Politics & Government

Booker Pledges To Battle Child Poverty In First Policy Speech

Booker calls for raising the minimum wage while late Sen. Frank Lautenberg's family endorses Pallone for U.S. Senate.

He’s known nationally for running into a burning building and single handedly saving abused dogs, but what would Newark Mayor Cory Booker actually do if elected to the U.S. Senate?

In his first major policy speech of his Senate campaign, Booker got down to brass tacks at an elementary school in Edgewater, outlining a program to battle child poverty in the state by re-directing federal priorities.

Booker embraced revered Democratic ideas by calling for raising the minimum wage, providing free pre-school for every needy child starting at age three and creating federally-funded trust funds to help pay for college for low-income children.

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Often pointing to pilot programs in Newark started under his tenure -- programs he said were held together on ‘shoestrings and bubble gum – Booker said the country was losing out on the potential of millions of children living in poverty.

"These children are starting out life at the base of a mountain that they are not given the tools they need to climb and rise," Booker said.

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Booker, who earlier also appeared on the morning television show "Live with Kelly and Michael," said he was unfazed by the Monday morning announcement from the campaign of U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6) that the family of late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg had passed over Booker to endorse Pallone.

"This is not surprising to me," Booker said. "Frank Lautenberg and Frank Pallone have had a relationship for decades. Their families go way back.

The endorsement, put out by the Pallone campaign, takes shots at Booker’s celebrity while saying that Pallone knows "gimmicks and celebrity status won’t get you very far in the real battles that Democrats face in the future."

Pallone, Booker, U.S. Rep. Rush Holt and state Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver are locked in a battle for the Democratic nomination to run for Lautenberg’s Senate seat. The primary is set for Aug. 13.

In a computer room of the newly built George Washington School in Edgewater, a school that had closed in the 1980s, Booker called for raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 over the next two years – a policy he said would stimulate the economy and help lift working families out of poverty.

"We have to do more to make work pay," Booker said.

He also called for bolstering the federal Earned Income Tax Credit program by eliminating what he called the "marriage penalty," in which a household’s tax credit is reduced when a filer marries or files a joint tax return.

Booker credited the credit program, which reduces taxes for low- and moderate-income families, with lifting 3 million children out of poverty – more than any other federal program, he said.

Booker called for creating "universal access" to preschool for all three-year-olds by 2025.

"High quality pre-kindergarten education produces huge improvements in the lives of children and extraordinarily high returns on every dollar spent," Booker said.

Booker also endorsed the idea of college savings accounts, linked to the earned income tax credit, to put $400 a year into an account earmarked for college tuition for children to help poor and moderate income families save for college. This idea, Booker said, could offset nearly a year of the cost of a four-year education.

"When you help a child, you empower a nation," Booker said. "If we don’t empower those children to manifest their strength and their genius, then we are all lacking from their failure."


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