Can we expand the state’s role in the economy while diminishing its capacity for war?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Deeply ingrained inequalities—many of which are reflective of the country’s patchwork healthcare system—belie rosy projections that Biden is delivering inclusive growth.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Highlighting the end of a yearslong trend of declining hunger in the United States due largely to federal policies like the expanded Child Tax Credit and universal school meals, a report published Wednesday details how the expiration of these programs has fueled a resurgence in food insecurity. Hunger Free America’s (HFA) 2023 National Hunger Survey Report found that “the number of Americans…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A Minnesota Public Radio article noted last month that “women are returning to the job market in droves.” While it’s true that women may be returning to work; they are not doing so without challenges. Most people have no idea the systems that must be in place in early childhood education to accommodate women and families and help them get back to work and stay at work. Simply put…
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All mothers want their children to have enough to eat, a safe home, and the opportunity to thrive, and the American Rescue Plan’s expanded Child Tax Credit provided critical financial support to help mothers build this solid foundation for their children — but only for 2021. As we celebrate Mother’s Day, Congress should recognize the contributions of mothers by expanding the Child Tax Credit for 2022 and beyond, most importantly by making the full credit available to children in families with low or no earnings, who otherwise get only a partial credit or no credit at all.
Mothers bore the brunt of the additional child caretaking responsibilities created by the pandemic, balancing work, child care, and their children’s schoolwork. Many mothers had to leave their jobs or take unpaid leave to care for their children. For example, in June 2021 over 6 million women (and 1 million men) reported not working for pay because they were caring for children not in school or day care, our analysis of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey shows.
For six months, from July through December 2021, the Rescue Plan helped ease their financial burdens and stress by providing advance monthly payments of the Child Tax Credit of up to $300 per child under age 6 ($250 for children 6 through 17). Families with low incomes largely used these payments to pay for everyday expenses — food, housing, clothing, and utilities — as well as education. Roughly 32 million mothers (defined broadly to include grandmothers and other women caring for children) and more than 65 million children benefited from the Rescue Plan’s expanded Child Tax Credit, we estimate. But the expansion expired at the end of 2021, leaving mothers to face rising costs and inadequate or unaffordable child care without the needed support that an expanded Child Tax Credit would provide.
The most important feature of the Rescue Plan’s Child Tax Credit expansion was its “full refundability” provision, which made the full credit available to an estimated 12 million mothers and 27 million children whose families previously were eligible for no credit or less than $2,000 per child because their earnings were too low. This included roughly half of all Black and Latino children and about half of children who live in rural areas. (Other provisions of the Rescue Plan raised the maximum value of the credit and extended it to cover 17-year-olds, not just children 16 and under.)
Making the credit fully refundable again would reduce child poverty by roughly 20 percent, lifting an estimated 2 million children above the poverty line, and help millions of others.
A couple of examples demonstrate the impact in 2022:
- A single mother with a toddler and a child in elementary school works part time around her kids’ schedule, earning $15,000 a year as a child care worker. Under current law she receives a Child Tax Credit of $1,875. If the current credit were fully refundable, she would receive a $4,000 credit ($2,000 per child).
- A married mother with an infant and toddler, whose spouse cares for their kids at home, earns $25,000 a year working full time as a home health aide. Under current law they receive a Child Tax Credit of $3,000. If the current credit were fully refundable, they would receive $4,000.
Research shows that additional income, like from an expanded Child Tax Credit, helps children in families with low incomes do better in school and live healthier lives, and lifts their earning potential as adults. An expanded Child Tax Credit would acknowledge and support the work that mothers do every day to give their children safety, stability, and opportunity.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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President Joe Biden recently delivered a speech promising to address “ghost guns,” untraceable, self-assembled firearms. They are often put together with parts purchased online and could include material from different models. Certainly, there are too many ghost guns in Black and Brown communities due to reckless profiteering of gun manufacturers and corporations.
Let’s be clear, the administration is right to address ghost guns. Our organization, LIVE FREE commends President Biden and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco for their work to ban companies from selling do-it-yourself kits for assembling a gun without a serial number. While action to address ghost guns is long overdue, elected officials must not “ghost” Black and Brown communities ahead of the summer by failing to use American Rescue Plan dollars to scale community violence intervention strategies.
In too many cities across the country, the conversation around safety is taking on an increasingly “tough-on-crime” narrative. We do not have to make the uneven and costly exchange of justice for safety, or healing for security. Thanks to the advocacy of Fund Peace, American Rescue Plan dollars are eligible to be used for scaling up community-based violence interventions.
However, mayors and police chiefs are instead using the lion’s share of these resources to grow already bloated law enforcement departments, even though a more effective and less harmful approach is easily within reach. If elected leaders fail to invest evenly in community-based violence intervention strategies, we will see further spikes in violence, mass incarceration, separated families and hurting communities.
And let’s be clear, the Biden administration has signaled to state and local elected officials that Rescue Plan funds can be used to expand the tool belt of public safety in cities across the country. This United States Treasury Department guidance clearly lays out expansive uses of the American Rescue Plan to include things like summer jobs, housing and community violence interventions. Local and state lawmakers’ lack of imagination — and muscle memory of criminalization — are impediments to ensuring public safety in 2022.
Yes, many of our communities are afraid. All are asking for more safe and secure communities. But we need visionary leadership in this time of crisis, not reactionary solutions from a 25-year-old failed playbook of tough on crime and criminalization.
Across the country, there has been widespread coverage on the “rise in crime,” which doesn’t take into account the impacts of a devastating pandemic or persistent joblessness. The narrative about crime creates a convenient pretext allowing local and state policy makers to turn their backs on much-needed reforms. Still, the safety of our loved ones is of utmost importance. Everyone wants to live in communities where they are safe from harm. And that is why government intervention must be targeted, and it must be precise. Policy makers cannot pursue short-term solutions to long-term problems. Nor can they return to approaches that barely solve one issue while creating a slew of others.
Focusing on “rising crime” will lead policy makers to abandon criminal legal reforms and throw out the baby with the bath water. We know that returning to a tough-on-crime approach will not keep communities safe. Building safety means investing in the people and groups closest to the pain. We cannot expect that, on the heels of a bruising and traumatic global pandemic, communities do not need deeper support. The federal government knew states and local jurisdictions were suffering. They passed a COVID-19 relief bill for this very reason.
Unfortunately, too many state and local governments are using COVID-19 relief funds to invest solely in police. For instance, The Guardian reported that several large cities in California spent a significant portion of federal American Rescue Plan Act funds on police, even though the bill was passed to address job loss, housing loss and food insecurity brought on by COVID-19. Police cannot feed hungry children; nor can they address homelessness. Law enforcement reacts to crime. Their expanded coffers aren’t leading to a reduction in crime.
It is imperative that local and state governments direct funding to proven gun violence reduction and prevention strategies. If gun violence prevention programs do not fund credible messengers, clergy outreach, bedside intervention, stipends for persons seeking to leave the gang lifestyle, restorative justice and non-police-affiliated violence intervention programs, they are short-sighted. If policy makers aren’t working to address the issues that cause people to turn to violence in the first place, they aren’t doing the type of work that would lead to short- or long-term reductions in crime.
Moreover, if the approach is to embrace the victims of violence without also seeking to understand and connect with the perpetrators, we are missing the mark. We must also recognize that these groups — victims and perpetrators — often overlap. We cannot have elected officials obstructing progress by refusing to engage or tepidly engaging with community-based gun violence reduction strategies.
Right now, many municipalities are directing federal funding to everything but the strategies that have been proven to reduce gun violence and mass incarceration. As the Biden administration works with community-based groups, we hope it will shift course away from encouraging further funding for police departments. Instead, both federal and local lawmakers should act in the best interest of Black and Brown communities and fund peace.
It is time for our communities to come together and create an ecosystem where people can live free of gun violence and mass incarceration. Police were never designed to meet the systemic issues of hurting people. Responding to pain by enforcing a criminal code, as police are trained to do, is ineffective.
