you have to have good policy. you can have empathy for that group of people, but the policies you make for that group of people don t actually make them better. let me take that one step further, and listen to marco rubio talking about poverty, in which he suggests, i do have empathy for poverty, but when i hear the policy proposals, they don t sound to me like good proposals. let s listen. for me, this issue is deeply personal. i m a generation removed from poverty and despair. with where i would be today if there had never been an american? what kind of lives tor futures would my children have if this was not a land of opportunity. what if my father had been stuck, working as a bar boy his whole life instead of making it to head bartender? what kind of life would i have right now? in all likelihood, i, too, would be on the outside looking in. so, this is a description of, i have empathy.
but he wouldn t have waited 50 years to talk about it. he would have been talking about it all the way through. a month ago, no one was talking really about poverty. and you have just in this last week, on the anniversary of the war on poverty, you have congressman ryan, you have secretary rubio, we have this report. i think the president will talk about this in his state of the union and he ll also, i think, talk about it talking about women. so when anyone talks about poverty or about income and inequality, they ve got to start talking about how women have these dual roles. they re breadwinners, caretakers, and caregivers. women are strapped between their children and their parents, and two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women. two-thirds don t have one sick day. how are they meant to manage all of these competing interests unless they have some support. we spent much of the first hour of the program talking about the issue of empathy. and in the case that you wrote for the atl
changed dramatically when suddenly people were telling their own stories and folks felt a strong sense of empathy and connection to survivors and victims of the disease. i wonder, and, of course, breast cancer, there was shame around it, initially, before women began to tell their own stories. can we do, for poverty, and for women in poverty, what happened around women and breast cancer? so that in 20 years, we have something totally different. i really hope so. because i think, you mentioned the word shame. there s a lot of shame to standing in an unemployment line. there s a lot of shame to standing in a food stamp line. there s a lot of shame in not being able to put food on the table for your kids. and so what we have tried to do, whether it s through our instagram, through social media, through the film, through what we re doing here, is, you know, to put a face to this. to let people know that there is support for them out there, that the actual, in the polling, the americans
lines of it, you emphasize that your own personal biography does not include a story of economic instability, but this issue matters deeply to you in terms of how important it is to your country. but i m wondering, the report has all the statistics, but these personal stories from women living in poverty and then people like beyonce and eva longoria. how do the personal stories help to generate empathy that maybe the statistics alone can t help us to see? exactly that way. i think statistics are hard to these numbers are so big, it s hard to wrap your head around 42 million people. but when you read the report, which you can download at shriverreport.org, for the next four days, it s three. and we ve had thousands of people line up just to press the button. but you can read these essays, whether it s from neara tandem, it puts a face to these statistics.
you ve probably heard a lot about the declaration of the war on poverty. president lyndon johnson s commitment to eradicating poverty was a product of both a political strategy, but also a deep personal experience, based in his own history. lbj grew up poor and often hungry. his family in constant fear that the bank would take away their home. he knew that poverty is not always the fault of the poor, but poverty can be addressed by government programs and by structural changes. and so, 50 years ago, empathy fueled public policy. medicare, medicaid, head start, the department of housing and urban development, the legal services cooperation. all of these were created under johnson s presidency. since then, the poverty rate has declined by about a third, although 15 million americans still live below the poverty line. now, congress debates whether to extend emergency long-term unemployment insurance for another three months. republicans are opposed to extending the benefits, saying it wou