U.S. House Democrats launch '18 anti-poverty tour

WASHINGTON, May 31 (Xinhua) -- U.S. House Democratic lawmakers on Thursday launched an anti-poverty tour aimed to highlight the plight of the poor under Republican control of Congress and the White House.

Led by House Representative Barbara Lee, who heads the party's anti-poverty task force, the Democrats made the case that the growing economy has affected America' s classes disproportionately, showering the wealthy with handsome benefits while leaving lower-income people behind.

The trend has only been exacerbated by Republican economic policies, contend the Democrats, saying they are seeking alternative legislative solutions aimed at boosting the financial fortunes of poorest Americans, said a TheHill news daily report.

"When you look at many of the budget cuts that they've proposed, more people would fall below the poverty line," Lee was quoted as saying.

"Their trickle-down theories on economics, it doesn't work." said the lawmaker.

Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip, called the Republicans' tax reform law evidence that Republicans are less concerned with deficit spending than they are with cutting federal programs, many of them designed to help the poor.

"They borrowed 1.5 trillion dollars and gave it to the people who are already very, very well off in our country, and (left) very little for either those in the middle class or who are struggling to get into the middle class," Hoyer said in a phone call Thursday.

"We're going to see what we find, we're going to come back ... and we're going to see whether there are programs that, in fact, need to either be expanded, programs that may not be working as well as we want, and investments we that need to make in education and job-training in order to get people into a place where they' re succeeding," Hoyer said.

Aside from the tax law, the Democrats are hammering Republicans for rejecting a minimum wage hike and a recent proposal, contained in the farm bill, which is predicted to cut millions of people off of the federal food stamp program, according to the TheHill report.

"That's not going to help lift people out of poverty, but create more poverty," Lee said.

Outlining the class divisions, researchers at the Urban Institute say that, over the last five decades, families living near the bottom of the wealth spectrum (those in the 10th percentile) have lost ground and are now living in debt, while those at the top (the 99th percentile) have increased their wealth by five times.

Race is a major factor governing the disparities, the researchers emphasized, as white families are much more successful than black families in growing wealth as they age. Enditem