We cannot continue to allow policy makers to ghost Black and Brown people.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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As state legislators finalize their budgets for the year ahead, they should pursue tax and budget policies that align with three principles for an antiracist, equitable state response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To set states up for long-term success and a stronger recovery, lawmakers should:
- Target aid to those most in need due to the pandemic and economic crises.
- Advance short- and long-term antiracist and equitable policies to dismantle racial, ethnic, gender, and economic inequities that non-dominant groups and identities experience.
- Strengthen state revenue systems to sustain transformative, long-term investments in Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities and those with large numbers of immigrants.
As of December 2021, states and U.S. Territories have $80 billion remaining in Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (FRF), which were provided under the American Rescue Plan. States should consider the three principles when deciding how to spend their remaining federal pandemic aid to uplift communities experiencing challenges exacerbated by the pandemic and to address racism, poverty, and other injustices. States also have flexibility in determining how to appropriate this aid. How they choose to spend these dollars can advance equitable, antiracist policies to build economic recovery and long-term opportunities for all families and communities.
For example, states and territories (as well as cities and counties, which also received FRF) can use the funds to:
- Provide housing assistance. FRF can extend rental assistance programs originally funded through other sources such as the Emergency Rental Assistance Program. These programs help people avoid evictions by providing short-term assistance to cover the costs of housing and utilities. They can also provide targeted support to people who face additional barriers to housing, and therefore a greater risk of homelessness, such as those leaving jail or prison, people with substance use disorders, people with mental health conditions, and immigrants and their families. In places with limited housing supply, FRF can help develop and preserve affordable homes.
- Expand food assistance. Black and Latinx households, especially those with children, are more likely to experience food hardship. FRF can provide food benefits and meal programs to those who need help now but whom existing programs don’t reach. States that plan well can use their own funds to extend these supports to advance long-term racial, ethnic, and economic equity.
- Invest in K-12 extended learning and tutoring. Students of color and students from low-income families face barriers to educational opportunities due to historical discrimination. During the pandemic, many of these students lost months of learning, setting them back even more. States can use FRF to supplement initiatives to provide extended learning time and tutoring to help students recover the learning they missed and to strengthen K-12 education for children of color and those from low-income households.
To work toward the three principles, some states have directed their FRF to communities most affected by the pandemic by using aid to establish programs that promote workforce development, human services, public health, education, and more:
- Illinois invested $4.2 million for grants and administrative expenses associated with legal assistance to migrant persons.
- New Jersey appropriated $100 million for a Child Care Revitalization Fund to improve facilities, support employees, and provide workforce development programming. Job losses during the health and economic crisis have been concentrated in lower-paid industries such as child care, where women and people of color — including immigrants — are overrepresented. Targeting professional support to child care providers is important for early childhood development, families, and local economies.
- Nevada spent $4 million to establish the Nevada First-Gen Network, a statewide program to assist students in grade 6 or higher who are prospective first-generation college students and have been negatively affected by the pandemic.
States have also used FRF to address racial, ethnic, gender, and economic inequities and barriers by investing in policies and programs that provide targeted support to people with lower incomes and underrepresented groups:
- Montana invested $2 million in its Individuals with Disabilities Employment Engagement Program to support individuals with disabilities to obtain and advance in employment, extending the capacity of existing workforce programs to reach more people.
- New York City spent $3.7 million on community-driven strategies to promote mental health services in parts of the city — often with large numbers of Black, Latinx, Asian, and/or other people of color — that have historically lacked access to these services.
- Washington State allocated $45 million for a new program that addresses food insecurity and supports local farmers and food businesses. It procures local food, focusing on underrepresented farmers and ranchers including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, to distribute to hunger relief organizations that serve communities of color and other marginalized communities.
States will need to invest more in historically excluded communities over the long term to overcome racial and ethnic inequities. This will require more revenue, which should be raised in ways that further advance equity. White supremacy and structural racism created — and perpetuate — disparities in power, resources, and opportunities, where the wealthiest 10 percent of white households hold nearly two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. Further, the upside-down nature of most state tax systems allows those with the most income to pay the least as a share of their income. Some states have begun to update their systems by raising new revenues to finance investments that broaden opportunity and promote equity. For example:
- Washington, D.C. scaled back an ineffective tax incentive for technology companies and used the savings for a range of critical programs such as homelessness services and health care for people who are undocumented. D.C. also implemented a tax increase on high-income residents to fund permanent housing for residents experiencing homelessness, raise salaries for workers in early childhood education, and increase financial assistance for workers with low earnings through D.C.’s earned income tax credit.
- New York adopted higher income taxes for millionaires. Income tax rates increased from 8.82 percent to 9.65 percent for households making over $1 million, to 10.3 percent for those making between $5 million and $25 million, and to 10.9 percent for those making over $25 million. With this new revenue, New York plans to invest in education and create a recovery grant program to assist small businesses affected by the pandemic.
- New Mexico enacted a tax increase on health insurers that is projected to raise about $110 million annually to fund Affordable Care Act marketplace subsidies. New Mexico also adopted a new statewide refundable Child Tax Credit that will provide families up to $175 per child to help address child poverty and food insecurity.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The spread of COVID-19 in classrooms has revealed an infrastructure problem made worse by the way the United States finances improvements to school buildings.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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The work of the left at this moment is to understand what new spaces have opened up and how to build upon them.
Introducing our Winter 2022 special section, “Beyond Bidenomics.”
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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By James Battaglia, Jack Watson
Original article: https://www.rochesterfirst.com/news/local-news/rochester-city-council-approves-guaranteed-basic-income-pilot-program/
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) — In its meeting Tuesday night, Rochester City Council unanimously approved a measure to create a Guaranteed Basic Income pilot program in the city.
Under the initial proposal presented by former Mayor Lovely Warren as her final act in office, 175 families in the City of Rochester who live at or below 200% of the federal poverty level would receive $500 per month for one year. A separate group of 175 families would receive the same amount monthly under the second year of the proposal.
“I will say there is a lot of work internally that the incoming mayor will have to make sure that this is implemented with fidelity,” said Mayor-elect Malik Evans, who is on the council. “We will work to do that while also simultaneously working to ensure that we do everything we can with public and private partnerships to expand both these pieces of legislation, but there is much work to be done, so we ask for patience.”
“We’re going to move this forward, and I believe it’s going to be great because we’re going to continue to do the work,” said City Council President Loretta Scott.
“It is a pilot that’s going to be a pilot that grows into a magnificent example of what government can do when we get our heads on straight.”
City council approved a measure to pay for the proposal with American Rescue Plan Act funds. The pilot program would cost an estimated $2.2 million, paying The Black Community Focus Fund, Inc. $50,000 annually to manage the program.
“This pilot will allow us to collect data that will hopefully allow us to create better policies, to provide permanent economic floors for people,” said Rev. Myra Brown, whose organization is tasked with administering the program, in an interview with News 8.
Rev. Brown told News 8 the organization’s work will now begin on the nuts and bolts – how residents can apply, and the structure of the program.
Jarrett Felton, with Rochester-based Invessent, Wealth Management says this is a more focused approach than universal basic income, a similar program with a similar name.
“This is more of a targeted approach, laser-sharp focus,” Felton explained. There are, “requirements people have to meet in order to qualify. I’m sure there’s a number of people who do try and sign up for it as well.”
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By Jesse Bedayn
South San Francisco this month sent out the first $500 monthly checks to around 150 low-income families to spend however they see fit.
South San Francisco is the latest Bay Area city to launch a guaranteed income pilot program – in which participants receive monthly cash payments with no strings attached – with $1 million in American Rescue Plan funds and a $100,000 grant from San Mateo County.
“We’ve struggled as a society for years to deal with poverty and we don’t have enough success to show for it,” said Dave Pine, a San Mateo County supervisor, “It’s time to try something new.”
The new program, which launched last week, comes months after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill offering $35 million in funding to support current or future guaranteed income pilots like those that already exist in Santa Clara County, Oakland, Marin County and San Francisco. Those programs offer between $500 and $1,000 a month to different populations, including foster youth and pregnant women.
