pay bills in cash.

The accounts could also include a budgeting function to give families real-time cash flow data and long-term financial planning information, including helping calculate how much they would lose in interest on credit cards versus how much they would gain in interest by saving more. The accounts would offer a calendar and scheduling function, enabling families to keep track of all job search, work, family, and school obligations, as well as any social service filing or appointment dates.^k

Instead of a vast army of government and nonprofit caseworkers in charge of micromanaging the lives of poor people, low-income adults would become, in effect, their own case managers. With this newfound power, people would be able spread their wings and take flight.

But to intrude on this love fest just as bit, America, I have to admit that these new apps and social service computer systems will be extraordinarily challenging to build and even more challenging to integrate with each other, especially given the current, antiquated state of government social service computer systems, as well as how much the feds botched the launch of the Obamacare web site. To further complicate matters, these new systems must combine ease of client access with very strict protections against fraud and theft, not easy considerations to balance. That’s why the nation’s top tech leaders and companies would need to challenge themselves to work together with government to make this a reality. Dear Mr. Gates, Zuckerberg, or Bezos: if you successfully accomplish this, we’ll add you to Mt. Rushmore—or if you prefer, we’ll carve a new monument near Silicon Valley on one of the Santa Cruz Mountains.^l Alternatively, the White House could direct a competition—with input from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Agriculture—that would provide an additional monetary reward for the company that built the best app to fuse all these programs.

Helping struggling families save time and money is a good start, America, but that’s not enough: they still need clear aspirations for the future. That’s why low-income Americans should be given the option of partnering in more depth with government and nonprofit organizations by voluntarily agreeing to long-term HOPE action plans that will specify exactly how all parties will work together to help the families earn, learn, and save better in order to ensure greater economic opportunity for themselves and their children. The idea behind the action plans is to ensure that all the programs and people involved are working together in a long-term, positive relationship for the purpose of ensuing upward mobility.

How might a HOPE action plan work in real life? In direct contrast to plans proposed by Paul Ryan that would force families to sign contracts to take actions that would waste their time and sap their dignity while giving them no additional resources to solve their concrete problems, HOPE action plans would be voluntary and could empower families who agree to them to better organize their time and focus their activities on productive endeavors while providing them extra resources to do so. Some plans could be short-term, over just a year or two, aimed at helping families achieve very basic goals, such as avoiding homelessness and hunger. But they could be long-term as well, with far more ambitious goals for upward mobility.

For example, a single mother of two young children could voluntarily enter into a 10-year plan jointly with her city government’s social service agency and with a local United Way. The plan would include yearly benchmarks of how the mother would use increased resources provided by the plan to boost her jobs skills, increase her earnings, improve the housing situation for her family, obtain more nutritious food, and begin to put money aside to help her children pay for college. Once the specific goals are set, the specific actions each entity would be required to take in order for the mother to meet her goals—as well as the money and other resources that would need to be allocated for these actions from the family, the government, and the nonprofit partners—would all be spelled out in the plan. Yes, the mother would need to work hard and sacrifice by saving more, but knowing that government and charities also had a stake and belief in her success, and knowing that she would ultimately advance herself and her family, she’d be glad to do it. It’s that hope thing at work again.

This approach may sound like traditional social work case management, which often is based on the patronizing belief that social workers—who a little too frequently sit in condescending judgment of other people’s life choices—know what’s better for low-income people than low-income people themselves. Yet the HOPE approach is entirely different than traditional casework, and is more in line with the kind of guidance a wealthy person gets from a financial advisor who simply works clients through all the available options to boost their economic well-being.

Unlike the mandatory, one-sided contracts proposed by Paul Ryan, under which only the low-income people would be held accountable, under the HOPE proposal, all the entities involved—government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and low-income participants—would be equally accountable. Unlike Ryan’s plan to strip struggling families of agency, the HOPE plan would instead empower them by ensuring that the contract included enforceable language making government and nonprofit agencies accountable to participants for keeping up their part of the bargain.

As I’ll say over and over again, everyone who receives government help—which means everyone in America, from bankers who get government bailouts, to truckers who ride over government roads, to defense contractors, to students who obtain Pell Grants or Stafford Loans, to farmers who obtain federal subsidies, to recipients of anti-poverty benefits—should be required to exercise certain responsibilities in exchange for their government aid.

In the case of HOPE, this new civic compact of mutual responsibility would be a boon to both people in poverty and middle-class taxpayers, restoring each side’s faith in the other. America, if you believe in families again, they will believe in you again.

Now, isn’t the HOPE approach much better than the social services status quo? Low-income Americans will be happier because they can, all by themselves, receive help in one centralized location instead of dozens of places. They can plan their own futures. They can collect their own feathers, wear them however they like, then fly wherever they want, however they want—reducing depression as they begin exercising their newfound freedom.

