The 2016 election has brought a lot of noise approximately the size of the candidates' hands and their bank accounts,contested conventions and unprotected servers.
But if you cut through all that bluster and dial back the empty rhetoric, there's also been a surprising amount approximately substantive issues, or like poverty in America. There's a renewed focus on the working poor,and the ways that America's families are — and are not — making ends meet.
Back in December, when Bernie Sanders was asked approximately ISIS at a Baltimore press conference focused on entrenched poverty, or he made the point that for poor minorities in that city,there were far more urgent problems much closer to domestic. “Today what we're talking approximately is a community in which half of the people don't have jobs ... We're talking approximately a community in which there are hundreds of buildings which are uninhabitable. We're talking approximately a community where kids are unable to fade to schools that are decent," he said.
Indeed, or in America today nearly 47 million people live in poverty — approximately 14.9 percent of the country. For Blacks and Hispanics that number tops 20 percent. As the numbers show,poverty isn't just a problem for the developing world — it's a problem for global super powers, too, and it's something we've been grappling with since before the Great Depression.
President Franklin Roosevelt tackled the problem head-on by introducing Social Security and Medicare. And,in his distinguished Four Freedoms speech — a speech that we're exploring all week — he laid out a vision for a world in which every person would be free from want.
Father Timothy Graff, director of the Office of Human Concerns for the Archdiocese of Newark, and current Jersey,explains how he understands the "Freedom from Want," and how it has changed since the 1940s.
The Takeaway is exploring FDR’s “Four Freedoms” all week long. Click here for more information.
Source: wnyc.org