His new plan? Spend $6 billion a year to fight poverty.

(let’s see, I think the best way for me to do this will be comment after each excerpt instead of doing it all at the end–just me thinking out loud.)

For starters, he pitches a plan that involves using money spent in war in Iraq to help fight poverty. While this may play well with those who want us just to pull out now (ignoring any repercussions of such a move), I have serious doubts that he also provided a detailed update on the effectiveness of the billions of dollars we are already spending to fight poverty (roughly $11 trillion since 1964)–INSTEAD OF JUST HIGHLIGHTING ONE LOCAL PROGRAM THAT IS WORKING(The Harlem Children’s Zone)! Politicians love to cherry pick the very few federally-funded social programs that work because they know that the average American is too lazy to look at the whole spending picture. They will always find the one public inner-city school that happens to have updated books, well-trained teachers and honor roll students. Nevermind the other school districts the politicians had to pass through to get to the “prop” school–the same districts parents will do just anything to avoid sending their own kids (ask John Edwards).

“I’ll be honest, it can”t be done on the cheap. It will cost a few billion dollars a year,” he said. “We won”t just spend the money because we can — every step these cities take will be evaluated, and if certain plans or programs aren”t working, we will stop them and try something else, but we will find the money to do this because we can’t afford not to.”

Show me ANY government program that has demonstrated the ability to be fiscally sound and I will gladly be in the next “Obama Girl” video.

Then he gets into a crowd favorite: raising the minimum wage.

I’ve covered this ground many times on this site in the past. I will just provide some highlights of the information I presented:

The following was written back in 2001–

Who is Paid the Minimum Wage and Who Would be Affected by a $1.50 per Hour Increase

by D. Mark Wilson

The 1.6 million paid-hourly workers who earn minimum wages can be broken down into two broad groups.1

Over half (53 percent) are teenagers or young adults under the age of 23. More than half (54 percent) of these young workers live in families with incomes two or more times the official poverty level for their family size and 18 percent live in poor families. The average family income of these young workers is almost $50,500 per year. The average income for single young workers is $11,200. Over 63 percent are enrolled in either high school or college.

The other half (47 percent) are workers ages 23 and up. More of these workers live in poor families (29 percent). Yet, even within this half of the minimum wage population, the average family income is over $38,100 per year. The average income for single workers is $19,300. Over 30 percent of these older workers did not graduate from high school and another 36 percent had only a high school diploma.

Almost 43 percent of all minimum wage workers are children, 26 percent are married family heads or spouses, 11 percent are single family heads, and 17 percent are single people (another 3 percent are other relatives).

Less than 21 percent of minimum wage workers are the sole breadwinners of their families and less than 5 percent are sole breadwinners that work full-time year-round. Less than 5 percent of minimum wage workers are poor single mothers over 18 years old.

Over 57 percent of all minimum wage workers work part-time voluntarily. Only 25 percent work full-time year-round while over 28 percent work part-time part of the year.

The average family income for all minimum wage workers is $45,200 and their wages account for 35 percent of their total family income. The average income of single-nonfamily minimum wage workers is $16,800.

Very Few Workers Remain at Entry-Level Wages for Long

Nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers move above the minimum wage within one year, and the median raise for those workers is over 10 percent.2 For full-time minimum wage workers, the median first-year raise is almost 14 percent. Entry-level jobs are not lifelong dead-end jobs. These jobs allow Americans to establish a track record of work that creates opportunities for better paying jobs. (more…)

Just under two years ago, I worked as a security guard on the graveyard shift. My salary at that time was about $9.00/hr. However when I first started out it was between $7-8. The reason why most businesses like security or fast food hire at such low pay rates is because of the extremely high turnover. This turnover usually comes from folks who are either kids on their first job or folks that are only staying long enough to hear from the other job they applied for recently. I also spent some time doing call center work where it was normal to see some of the same trends. Once the probational period is over (usually between 1 to 3 months, in most places employees get a bump in pay. Not only that, they oftentimes are given the opportunity to move to other positions that pay more money. So according to Obama’s proposal combined with the above statistics, much of the minimum wage hike will benefit folks who are in transition–not just the poor Black single mother with 5 kids.

I am saying all of this because besides the findings of the excerpted article above, it was very rare for me to see someone who was the sole breadwinner of their family who was either hired on minimum wage or stay on it longer than a month. This article I found in the Christian Science monitor I think reflects the type of wishful thinking folks like Obama have when talking about raising the minimum wage:

“Keisha Walker, for one, is happy that Congress is at least debating whether to raise the minimum wage. For her, boosting it to $7.25 would mean earning an extra $1 an hour – enough to pay for eight months of groceries or perhaps a few nights out.” (from “If minimum wage is raised, who benefits?” 6/22/06)

You can add your own comments to that excerpt.

Wikipedia also has a pretty good pros/cons page for raising the minimum wage.

Back the the Washington Times article:

He also vowed to pass a plan that he outlined last year to provide more financial support to unwed fathers who help raise their children and crack down on fathers who don’t and to help new mothers by expanding the Nurse-Family Partnership, which offers home visits by registered nurses to low-income mothers and mothers-to-be.

I’ve got a better idea. How about drafting legislation that would severely punish women (stay with me before you go off ) who use their kids to shake down Dads for money that is used more for the mother than the children.

As for the Nurse-Family Partnership, that is a whole lotta nurses. Might I remind you of the problems just with Medicare. According to this article written back in 2005, this program alone is (dare I say) underfunded.

WASHINGTON — Trustees for Social Security and Medicare said in an annual report released yesterday that Medicare’s long-term difficulties were far more severe than those of Social Security.

“Medicare’s financial outlook has deteriorated dramatically over the past five years and is now much worse than Social Security’s,” the programs’ two public trustees, Texas A&M University economics professor Thomas R. Saving and Syracuse University professor John L. Palmer said in a summary report.

In 75 years, Medicare’s unfunded liabilities will be more than twice those of Social Security, they said. (more…)

I will say this, for Obama to propose a “plan” that will use money slated for the war in Iraq to help fight the war against poverty is a very clever hook. Folks who are against the war can easily find comfort in such a plan– as long as they are unwilling to look at ALL the facts and history behind it.