Government and nonprofit agency workers will be happier because they are more effective. Taxpayers will be happier because their dollars are used more wisely.^m

Moreover, HOPE would empower families by giving them the necessary tools to take charge of their own futures—allowing them to obtain concrete tools to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.” By promoting personal responsibility and a more efficient government, as well as increased economic opportunity and easier ways to get government aid, HOPE advances both conservative and liberal priorities. By superseding today’s stultified ideological debate, HOPE would actually be radically centrist, prompting massive progressive changes in American society, but would do so based on mainstream values widely embraced by the public. It should be a model for all our governmental policies and a ladder to achieve the American dream, bringing the entire populace together again.

America, your joyful celebration won’t last long. As common-sense as these reforms are, and as likely as they are to be warmly embraced by the vast majority of the American people, some traditional conservatives as well as some traditional liberals will oppose them, albeit for very different reasons.

Some conservatives fear that an approach like HOPE would make it easier for low-income people to get government assistance, thereby increasing government spending. But HOPE would reduce government bureaucracy and paperwork and ensure that more of the money spent goes to helping families instead of bureaucracies, all of which are professed conservative goals.

Other conservatives will argue getting government help should be a difficult, shameful process, and making it less so would only increase dependency on government. But it’s inconsistent for the Right to argue for government to be less intrusive in the lives of most people but more intrusive in the lives of low-income Americans. Plus, by freeing up more time for parents to work, study, and spend time with their families, HOPE is “pro-family,” “pro-work,” and “pro-education”—and thus would reduce long-term dependency.

Some liberals will be wary because, at first blush, these accounts and plans appear to be similar to the punitive contracts and safety net–slashing block grant proposals advanced by Paul Ryan and other conservatives. But God is in the details, and in reality, the HOPE accounts and action plans would be 180 degrees different in both intention and implementation from the conservative schemes.

Ryan has used his anti-poverty plans as a cover for trying to decimate existing government benefits for low-income families. In contrast, HOPE would provide anti-poverty benefits far above the current levels, so true self-sufficiency could be achieved. Unlike the Ryan and other GOP proposals that would replace existing federal programs, the HOPE accounts and plans would be in addition to existing government efforts. Unlike Ryan’s proposal, which assumes that his proposed opportunity grants can somehow succeed even if the rest of the safety net is slashed and the economy is still failing, this proposal assumes that HOPE accounts and plans can only be effective in tandem with a strong safety net and the broad-based economic growth that creates jobs and raises wages. HOPE would also end the arbitrary benefits cliffs that kick in when families marginally increase their incomes as they struggle to enter—and remain in—the middle class. Ideally, the HOPE initiative would be funded robustly enough by the government and the philanthropic sectors so that all those ends could be achieved.

Liberals may also worry that HOPE might undercut public employees and their unions, which provide liberal candidates with vital troops, votes, and donations. Given that the Scott Walkers and John Kasichs of the world have used “reforms” to try to slash government jobs and destroy public sector unions, and given that mass layoffs of public employees only further decimate the middle class and increase poverty, such concerns are understandable. That is why it is vital to make it crystal clear that the HOPE proposal is based on the assumption that most public employees are dedicated, underpaid, and have a right to unions that bargain collectively on their behalf. Under this proposal, some social workers would keep jobs similar to their existing ones, in order to answer questions about HOPE over the phone or from clients who still prefer face-to-face meetings. While HOPE would indeed eliminate most other government positions that currently exist to handle paperwork and interview clients, this proposal recommends that virtually all the employees holding those positions continue to hold public sector jobs—at the same pay levels at the very least—but over time be transitioned into more useful functions, such as training and placing low-income adults into living-wage jobs, staffing universal Pre-K programs, or aiding homebound seniors. I would argue that public employees themselves would be happier if they spent less time filling out paperwork and more time directly aiding the public.

Some liberals might worry that merely suggesting that government programs can be improved or that low-income Americans have personal responsibility for their own futures reinforces conservative messages, effectively giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” Some might argue that it’s inconsistent for anti-poverty advocates like Mariana Chilton and Joel Berg to, on the one hand, effusively praise safety net programs like SNAP, but on the other hand, point out their significant flaws. Those arguments are also reasonable, but ultimately they are not convincing. There’s nothing inconsistent in pointing out that programs significantly improve the lives of recipients but could help beneficiaries even more if they were modernized. Just as even generally solid relationships can always be improved by both sides thoroughly addressing life realities (including painful ones), so too social services can be further improved through an unflinching examination of their current defects.

Some progressives might worry that funneling all anti-poverty funding into one program might make it easier in the future for conservatives to cut them. Yet the recent trend of omnibus budget deals has already allowed conservatives to cut all anti-poverty programs at once with tools such as the sequestration process (which was, I am obligated to point out, suggested—though as a last resort and a threat, that later blew up in their faces—by the Obama administration).