“We’ve struggled as a society for years to deal with poverty and we don’t have enough success to show for it. It’s time to try something new.”
— David Pine, San Mateo County SupervisorSouth San Francisco’s pilot prioritizes foster youth, families with young children and low-income households in the largely Asian American and Hispanic city, where 24% of the population doesn’t earn enough to afford basic necessities, according to United Ways of California. Undocumented residents and formerly incarcerated people are also eligible for the program.
The YMCA Community Resource Center in South San Francisco will manage the program with support from Community Financial Resources, an Oakland non-profit that help set up bank accounts and debit cards for the payments to residents. Participants also receive financial training.
Every three months, the YMCA will release reports with data on participants’ spending trends. The goal is to determine the effectiveness of guaranteed income, and the results may set the groundwork for larger programs in the future.
The idea of guaranteed income is a break from older, more prescriptive methods of doling out public assistance money.
Rules around how money should be spent in state programs like food stamps or requirements that people on unemployment be searching for work, “don’t actually fit the realities they are facing,” said Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget and Policy Center.
Hoene points to results from Stockton’s $500 a month guaranteed income pilot. People in that program were better able to find full-time jobs, pay emergency bills and stay healthy, according to a report from Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration.
“All of the evidence is pointing to the fact that people who don’t have much income,” said Hoene, “actually use the additional cash wisely and position themselves to be better off.”
The post South San Francisco launches guaranteed income program appeared first on Basic Income Today.
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Original article: https://www.mercedsunstar.com/news/local/article255486671.html#twt-evening-mer
After a contentious public hearing over how to use money allotted by the federal American Rescue Plan Act, the Merced City Council on Monday reviewed a long list of proposals community members and youth advocates had pressed for in the last few weeks.
The first of two public hearings resulted in a discussion among members of the City Council about how the city’s $27 million in ARPA funds will be used.
Some of the programs topping the list were the establishment of an affordable housing trust fund, the creation of jobs for high school students, a universal basic income program and premium pay for essential workers, especially farm workers.
However, some city officials didn’t support some of the biggest expenditures community advocates suggested in recent weeks — particularly the establishment of a basic universal income program.
Such a program would be similar to one established in Stockton, called the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration.
Launched by now-former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs two years ago, the program paid $500 a month to city residents selected at random. The program was paid for by donations from private organizations.
District 2 Councilmember Fernando Echevarria was the strongest supporter of such a program Monday night. Councilmember Jesse Ornelas has also previously spoken in support of establishing such a program.
“Stockton is on point on this and their research is showing that it was successful,” Echevarria said.
Echevarria supported funneling funds from $2.5 million toward sending out checks to program participants between ages 16-21 or 18-21 every month, saying he’d like the youth who get universal income to use the money productively, like spending money on clothes, shoes and food.
“That’s their money. If we give them money, they can spend it any damn way they please,” Echevarria said.
Echevarria even went as far as to make a motion establishing a universal basic income program for youth, although the motion failed because only Ornelas and Councilmember Bertha Perez voted in support of the program.
Meanwhile, Mayor Matt Serratto and council members Kevin Blake, Sarah Boyle and Delray Shelton voted against it.
“I’m 100 percent for job training,” said Boyle, who represents District 5. “There’s a lot of other resources out here in Merced we need to make sure we’re advertising about. Universal basic income, I’m not really for.
Perez supported the idea, saying that every dollar the city invested in the youth would pay off in the long run.
Councilmember Delray Shelton said he didn’t know about giving residents “random, miscellaneous checks.” Serratto said he didn’t think there was enough money to make the program last long-term.
“Giving people checks, no way,” Blake added during the meeting. “I don’t know if that’s beneficial.”
Other possible uses
Using that money to cover the backlog of unpaid water, sewer and garbage disposal bills to the city also came up on Monday night, something city officials previously discussed as the total amount of delinquent utility bills hovers around a half million dollars.
“The city should look at ARPA funds to make sure they cover that portion of water, sewer and garbage bills,” said Sheng Xiong, a policy advocate for the Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability.
“This utility bill was not accepted when people applied for rental assistance with the programs here locally. It’s important we look at ARPA funds to make sure that is covered, especially since we know people were affected by this and couldn’t pay their bills.”
In a previous demonstration to push for that ARPA money to be invested in programs that helped youth in the city, youth organizers said they wanted $2.5 million to be used to fund the guaranteed universal income program for youth in Merced, and $500,000 to be used to create new jobs for high school students.
“We need youth investments. That money needs to go to the youth,” said Astrid Morales, a Merced youth activist who spoke at Monday’s City Council meeting.
“You have $27 million, $3 million towards youth investment, housing, redistricting, we need that.”
Others in previous weeks advocated for additional funding for affordable housing in the amount of $5 million, another big item pushed by many in the previous two public hearings over use of ARPA funds.
This and other priorities voiced by members of the community lined up with those of City Council members, who individually support priorities as diverse as youth services, affordable housing, zoo improvements, public safety, Yosemite Parkway beautification, street improvements, tourism, and infrastructure, among other priorities.
Other areas of interest indicated on Monday night include construction of a youth center in south Merced to keep kids out of trouble, rental support, utility support, more services to the homeless, food bank support, eviction prevention and broadband internet expansion.
City staff will come back to the City Council during their next public hearing on ARPA funds to break down how members could vote to spend the city’s ARPA dollars.
The post Could Merced, California, get a universal basic income program next? appeared first on Basic Income Today.
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Researchers from the Center on Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University have been measuring monthly poverty rates throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. They use a supplemental poverty measure that includes all taxes and transfers, including income supports from federal COVID-19 relief such as stimulus payments and the improved Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments.
These data show just how effective cash assistance from tax credits and other pandemic relief has been for reducing child poverty, and the most recent data highlight the importance of improved CTC payments. The American Rescue Plan Act made some key — but temporary — changes to the CTC, increasing the amount of funding available to families, expanding eligibility for families with lower incomes, and changing the schedule for distributing the funds. Families are now receiving half of the funds in monthly payments that began on July 15, rather than in a lump sum when families file their taxes. The Center on Poverty & Social Policy’s analysis shows that the national child poverty rate dropped from 15.8 percent in June 2021 to 11.9 percent in July after families started receiving CTC payments. The rate dropped again to 11.5 percent in August as monthly CTC payments continued.
These monthly estimates provide a clearer picture of the real-time hardship faced by families across the country. Poverty rates are most often an annual measure, but research shows that short spells of poverty can have long-term consequences for children’s well-being. These numbers bolster data that show food insecurity went down among eligible families after the monthly CTC payments began. These numbers also add to the wealth of evidence that cash assistance is a crucial tool for fighting poverty.
Original article: https://www.ncjustice.org/publications/child-tax-credit-payments-other-cash-benefits-lead-to-a-decrease-in-child-poverty/
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The benefits were handed out. But they don’t seem to be translating politically. In some cases, voters don’t even credit Biden for them.
By Sam Stein
When they took power this past winter, Democrats made a commitment to not repeat what many viewed as a critical misstep of the Obama years. The legislation they passed would do two things well: make sure that the benefits were frontloaded and that the impact was tangible.
The result was a Covid relief package that included direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, $300 per week in unemployment insurance supplements, and an expansion of the child tax credit for a year.
Nine months later, whatever political benefits were supposed to accrue from that package have seemingly faded. The public’s support for the direct payments has been overtaken by its concerns about the lingering pandemic. The federal unemployment insurance benefits ended in September with no apparent appetite by the feds or state governments to extend them. And while Democrats are seeking to extend the expanded child tax credit past its expiration date this December, recent polling data suggests that they are getting little credit for it.
A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released last week showed that 61 percent of respondents said they’d received the credit — a $300 payment per month for every child under the age of 7 and a $250-per-month payment for every child under the age of 17. But only 39 percent of respondents said that the payment had a major impact on their lives. And while 47 percent of respondents credited Democrats for passing the expanded child tax credit, just 38 percent credited President Joe Biden.
