Rebuilding America's Cities

"As the new Congress moves toward capping its 100 Hours Agenda with a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage, legislators looking for a next step should focus on rebuilding our physical and social infrastructure-in both the New Orleans/Gulf Coast area and across America.

The new majority in Congress was elected in part on a mandate to do better by the people of New Orleans and to put the federal government back in the business of giving ordinary Americans the opportunity to build better lives for their families. There are already plenty of well-thought-out ideas that Congress could take up in its next hundred days, if not hours, to begin rebuilding an America with opportunity for all. Here are just a few suggestions:

- Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, which even Ronald Reagan called 'our nation's most effective anti-poverty program.'

- Deliver the education funding long promised as part of the No Child Left Behind act, and appropriate money for class-size reduction and teacher training in inner city schools.

- Create living-wage jobs by training and employing local residents to finally rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hire workers nationwide to clean up lead paint, rebuild our urban infrastructure and repair crumbling schools.

- Put affordable housing development back on the agenda of HUD and in the national budget.

- Move towards universal health care-start with enrolling many more children in the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), if we can't just solve this problem once and for all."

"These items will cost money-though less than extending tax breaks for the super-rich or a few weeks of the war in Iraq. Other initiatives that would give working families a chance to build better lives-like legislation to protect homeowners from predatory lending and let workers join unions without being fired-require only attention and political will."