The American dream has always consisted of a simple promise: If you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll have a real shot at prosperity. In recent years, that promise has been broken by the Bush Administration and its allies in Congress like Chris Shays.

Here in Connecticut’s Fourth Congressional District, families are being squeezed like never before, with some of the highest food and energy prices in the nation and a cost of living that is threatening the existence of the middle class. A recent study showed that income inequality is growing faster in Connecticut than in any other state, and that we are the only state where real income for the worst off among us has actually significantly decreased over the past 17 years.

This issue is deeply personal to me. I grew up with a single working mom in a small town. We didn’t have a lot of extra money and I worked just about every part-time job in town. Thanks to a good public school and a supportive community, I was able to go to Harvard, win a Rhodes scholarship, and pursue fulfilling careers in business and the nonprofit sector.

I have two young daughters, and I worry that they may not grow up in an America with that kind of opportunity. I’m running for Congress to renew the promise of the American Dream by strengthening our middle class and creating opportunity for everyone.

We need to give middle-class families long overdue tax relief–that’s why I have proposed a tax cut package that will help people achieve three pillars of the American dream: sending children to college, owning a home and saving to build wealth over time.

We need to ensure that good public schools remain the gateways to the American dream for every child.

And we need to address our energy crisis head-on in a way that will create good jobs. Prior to running for Congress, I led the New York office of Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing non-profit, where we created. There, we found that by building green we were able to support well-paying career track jobs for skilled laborers, jobs that could not be outsourced and which contribute to a clean environment. By having government adopt Green Building practices, and providing government-backed guarantees to help families and businesses invest in green retrofits, we can dramatically reduce our energy while creating jobs here in our district.

Voters in our district are hungry for new energy and real leadership on these issues. That’s why they are getting involved and registering to vote in record numbers, and that’s why national pundits and prognosticators are calling our race one of the most hotly contested races in the country.

It will take the right priorities to make these changes – a focus on the economy we haven’t seen from the Bush Administration and its supporters like Chris Shays. But if we are to make sure that we restore opportunity to seek the American Dream, we have to start now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under Politics .