Those numbers are causing agita on Capitol Hill, where there is growing concern that in a rush to continue legislative momentum around infrastructure and Biden’s Build Back Better social spending plan, the party has failed to hammer home the benefits of their first big bill: the American Rescue Plan.
“It’s great to deliver and do things, but you have to actually go out and tell the f—ing world about it,” conceded one top Senate Democratic aide who worked on getting the child tax credit passed. “That’s not a two-month project. It has to keep going.”
It’s also compelling officials in the party to revisit the calculation they made in January. Giving people money may not be the dispositive political winner that they imagined.
“I believe we should do popular things and use our power while we have it,” said Adam Jentleson, a party operative who now finds himself among the more vocal progressive activists in D.C. “But you should do them because they’re the right thing to do but not with the expectation that there would be a big political payoff.”
As Jentleson and others noted, the moral case for passing the child tax credit remains quite profound. Researchers at Columbia University found that 59.3 million children nationwide received payments in July 2021. That month alone, they wrote, the program “kept 3 million children from poverty.” Extended through its duration, the program could “reduce monthly child poverty by up to 40 percent.” Combined with all Covid-related relief, “it could contribute to a 52 percent reduction in monthly child poverty.”
Democrats negotiating the Build Back Better legislative package have pushed to extend the program expansion until 2025. And Biden himself has leaned into that policy specifically as a way to sell the larger reconciliation package.
“The jobs numbers also remind us that we have important work ahead of us, and important investments we need to make,” Biden said on Friday, after the release of an underwhelming jobs report. “We’re going to help build families, and we’re going to help them afford to care for their new baby, a child, an elderly relative. [We’re] going to extend the tax credit for families with children.”
The question confronting the campaign apparatuses within the party, however, is how can they turn any such extension into actual electoral positives. For some, it’s simple: You keep building a record that you can take to the voters as a case for remaining in power.
“All of this is part of the stew you need to put together to create a post-pandemic, economic boom in 2022,” said one top party operative, in reference to both the child tax credit, the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better initiative. “And if you succeed, there is a clear argument to make that Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress came in, got to work, rescued the economy and put money in your pocket. You can see the ads. But it’s an ugly path to get there.”
But others say that Democrats’ ambitions need to be recalibrated a bit; that there are no panaceas for electoral success and that the real benefits won’t be realized in 2022 or maybe even 2024, but in the reshaping of the electorate down the road.
Ethan Winter, a senior analyst at Data for Progress, does polling for Fighting Chance for Families, a group that is working to extend the child tax credit. The data he has shows wide support for the expanded tax credit among Democrats and independents. But the more interesting number, he argued, was found in the crosstabs.
Republican parents who have gotten the benefits, he said, support Biden at a higher rate than their non-parent Republican peers. And that, Winter added, is a decent thread of optimism for Democrats who thought the policy would serve them well both morally and politically.
“I think there was a triumphalist narrative that if we provide this benefit, we will remake American politics,” Winter said. “But I think this misreads the literature on policy feedback slightly. The place where this works is at the margins. That’s where the struggle is waged.”
He went on from there.
“It’s really hard to remake the electorate, but if you can provide clear benefits to Republican parents, then you can pick off maybe not the module Republican parent, but the marginal one. And if you can pick up the marginal ones, then you can maybe win the next election and that solidifies it even further.”
Original article: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/11/democrats-cash-success-covid-relief-515765
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Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins’s plan for a pilot Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) program is finally seeing some movement.
Not much had been said about the program since Perkins’s announcement last year that he was joining other mayors across the country (Mayor’s for Guaranteed Income) who plan to institute GBI pilots in their regions.
A recent $432,000 appropriation from the Caddo Parish Commission at Caddo Parish Commissioner Stormy Gage-Watts’ recommendation, sparked new conversation and additional financial support for the mayor’s program.
“This is something that’s being provided to low-income families with school-age children and will be done over a 12-month course,” Gage-Watts told The Times.
Stormy Gage-Watts Caddo Commissioner District 7 Commissioner – Douglas Collier/The Times That appropriation will come from the $48 million Caddo Parish received from the American Rescue Plan Act federal grant.
However, only half of the $432,000 can be provided this year since the parish has only received half of the Rescue Plan funding. The other half will be allocated once the parish receives the other half of the $48,000,000 next year.
The funding will go out to the City of Shreveport once an agreement has been signed.
Overall, the parish funding will help 120 single-family households with $600 per family for 12 months.
The parish’s $432,000 will only go as far as 6 months of help. Matching funds for the remaining months will come from a $500,000 donation from Mayors for Guaranteed Income to the City of Shreveport.
Though the commission is providing funding, Mayor Perkins has stressed that he would not be using any city funds for the program, something that has not changed.
“Twenty-five percent of the citizens in Shreveport are living in poverty and UBI would help more of our residents maintain a better quality of life,” Perkins said in a statement to The Time. “We are in the first phase of raising money for the program and I am excited to know that the Caddo Parish Commission is on board with improving the lives of our citizens.”
The $500,000 donation to the mayor’s pilot is by way of an $18 million donation from Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey. That funding will be released, according to Saadia McConville with Mayors for Guaranteed Income, once the mayor’s GBI program is further along in the design phase.
GBIs are described as a type of cash transfer program that provides continuous
As for the economic outlook in Shreveport, in order to afford a modest, two-bedroom apartment at fair-market rent, full-time workers need to earn a minimum of $16.56 per hour, according to a report titled, “Out of Reach,” from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), a research and advocacy organization dedicated solely to achieving affordable and decent homes for the lowest income citizens, and Housing LOUISIANA, a state-wide network of nine regional housing coalitions working to solve the state’s affordable housing crisis.
“These are still very trying times. We cannot do enough,’ Gage Watts said. “There’s still job loss, needs, and things beyond food. (People) need shelter. It takes a lot to run a household, especially if it’s a single-parent household.”
This is also being done in partnership with the Department of Community Development, United Way of Northwest Louisiana, and the Shreveport Financial Empowerment Center, Gage-Watts added.
Participants for the mayor’s GBI program will be chosen by zip code with the lowest income first, Gage-Watts said. All participants must be single parents with school-aged children and incomes up to 120% of the poverty rate.
An analysis last year found that Louisiana ranks third in the nation for high risk for evictions due to job losses, with 130,000 households across Louisiana at risk for eviction.
“We’re at a point of ‘this is it,”’ Gage-Watts said. “But yet, we’re still trying to find other resources to be able to offer assistance to those citizens in need. Hopefully and prayerfully, the (DBI) is a way to help them to get back on their feet as well.” Gage-Watts said.
A resolution in support of the program authorizing the mayor to execute of memorandum of understanding with the Mayors for Guaranteed Income coalition (MGI) the Shreveport Financial Empowerment Center (SFEC) and United Way of Northwest Louisiana is on the agenda for passage during Tuesday’s city council meeting.
Following passage, the City will receive funds in the amount of $500,000 from the Mayors for Guaranteed Income Coalition (MGI), and matching funds in the amount of $450,000 will be obtained from other non-City sources for a total of $950,000 in funding for the program.
The funds will be deposited into the Special Revenue Fund for Community Development, which will oversee all expenditures and ensure that the goals of the program, including but not limited to data collection, according to information provided in the
Original article: https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/2021/09/27/shreveport-mayor-adrian-perkins-ubi-program-fundraising-phase/5517875001/
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This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.
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by Elaine Maag
As Congress debates whether to extend the major, but temporary, changes to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) it adopted earlier this year, a crucial question is whether it should keep the credit fully refundable.
A new Tax Policy Center analysis finds that, for low-income families, full refundability is a key element of the CTC reforms. For families with children and incomes in the bottom one-fifth of the income distribution (income of $27,000 or less), keeping the higher credit amounts without full refundability would boost average benefits by only about $100 in 2022– from about $1,500 to $1,600. But if Congress also retains the law’s full refundability, average benefits for those families would almost triple relative to the prior law, to $4,600.