Taking no action because you are afraid things could get even worse makes little sense. That’s sort of like when two people are in front of a firing squad about to be executed, and one asks the other if they should ask for a cigarette, only to hear the response, “Nah, I don’t want to make them mad.”

Taking the ostrich approach by ignoring both public concerns and real-life problems is a losing strategy, both substantively and politically. In contrast, FDR, the most successful progressive leader in US history, called for “bold, persistent experimentation” because he understood that continually modernizing liberal programs was the best way to save them.

The most effective political defense is an offense. The best way to push back against possible cuts is to fight for more funding, which is why progressives should be clear that the HOPE system would need more money than the current system.

Because it would build public confidence in government safety net programs, HOPE could actually increase the public’s willingness to pay for them. While voters tend to give conflicting answers to pollsters as to whether they support increased funding on anti-poverty programs, when they get into the privacy of the polling booth, they tend to vote (especially in lower turnout, off-year, elections) for Senate, House, and gubernatorial candidates who demonize the safety net and promise lower taxes and smaller government. But if the public believed that more up-front expenditures would actually ensure long-term self-sufficiency for families, and thereby reduce the need for the programs and spending over time, they would be far more likely to embrace them. In the end, though, the question that is most important is whether HOPE would make life better or worse—in both the short-term and the long-term—for the people the programs are intended to help.

The overwhelming answer from low-income Americans would be a resounding “yes.”

Hope is not necessarily about having all the feathers in your possession at once. It is also about dreaming how you will someday get them. Hope is a mixture of exaltation and expectation. It doesn’t mean you ignore past setbacks and the pain they brought, but it means that—deep down—you believe you can eventually overcome their legacy and fly away. America, you can hear all of that in Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” our national anthem of hope.

The song begins with sorrowful strings and a slow, loping bass line, leading to the howling tale of a man born homeless by a river, who has been on the run his whole life. We can only imagine the realities from which he’s been running. He says living is too difficult but he is scared of death, unsure of whether there’s a heaven that will offer redemption. Haunting horns and a martial beat kick in, as Jim Crow laws prevent him from so much as spending time in public in his hometown. He then pleads for help from his brother, who responds by whacking him down.^o He contemplates early death, a fate for so many men of color. But then, in a marked shift in lyrical and musical tones—he finds some previously buried storehouse of hope—and he concludes, in a soaring voice that he is confident that he will be able to persevere became he knows that change is coming.

In just a few lines, he goes from believing he may die soon, to believing his life might improve, to knowing he would prevail. What changed was that the narrator decided to take matters into his own hands and move from passive suffering or begging into taking concrete, assertive actions that would enable him and his brothers to fly away to build a better life for themselves. He moved from depression to exhilaration by determining his own flight path.

America, you too can come to understand that when even the most marginalized people demand that government and society enable them to empower themselves, hope and positive change are not only possible, but inevitable. When people have power over their own lives and agency to use their feathers however they please, progress will come. My yes, it certainly will.

^b Yes, I’ve watched Steel Magnolias. I didn’t like it but couldn’t avoid it in my house.

^c Liberace and Dickinson may also have had something other than feathers in common. She once wrote, “They put me in the Closet—Because they liked me ‘still.’”

^d I couldn’t afford to pay for the rights for a more modern picture, but many social service offices still look like this, I swear.

^f I think it’s a bit over-the-top to use a truly radioactive word like “slavery” to address anything other than its specific, historic meaning—people held in chattel servitude due to their skin color—but emotions do run high when people argue these issues and I understand why debaters on both sides feel they need to use words with shock value, although I still don’t agree with them doing so.

^h In order to offset the fact that some wealthy children would also benefit from this, the US should also restore inheritance taxes for the rich to the much higher rates they were in the past.

ⁱ I do look forward to the day when the golden woks of the Zhu Ji dumpling chain replace the golden arches as the nation’s top food symbol.

^j As I previously mentioned, the federal government should do more to ensure high-speed Internet connections throughout the country, but especially in rural areas.

^k Careful security and privacy protections would need to be put in place, so that only the family, and not the government, nonprofit, or banking partners, would be able to see the private financial and appointment information.

^l Dear environmentalists: just kidding about the Santa Cruz Mountains part. Please don’t send protesters in rafts to surround my apartment.

^m That’s more happiness than Pharrell Williams, unicorns, and rainbows, combined with cute puppies romping in a field of flowers, can bring to you, America.

ⁿ

^o It is unclear whether “brother” refers to an actual sibling or merely to a fellow African American, but there is no question that his “brother” letting him down is a metaphor for all of society letting us all down.