Faith groups weigh antipoverty prospects with new Congress

It's hardly a war on poverty, or even a surge.

To be sure, the new Democratic majority in Congress is generally more sympathetic to domestic antipoverty programs than their Republican predecessors. But Washington's faith-based antipoverty lobbyists don't expect miracles. Instead they are engaged in a series of complicated longrunning legislative battles where success is never final and setbacks are common.

Case in point: Last week Catholic Charities USA launched a "Campaign to Reduce Poverty," which, even if successful in boosting housing and health care spending and increasing income supports for poor families, would take more than a decade to achieve its goal of a 50 percent cut in the U.S. poverty rate.

One early victory is expected with legislation that would raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 over three years, the first such increase in a decade. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the increase a part of the new Democratic majority's "100-hour" agenda and President Bush is expected to sign such a measure once the Senate agrees. The bill has broad support within the religious community.

"The minimum wage needs to be raised not just for the goods and services a person can buy but for the self-esteem and self-worth it affords," Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn, N.Y., chairman of the U.S. bishops' Domestic Policy Committee, said in a Jan. 8 letter to members of Congress.

Raising the minimum wage "is an important way station on the way to a living wage for working people and families everywhere," the Rev. Paul Sherry, national coordinator of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, told a Jan. 9 news teleconference. More than 90 faith-based groups make up the Let Justice Roll coalition.

If the Democrats' election . victories made a minimum wage hike a fait accompli, the remainder of the short-term antipoverty agenda won't be nearly as easy.

The new leadership in the House will emphasize "the bread-and-butter Democratic priorities of helping poor and middle-class families with tuition costs and health care costs, safe neighborhoods, and safe and drugfree schools," Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat newly appointed to the powerful House Appropriations Committee, told NCR. "There will probably be increases in all those programs," he continued, "but the downside is that the increases aren't going to be what we want them to be, given the deficit, given the [House budget] rules, and given the war, which is costing $8 billion a month."

Further, said Ryan, reducing or eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax--a provision of the tax code originally designed to ensure the super-rich didn't avoid taxes but one that is now hitting the upper middle class--"means there will be less money coming into the treasury." Bottom line: "We're going to have to suck it up for a couple of years ... get back to surpluses and [then] start investing in the American people at the levels that we need."

Recent successes

Those lobbying for the poor, however, can point to some recent successes to bolster their case. Included in the faith-based groups' antipoverty agenda, for example, is a call to expand the State Child Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), a joint federal-state initiative that provides coverage to children in low-income families who typically don't qualify for Medicaid but who also don't have employer-sponsored health insurance. Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the program this year.

"Together," according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis released earlier this month, "Medicaid and the S-CHIP provide health coverage for one in four of our nation's children." The percentage of uninsured low-income children dropped by one-third since the State Child Health Insurance Program was created a decade ago even as declines in employer-sponsored coverage swelled the ranks of the uninsured, said the Kaiser analysis.

Still, there are 9 million low-income children eligible for health insurance who do not receive the benefit. And more than 2 million children could lose their coverage unless states ante up more funds for the program and if the federal government does not increase its $5 billion annual commitment to the program, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington think tank.

"We plan on really focusing our efforts [on S-CHIP]," Jeff Carr, chief operating officer of the Washington-based evangelical social action advocacy group Sojourners, told the Jan. 9 news teleconference. He noted that different states, most notably Massachusetts and California, have passed or are considering legislation that would expand health insurance in their states. "In many ways, they are ahead of Congress," said Carr.

Comprehensive immigration reform legislation, meanwhile, is the No. 1 legislative priority of the U.S. bishops, according to Frank Monahan, director of the bishops' office of government liaison: While some of the bishops' other priorities--a ban on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research and a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage for example--may suffer in a Democratic Congress, the prospects for passage of an immigration bill along the lines supported by the bishops have improved, said the veteran lobbyist.