Benefits for families with children in the second income quintile (between $27,000 and $54,000) would rise by an average of almost $700 – from $2,700 to $3,400 – if credits amounts are kept at today’s levels but are only partially refundable just like before the temporary expansion. But their average credit would rise to almost $4,900 if both the higher amounts and full refundability continue. Retaining full refundability of the credit would make little difference for families in the highest two income quintiles.
Keeping the Child Tax Credit fully refundable – so that even very low-income families receive the full benefit – is critical to helping the lowest income families. – URBAN INSTITUTE In 2021, the American Rescue Plan (ARP) temporarily increased the credit from $2,000 per child under age 16 to $3,600 per child from birth to age 5 and $3,000 per child ages 6 to 17. And crucially, it made the credit fully refundable. Under prior law the credit was only partially refundable. The changes apply only for this year.
The Tax Policy Center analyzed three CTC variations: current 2022 law, where the ARP rules expire; extending ARP law including the higher credit amounts but without full refundability; and extending all of the CTC provisions of the ARP, including full refundability.
Of the total benefit delivered to families in 2022 if the ARP rules were kept in place, keeping the credit fully refundable would represent nearly a quarter of all benefits – almost all of which would be delivered to families in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution.
A recent Urban Institute analysis finds that, in a typical year, extending the ARP provisions of the CTC would reduce poverty by roughly 40 percent – lifting 4.3 million children out of poverty. Maintaining full refundability is essential, however, to allowing the very lowest income families—those whose children are most likely to be in poverty— to receive the full value of the tax credit.
TPC estimates the child credit would deliver about $126 billion in benefits in 2022 if the ARP rules expire, about $169 billion if the credit amounts stay at ARP levels but are only partially refundable, and about $223 billion under all the ARP rules, including full refundability.
If Congress keeps full refundability but reduces credit amounts to pre-ARP levels, overall benefits would be lower. But low-income families would still receive substantial benefits if the lower credit amounts were made fully refundable.
Expanding the CTC to include even the very lowest income families was one of a package of changes that a panel of experts recommended to reduce childhood poverty. Failing to continue full CTC refundability would severely limit the credit’s ability to fight poverty, and again exclude millions of low-income children because their parents don’t earn enough. If policymakers are interested in fully using the CTC to reduce poverty, they should keep the credit fully refundable.
Original Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/elainemaag/2021/09/10/keeping-child-tax-credit-fully-refundable-is-critical-to-low-income-families/?sh=57a5ee796445
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Accounting for government aid programs, poverty fell in 2020 to the lowest rate on record since the Census Bureau began keeping records in 2009. The dip, which happened in spite of declining median household incomes last year, shows that the direct aid from the stimulus packages was incredibly effective at reducing poverty.
While the official poverty rate rose due in part to a 2.9 percent decrease in median household incomes, the supplemental poverty rate fell from 11.8 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2020. The supplemental poverty rate takes into account more government aid than the official rate, including things like food stamps, housing assistance and the stimulus checks.
The stimulus packages passed in 2020 helped significantly in the overall poverty reduction, the Census found. The $1,200 stimulus checks alone lifted 11.7 million people out of poverty. Supplemental unemployment aid — $600 a week for much of 2020, thanks in large part to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) — protected an additional 5.5 million people from experiencing poverty.
Without the stimulus payments, the Census Bureau wrote, the poverty rate would have been 12.7 percent rather than 9.1 percent. While the additional government aid helped lift millions out of poverty, Social Security still had the largest impact in 2020, lifting 26.5 million out of poverty.
The government aid worked in reducing poverty across the board: People of all ages, races, ethnicities and education levels saw a reduction, The Washington Post reports. Households headed by single moms and Black and Latinx people saw the largest declines.
The data shows the powerful impact of direct aid from the government, which was able to reverse some of the harmful effects of the pandemic on the economy, such as mass layoffs.
“What the data tells us is clear: when government responds to the needs of the working class, millions of families are lifted out of poverty,” Sanders wrote on Twitter in response to the Census report. “We must not stop here. We must pass the $3.5T reconciliation bill and invest in working families.”
To many progressives, reports such as these showing that aid in stimulus packages like last years’ bills and this year’s American Rescue Plan reduce poverty are proof positive that lawmakers should implement further direct aid measures.
“For the record, poverty dropped last year despite the pandemic — because of government aid. Lesson: Poverty is a policy choice,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote on Twitter.
Experts at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) echoed Reich’s tweet, writing “The poverty rate reduction highlights how much poverty the nation and its policymakers tolerate is a choice.” EPI recommended immediately reinstating the supplemental unemployment checks, which ended nationally on Labor Day but were cut off prematurely by 26 states, nearly all of them with Republican governors.
Republicans piled onto the unemployment checks this year, blaming them for a so-called “worker shortage” that didn’t actually exist. But states that cut off the unemployment checks early didn’t find a significant increase in employment — in fact, data from the Department of Labor found that the states that stopped the unemployment checks had slightly slower job growth.
Data from Tuesday’s Census Bureau suggests that employment can have a limited effect on reducing poverty in comparison to direct relief programs. However, Republicans and conservative Democrats, have shown little interest in pursuing poverty reduction as a goal.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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When third-grade teacher Sarah Adkins returned to her classroom at Pennoyer Elementary School in Norridge, Illinois, in August, she knew that she would be facing a slew of challenges — none of them related to curriculum or student achievement. First, it would be hot in the building. Secondly, the water fountains would be inoperable because they’d been turned off to protect against possible lead poisoning, and many of the toilets and sinks in the bathrooms of the 70-year-old building would be broken.
Windows would pose an additional obstacle. “We’re located near O’Hare Airport, so there is a lot of noise,” Adkins told Truthout. “Our windows are double-paned to help reduce the sound, but we can’t open them.”
This, despite raging COVID-19 infections — made worse by the Delta variant — and late August recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to utilize “layered mitigation strategies” to combat the virus. These strategies include universal masking and the vaccination of teachers, staff and kids older than 12; adequate ventilation, including working heating and cooling systems or in-room air purifiers; social distancing in classrooms and lunch rooms; frequent hand washing and sanitizing of high-touch surfaces including door knobs, desktops, writing implements and computers; and testing, contact tracing and quarantining when positive COVID cases are detected.
Turns out, this is easier said than done.
Indeed, U.S. public schools have been in sorry shape since long before COVID — and it’s gotten worse. A report published by the federal government’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) in June 2020 documented the burgeoning crisis, reporting that the structural integrity of 100,000 public schools was putting nearly 50 million kids and the more than 6 million adults who instruct, feed and clean up after them at risk.
“Fifty-four percent of public-school districts need to update or replace multiple building systems,” the report concluded. “Forty-one percent need to upgrade or replace HVAC systems.”
This, the GAO found, means that 36,000 schools are currently without adequate heating or cooling equipment. What’s more, the GAO documented a huge number of other deficits: faulty plumbing, poor interior and/or exterior lighting, bad electrical wiring, and unacceptable amounts of asbestos, lead and mold, among them.
A previous GAO report documented how, in 2018, an estimated 43 percent of districts had tested for lead in the school drinking water within the past two years, with an estimated 37 percent showing elevated levels.
Water fountains manufactured before 1988 are likely to contain lead piping — and a 2012 survey of public schools found that the average school building was 44 years old. “Most building systems, components, equipment, and finishes do not last this long,” the study, compiled by the 21st Century Fund, The National Council on School Facilities and The Center for Green Schools, concluded in 2016.
Other findings were similarly distressing. “One-sixth of the entire US population is inside K-12 public school buildings each day,” the groups concluded. “During a building’s life, districts will have to replace roofs, windows, doors, boilers, chillers, ventilation systems and plumbing and electrical systems.”
If only they could.
Where’s the School Infrastructure Funding?
As always, the issue is money, or the lack of it. Schools are typically funded by state, city and federal dollars, with the lion’s share of operating revenue raised through local property taxes.
