Bradley Says He Wants to Cut Childhood Poverty in Half

NEW YORK — Bill Bradley declared Thursday that as president he would seek to reduce the number of children in poverty by more than half over the next decade, attaching a specific goal and dollar sign to a central theme of his campaign.

But the $9.8-billion-a-year agenda he detailed to meet his ambitious target offered more continuity than contrast with policies already supported by Vice President Al Gore, his rival for the Democratic nomination.

Appearing before an enthusiastic audience at a church in the low-income Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant, Bradley spoke in sweeping terms about the nation’s moral obligation to combat what he called the “slow-motion national disaster” of childhood poverty. “Let us eliminate child poverty as we know it,” Bradley declared to loud applause.

Toward that end, he proposed to raise the minimum wage, expand child-care assistance, enlarge the earned income tax credit for the working poor, improve access to after-school programs and increase funding for Head Start.

In each area, Bradley’s differences with Gore are more of degree than kind. Little in Bradley’s speech differed philosophically from the basic direction the Clinton administration has pursued to combat poverty and which Gore is now pushing as a candidate.

The most consistent contrast was that Bradley, on several fronts, proposed to go further than Gore has--though on some specifics the vice president wants to spend as much or more than the challenger. Gore, meanwhile, has placed more emphasis on the role of family breakdown and absent fathers in the persistence of child poverty--themes he emphasized in a speech Wednesday.

As striking as anything Bradley included in his speech was what he left out. After voting against the 1996 welfare reform bill that President Clinton signed into law--and repeatedly criticizing it since--the former New Jersey senator called for only modest changes in the measure.

“The scale of Bradley’s effort [to fight child poverty] does seem to go beyond what’s been put on the table to date [by Gore], but there’s no great new insight about how to tackle poverty or great new initiatives,” said Will Marshall, executive director of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Washington think tank.

Bradley’s speech continued an intensifying policy duel between the challenger--who’s shown increased strength in the polls--and the vice president. Gore’s speech Wednesday on reconnecting absent fathers with their families marked the second time this month he has tried to preempt a Bradley initiative. Earlier, Gore delivered a speech on working families immediately before an address Bradley had scheduled on the subject.

Gore has also been questioning Bradley’s loyalty to the Democratic Party. On Thursday, the challenger wrapped himself in the mantle of two of the party’s greatest heroes: He compared his quest to reduce child poverty to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s drive to lead America out of the Depression and President Kennedy’s crusade to land a man on the moon. “The task of presidential leadership is to challenge ourselves to do things we weren’t sure we could do,” Bradley said.

Childhood poverty has been one of the sharpest points of contention between Bradley and Gore. In Los Angeles this summer, Bradley accused the Clinton administration of merely “tinker[ing] around the margins” while “the percentage of children living in poverty has barely changed.”

Actually, the share of children living in poverty has declined from 22.3% of the nation’s youth when Clinton took office in 1993 to 18.9% in 1998, according to the Census Bureau. That’s the largest six-year decline since the 1960s; overall, the number of children in poverty has fallen by 1.8 million during the Clinton years, to 13.5 million.

In his speech Thursday, Bradley acknowledged those gains but suggested the country could do better. Specifically, in a document released by his campaign, Bradley said he would seek to reduce the number of poor children by 3 million in his first presidential term and an additional 4 million in his second.

To reach that goal, Bradley offered several proposals, including:

* An increase in the hourly minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.15 over the next two years. After that, Bradley said, the minimum wage should automatically increase by the annual rise in the median wage for workers.

* A substantial increase in the earned income tax credit, which provides tax relief for the working poor. Bradley said that the credit should not phase out as quickly as it does now when low-income workers see their incomes rise and that benefits should be increased for families with three or more children.

* Increased subsidies for child care. Bradley said the existing child-care tax credit should be made available to low-income families who pay little or no federal taxes. To accomplish that goal, the government would write refund checks to help cover the child-care costs. He also proposed spending $1 billion more annually in direct federal subsidies for child care.

* An increase in funding for Head Start, the government preschool program for low-income children, to the point where the program will be large enough to serve all eligible children. Bradley also proposed to spend $1 billion a year on after-school and community programs in schools in low-income neighborhoods.

* A $375-million program to create 550 “maternity group homes” that would provide housing, training and counseling for young unwed mothers.

The package’s $9.8-billion annual cost would grow over time, Bradley aides acknowledged. Eric Hauser, a campaign spokesman, said the initiative would be paid for out of the projected federal budget surplus. Bradley already has said he would use the surplus to pay for his $65-billion-a-year plan to increase access to health care and a $2.6-billion proposal to expand access to preschool.

That brings the total annual bill for Bradley’s new initiatives to about $77 billion--an amount Gore aides say would require him to dip into the surplus funds Clinton wants to set aside to stabilize Social Security and Medicare.

Gore has yet to put a specific cost figure on his agenda, except to promise to maintain the budget in balance if elected.

Many of the specifics in Bradley’s Thursday speech simply were more expansive versions of policies that Gore and Clinton have pursued. Gore, for instance, also has called for enriching the earned income tax credit but not by as much as Bradley did; Gore wants to raise the minimum wage by $1 but hasn’t urged automatically increasing it as Bradley did.

Like Bradley, Gore has proposed spending $1 billion annually on after-school programs. And a Clinton proposal Gore has endorsed calls for spending $2.5 billion more on child-care subsidies over the next five years than Bradley proposed.