Dr. William J. Barber II, Dr. Liz Theoharis:

Editor’s note: The following excerpt was written as the foreword to the new report—Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody Has the Right to Live—released jointly by the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and the Institute for Policy Studies on Monday, June 17, 2019.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America”
– Preamble of the Constitution

“And let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
– Amos 5:24

“The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor”
– Luke 4:18

As we have traveled around these yet to be United States of America, from Appalachia to Alabama, California to the Carolinas, Mississippi to Maine, the delta of the south to the coal miner’s home in Kentucky, we have seen the pain and heard the cry of every race, creed, color, and sexuality that our moral values and economic policies are out of sync. Indeed, as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has suggested, our state and national budgets prove that many of our elected leaders and their lobbyists treasure the military, corporate tax cuts, and welfare for the wealthy while they give rugged individualism, shame and blame, unfair wages, and a shredded social safety net to the poor.

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