In Norridge, Illinois, for example, property taxes have not been raised since 1992, and despite numerous attempts to generate money for the construction of a new school to replace Pennoyer Elementary — or make essential repairs to the existing structure — voters have repeatedly rejected attempts to increase property tax revenues through referendum-approved bonds, even with the elevated needs caused by COVID.
“We’ve gone door-to-door, made phone calls and given people a chance to tour the school and see the conditions for themselves,” Adkins says. “We’ve tried to convince people of the urgency, but people like low taxes. There are a lot of retirees here and a lot of people who don’t vote. Those who come to the polls apparently don’t see a problem with a STEM lab without running water.”
But as dire as these straits are, federal relief dollars earmarked for the school renovations — including upgrades needed to keep COVID at bay — may be forthcoming.
Both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) are pushing for congressional passage of the Reopen and Rebuild America’s School Act [S.96; H.R.604], legislation that will allocate $100 billion in direct grants and $30 billion in bonds to enable schools to upgrade their HVAC systems and replace environmentally damaging diesel school buses.
“The pandemic has caused America to see what educators have seen forever,” NEA President Becky Pringle told Truthout. “Students, especially if they’re Black, Brown or Indigenous, often attend schools with poor ventilation, leaky pipes or broken toilets. Many go to schools built more than 50 years ago and are predisposed to getting sick from COVID because they have pre-existing conditions like asthma that are exacerbated by the conditions in their classrooms and schoolhouses.”
Add in poverty, housing instability, hunger and a lack of consistent access to technology and you have what Pringle calls “a moral crisis.”
“We have to talk about all the challenges that our students are having and highlight how the virus impacts those whose parents either had no job or were working two or three jobs during the worst of the pandemic,” she says. “We have to make sure that their stories are told.”
As we shed light on deplorable conditions, Pringle tells Truthout, “we also have to focus on institutional racism and systemic economic inequities in schools that have not done right by their students. We have to care about all our kids equally so that they can move into their brilliance and thrive.”
Not surprisingly, AFT President Randi Weingarten wholeheartedly agrees with Pringle, but told Truthout that in addition, progressives need to call out lawmakers who have shown a “complete disrespect for children, educators and public education more generally,” and who are now putting students and staff in harm’s way by refusing to enforce COVID protections.
“People like Florida Governor DeSantis are irresponsible,” Weingarten says. “After Parkland, the gun lobby recommended new protocols for Florida schools that had nothing to do with gun safety and the governor was fully into it. Now, when it comes to COVID safety, he’s showing no concern.”
But despite her evident frustration, Weingarten remains cautiously optimistic about the release of federal relief money to mitigate unsafe conditions. “Some new federal legislation will get through,” she says. “I think we’ll see a big push to get the infrastructure, reconciliation and voting rights bills passed once Congress reconvenes. The fact that the rebuilt levees held in New Orleans during Hurricane Ida shows us the importance of robust infrastructure. Imagine if we had that kind of infrastructure to shore up schools, roads, bridges and families.”
Yes, imagine.
But until this comes to pass, the return to in-person learning will continue to be strewn with problems and roadblocks.
In Maryland, Capital Improvement Program Committee Chair of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs Laura Stewart says that long before anyone had heard of the coronavirus, Montgomery County was facing a backlog of large maintenance projects. “The last I saw we were about $600 million in backlog,” she told Truthout. “We also have a capacity issue and have been using portable classrooms — trailers — due to increased enrollment, and we will likely need to purchase more.”
Stewart adds that Montgomery County has already received some Recovery Act money which has been designated for the purchase of electric vehicles and an upgrade of water systems. “This,” she says, “frees up money for other projects,” such as mold removal and fixing malfunctioning HVAC equipment.
The school district, she says, is also grappling with how best to navigate meal times. “Parents are freaking out about their kids having lunch indoors,” Stewart says. “Yes, in nice weather, eating outside may be possible, but not every principal is willing to allow this. The fear is that kids will run off, which they say will require the hiring of additional monitors. Despite this apprehension, a few schools have purchased canopies and outdoor seating.”
Student security is also an issue in Florida, although it is playing out differently.
Florida parent and former teacher Kelsey Smit, now a curriculum developer who works from home, says that administrative policymakers in the metro Orlando area have barred teachers from opening classroom doors and windows. “Because of active shooter preparations that went into effect after the killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, teachers are supposed to keep all windows and doors shut. This protocol is still being enforced, despite COVID.”
Landmark Preservation vs. COVID
David Marshall, a social studies teacher and track coach at Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School, told Truthout that COVID has caused unprecedented concerns about historic preservation. Because the 110-year-old building he teaches at is a designated landmark, Marshall reports that the school has been unable to install air-conditioning units in the school’s front-facing rooms. Instead, they’ve had to utilize chillers. “They’re like giant refrigeration units that had to be brought in by helicopter and installed on the roof,” Marshall says. The upshot is that some sections of the building are cold, while others are not; heat is similarly uneven.
In addition, he says that pre-COVID, other needed upgrades and repairs were done piecemeal due to budgetary constraints. “We’ve been reactive,” he says. “At one point, the counseling office had to clear out so that black mold from leaks could be removed, and we’ve undertaken other mold and asbestos abatement projects throughout the building.” Still, he says lead pipes in some areas have not yet been replaced and “on stormy days there is a sewer smell in some places.” Now, given the respiratory nature of COVID, Marshall says that these problems have taken on a new urgency.
Meanwhile, concerns are mounting over the pace and location of Chicago’s school building remediation. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) will receive $1.8 billion in federal COVID relief money over the next two years, Marshall says, but it’s not clear what those funds will go toward. “CPS needs to be clear about what they plan to spend money on,” he says. “The Chicago Teachers Union has been demanding transparency, but so far there has been a lot of talk but very little disclosure from CPS.”
New York City schools — the nation’s largest public school system — also have a lengthy repair list, with many needed fixes to protect everyone’s health.
“Even before COVID, there was often no soap, hot water or paper towels in the bathrooms of my school,” English language arts teacher Selena Carrion, who teaches at PS 119 in the Bronx, told Truthout. “Students had to bring soap from home.”
But as troubling as this is, Carrion is most concerned about overcrowding. “We don’t have enough chairs and desks in many classrooms,” she says. “It makes social distancing impossible.”
Carrion emphasizes that in addition to COVID concerns, the lack of resources makes it difficult for the school to welcome its large numbers of immigrant and refugee students. “New kids are constantly coming in from Southeast Asia and the Middle East,” she says. “When we don’t have enough seating for them, it sends a terrible message about how much we want them to be here.”
For now, says Carrion, teaching remotely would make more sense than teaching in person under such dangerous and difficult conditions, especially when schools like PS 119 can’t ensure adequate space for socially distanced learning. Although she acknowledges that teaching and learning remotely can be difficult, she believes the health and safety of students and staff make it the most practical option. However, despite petitions and rallies by parents and teachers, the demand for remote learning has gotten no traction from the City’s Board of Education.
And it’s not just public-school educators who are aggrieved. Photographer and arts educator Amanda Adams-Louis taught in a community-based art program for New York City students of color this summer, and there, too, safety measures were largely ignored. “No one took responsibility for buying soap, toilet paper or cleaning supplies,” she told Truthout. “Hand sanitizer was not consistently supplied and we ran out of paper towels a few times. Since we were working with paint, graphite and charcoal, not being able to wash our hands was terrible. Our room was not cleaned very often, either. It made me wonder if white kids in Manhattan were treated better…. We deserved better.”
Teachers’ unions could not agree more. As COVID safety concerns persist, the NEA’s Becky Pringle stresses that the decisions we make today will reverberate for generations.
“Every decision made for our students and our schools is a political one,” Pringle told Truthout. “We have to center public education in equity in order to achieve excellence. Children are the most critical infrastructure we have.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Census surveys show that low income families are using the child tax credits to pay off debt. This is why it should be made permanent.
By: Michael Sasso.
America’s poorest families are using new child benefits in large measure to climb out of debt, much of it likely accumulated during the pandemic.
U.S. Census Bureau surveys are offering an early glimpse of how households are spending $30 billion in enhanced child tax credits that have been distributed so far in two monthly payments. Families who earn less than $50,000 a year are focusing first on paying off debt.
The payments of up to $300 per child, part of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, are a first-ever effort to distribute monthly checks to help families better manage living costs such as groceries and school supplies. The administration has touted the tax credits as a step to reduce child poverty.
There’s evidence from earlier in the pandemic that people used stimulus payments to reduce their dependence on high-cost debt like payday loans, according to Alex Horowitz at Pew Charitable Trusts, who’s researched the issue.
That’s probably happening again, Horowitz said. “I don’t know if that was one of the goals of the child tax credit, but it is likely to be one of its benefits.”
Medical Bills
In Duluth, Georgia, Tanzida Zaman said she steered her $300-a-month payments toward medical bills that accrued since last year, a result of “a lack of ownership between my two insurance providers.”
Zaman, a project manager who considers herself middle income, uses anything left over for child care for her 13-month-old daughter. She’s also used previous federal relief money on medical bills, she said.
“The stimulus and child tax credit have been a very welcoming addition,” she said.
The monthly payments had an immediate economic impact, data show. Personal incomes rose more than forecast in July, reflecting in part the distribution of the first checks to the families of about 60 million children. The Center on Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University found that the money kept almost 3 million kids from poverty.
But it may not last. Remaining pandemic relief programs are winding down and a wave of evictions is looming with a federal moratorium ending in October. The expanded child benefits, a program that advances tax credits that parents would normally get in their tax refund and boosts the amount to as much as $3,600 for kids under 6, end next year. (Advocates are calling for making them permanent).
The percentage of families citing food insufficiency fell after the first tax-credit checks arrived in July, Census surveys show. Even those who reported using most of their checks on debt also spent some of the money on food, clothing, rent and school supplies.
The grocery industry is poised to benefit. The sector could see an $8 billion lift from the child tax credits in the second half, according to Cowen Inc. analyst Oliver Chen.
Jamie Sizemore, who oversees the Feeding America, Kentucky’s Heartland food bank in central Kentucky, said she has seen lines at food pantries shrink since the first credit payments. She’s concerned people will load up on cheap, highly-processed food.
“If you’re trying to stretch your dollar, you’re not going to go to the fresh produce area,” Sizemore said.
Briana Daniels, 26, had stopped by a food pantry in Clarkston, Georgia, mid-August, her 10-month-old daughter in the back seat. Her $300 monthly tax credit payment will only cover a week’s worth of child care, which runs $200, and maybe a bit of food.
“It goes pretty quick,” she said.
The post Child Tax Credits Help Poorest Americans Pay Off Costly Debt appeared first on Basic Income Today.
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As the eviction moratorium sputters uncertainly onward, a new genre of news article has emerged from the chaos: the woes of the so-called “mom-and-pop landlord.” These landlords — individuals with just a handful of rental properties — are hard-pressed to keep up mortgages and maintenance due to their inability to collect rent during the COVID crisis. Most landlords featured in such stories agree that ending the moratorium is the answer.
“What’s the difference between me and a grocery store or a restaurant?” Carol Kelly asked The Washington Post. “You would never go into a restaurant and say, ‘Please feed me for the next 12 months and I’ll give an IOU.’” Michelle Quinn, a partner at a law firm, agreed. “Really the landlords are the party taking the brunt of the effect of the pandemic…. They’re giving tenants a break, but not giving landlords a break,” she told Forbes.
Some claims verge on self-aggrandizement. “Next to the front-line medical workers and emergency responders, I think the small-business landlords who have kept their tenants housed should be getting a good deal of credit,” Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, told Politico.
Others point to emotional distress as reason to overturn the moratorium. “The stress and anxiety, the mental stuff,” Vanie Mangal told The New York Times in one of the most high-profile articles on afflicted landlords, “It’s too much.” The Times article described a nightmare scenario: destructive and noisy tenants who refuse to pay rent or negotiate. The article neglected to mention what internet sleuths quickly figured out: The units in question are illegal and have been the subject of neighbor complaints, including unaddressed flooding issues.
As Mangal’s situation suggests, the plight of the small landlord is complicated. It is true that the so-called mom-and-pop landlords are feeling the squeeze, though not to the extent they like to pretend. At worst, these beleaguered landlords will lose their rental properties, while those they evict stand to lose housing, a financially stable future and even their lives as the Delta variant surges. Yet landlord complaints are not entirely unfounded. As mom and pops begin to exit the rental market, large corporate entities are already swooping in to buy up the excess stock, which threatens to funnel wealth into the pockets of the ultra-rich, put further pressure on remaining small landlords to sell and create worse conditions for tenants down the road
Who Owns Rental Property?
The term “mom-and-pop landlord” has no official definition and does little to convey the actual spectrum of landlords within the rental market. Housing reports instead tend to divide the rental landscape into individuals and business entities.
According to the Brookings Institute, business entities control just over 60 percent of rental housing, and own an average of 20 units each. The rest of the U.S.’s rental stock belongs to unincorporated individuals. Most of these small landlords do well financially — 70 percent of individual landlords make over $90,000 per year, well over the national median income of $79,900.
There are, however, some small landlords who may be in a very precarious position as a result of the eviction moratoriums. The small minority of these landlords making less than $50,000 per year depend on rent for 20 percent of their total income, which means a lack of rent can constitute a genuine hardship. This burden falls especially heavily on senior citizens who depend on rental income for their retirement; according to the Urban Institute, 34 percent of property owners of two- to four-unit buildings are over the age of 65. Of these, 81 percent have no other job and 40 percent still owe mortgage payments on their rental properties.
Is it true that only the elimination of eviction moratoria can help these landlords? Under analysis, most of their arguments in favor of resuming evictions fall apart.
Disproportionate Harm?
Greta Arceneaux, like many landlords, feels abandoned by the government. “I don’t understand how they can come up with all of this financial aid for the homeless, for renters, for agriculture, for big business, for airplanes,” she told Time Magazine. “And they’re forgetting about the small mom-and-pop people that have two units or four units.”
Arceneaux may not be aware of it, but the American Rescue Plan (ARP) passed in March 2021 has instituted two programs that can help small landlords. While only businesses with a payroll were able to take advantage of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program offers businesses adversely affected by the pandemic — including small landlords — loans of up to $500,000. The ARP also set aside nearly $10 billion in relief specifically for landlords making less than 150 percent of median income in their area.
Even without considering these programs, it is disingenuous to focus on the plight of small landlords without looking at the comparatively larger harm of eviction. Evictions mean more than the loss of housing. Evicted tenants can often only find housing in far worse neighborhoods, which exposes them to poorer education for their children, physical and mental health troubles, and deepening financial insecurity.
“It doesn’t really hold water to me to say that landlords are uniquely hurting relative to their tenants during the pandemic,” says Max Besbris, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Besbris points out that evictions disproportionately impact Black women and other women of color, which can lead to increasing inequality in the long-term. A 2019 study found that homeowners have an average net worth of $255,000, while the average tenant has a net worth of $6,200. Landlords, who own more than one home, are far more comfortable than the tenants they wish to evict.
Unlike their tenants, mom-and-pop landlords also have backup from powerful organizations that work to protect their interests. In Maryland, for example, many small landlords belong to the Maryland Multi-Housing Association, an organization dedicated to lobbying both state and national government for landlord-friendly legislation.
Evictions and the Delta Variant
In a June CNBC article, the CEO of the Small Multifamily Owners Association indulged in a bit of hyperbole. “The eviction moratorium is killing small landlords, not the pandemic,” asserted Dean Hunter, who is a landlord himself. This callous statement, printed two months ago in the wake of over 600,000 dead of COVID-19 in the U.S., seems positively ghoulish in light of the surge in COVID cases due to the Delta variant.
Multiple studies of the effects of eviction moratoria demonstrate that prohibitions on evictions save lives. A study published in the Journal of Urban Health in January 2021 found that evictions lead to overcrowding, houselessness, decreased access to health care, and an inability to adhere to CDC recommendations such as social distancing, all of which increase COVID transmission. An April 2021 study reinforced these conclusions when scientists used established epidemiological modeling techniques to simulate the transmission of COVID with and without strict eviction prevention. In every simulation, evictions led to more infections — not merely among those evicted but across entire urban areas. These findings became more dramatic when applied to poorer neighborhoods.
These predictions hold tragically true in practice. A July study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, studied 44 states with eviction moratoria between March 13 and September 30, 2020. Some of these states allowed their moratoria to lapse, while others kept eviction protections in place. Controlling for other variables, the study found that, 16 weeks after lifting moratoria, states experienced twice as many COVID infections and five times as many deaths as states that left moratoria in place.
“As the Delta variant spreads faster than the virus that was circulating last summer, we need to think about how these more transmissible variants of the virus might affect what we see when moratoriums lapse,” said Kathryn Leifheit, an epidemiologist at UCLA and one of the authors of the study. “The research that we did demonstrates that preventing evictions … are a really critical tool to help people stay safe and avoid infections.”
Wall Street Landlords
While allowing evictions to resume would be devastating for tenants by nearly any metric, moratoria without efficient rent relief come with long-term hazards as well.
According to a study by the National Rental Home Council (NHRC), 12 percent of single-housing landlords have already sold their properties as a result of their inability to collect rent, with more sales likely to follow.
“A lot of people who are small-time landlords are going to sell these properties that have become liabilities as a result of the pandemic,” Besbris said. “They’re going to sell them to much bigger corporations … what we call institutional landlords, who own hundreds if not thousands of properties.”
Institutional landlords are large corporate entities, such as private equity firms or real estate investment trusts (REITs), which allow investors to buy and sell shares in a large holding of rental property owned and managed by the fund. The nine largest REITs own nearly 250,000 single-family homes.
This “financialization” of housing means that trading of shares generates more revenue than the housing itself. Such practices ensure that money from rental property flows to shareholders rather than remaining in the community. Financialization can also cause disastrous bubbles and instability, as when the financialization of mortgages led to the 2008 recession.
Ironically, the housing bust of 2008 led directly to the financialization of single-family rental properties. In 2012, the Federal Housing Financial Agency launched a pilot program that allowed investors to buy foreclosed houses in bulk under the condition that they rent the houses for several years. The program, meant to stabilize the housing market, led to massive investments by REITs in single-family houses.
REITs and other equity firms are already moving to buy the property small landlords sell, along with anything else they can get their hands on. According to a report by Redfin, corporate investors bought nearly 68,000 homes in the second quarter of 2021, shattering previous records. Such practices drive up prices and make it more difficult for regular people to become homeowners. Little wonder housing prices reached an all-time high in March 2021.
Not only does this practice divert yet more of America’s wealth into the pockets of the ultra-rich, corporate landlords may be significantly worse for tenants than smaller landlords. Though Besbris emphasizes that more research is needed before sociologists can draw definitive conclusions, “It does seem that institutional landlords are worse for tenants in a lot of ways.”
What research exists supports this conclusion. A study by the Atlanta Federal Reserve found that corporate landlords are 8 percent more likely to evict tenants than individuals. This willingness to evict may result from the practice of charging late fees and other hidden fees, which can make evictions not just cost-neutral, but even profitable. This finding comes from a report released by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (AACE), Americans for Financial Reform, and Public Advocates. Rental contracts also offload responsibility for maintenance onto tenants, including for appliance breakdowns and sewer issues. These institutional investors especially target communities of color: in Fulton County, Georgia, for example, corporate landlords own over 75 percent of housing in Black neighborhoods, compared to just 33 percent in white neighborhoods. Researchers in California have observed similar trends.
Rent Relief Now
The elimination of eviction moratoria would be devastating and even life-threatening. Yet the status quo threatens to give corporations even more power over everyday American life. What should be done?
“We could essentially have rent subsidies right now, instead of letting landlords evict their tenants, from whom they might still be owed a lot of money,” Besbris says. “We have the money for it. We just haven’t distributed it.”
The ARP of 2021 earmarked $46 billion for rental assistance. As of June 30, only $3 billion of this aid had been distributed. This money would both keep tenants in their homes and help save rental stock from the clutches of Wall Street financiers. Local government in Baltimore and Santa Fe provide models of how aid could be distributed more efficiently: both have worked closely with nonprofit organizations and activists to distribute aid more quickly.
“Rental assistance is now available in every state to cover up to a year-and-a-half of back and future bills,” says Patrick Newton of the National Association of Realtors. “We should direct our energy toward the swift implementation of this assistance.”
With multiple challenges to the eviction moratorium working their way through the court system, judges ignoring the moratorium entirely and assistance programs operating at a glacial pace, it remains to be seen whether the United States is capable of distributing rent relief swiftly enough to avert the humanitarian crisis of mass evictions looming on the horizon.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“Equality before the law” — for a constitutional principle, it is one of the most basic, perhaps the most important.
It is also the idea (at least the one openly stated by right-wing law firms, such as the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty) that is driving the legal injunctions blocking President Joe Biden’s $4 billion debt relief initiative for farmers of color. The effort is part of the American Rescue Plan, a COVID-19 stimulus package.
As the argument runs, it is not fair for any specific group of farmers, although they may belong to historically marginalized groups of people, to be singled out for special treatment.
We are told that farming is tough for everyone in the occupation. White farmers also have debts that could be forgiven. Everyone should have equal access to the same resources. Therefore, Biden’s proposal is being decried as unconstitutional. Yet, as simple and logical as this line of reasoning sounds, the arguments provided are deeply flawed.
What these injunctions really display is a ploy by right-wing political actors and the conservative law firms that give them cover, to gin up the support of rural white people.
There have been three separate injunctions filed — in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin. Each represents white farmers not only from those three states but around the country.
The filing from Wisconsin roots its argument in individual rights. Here, the reasoning is based on the 1995 case Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, which held that group-based allegations of racism must be scrutinized with respect to the effects on individuals.
Specifically, the plaintiffs take a quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his concurring opinion from Adarand, which reads, “Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual.”
There is an interesting bit of constitutional philosophy here but also one that is problematic: Basically, it’s debatable whether there is a “focus upon the individual” in the Constitution.
The fact is that there are many references to group rights in our country’s founding document. Look no further than the First Amendment, with respect to the freedom to practice religion free of discrimination. As far as I know, a religion comprised of one individual does not exist.
The same could be said of the Second Amendment and militias. Again, this is a clear “focus,” not on individual, but rather on group rights. So, for the plaintiffs filing these injunctions to base their arguments on the idea that the U.S.’s magna carta is rooted solely on individual rights is incorrect.
The Florida injunction, which the Texas plaintiffs claim is the basis for their case, takes issue with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) designation of “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” (SDFRs).
Here, the reasoning goes that direct evidence needs to be shown as to the experiences of racism. The plaintiffs argue that, “although the government argues that historical discrimination against SDFRs also included things such as higher interest rates, less advantageous loan terms, and delayed approvals, the record evidence does not appear to show that SDFRs with current loans suffered such discrimination.”
The problem is that evidence is not the issue; or rather, claims that evidence of racism must be provided are not required for the USDA to act with respect to historically marginalized farmers and ranchers.
It is worth noting that the SDFR designation was created as part of the 1990 Farm Bill, referring explicitly to producers who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their group identity. Included are not only African Americans, but also Latinos, Indigenous people, and Asian and Pacific Islanders.
With the designation, the USDA secretary of agriculture was granted the power to “carry out an outreach and technical assistance program to encourage and assist socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, and veteran farmers or ranchers, in owning and operating farms and ranches, and in participating equitably in the full range of agricultural programs offered by the Department.”
The main point here is on “participating equitably.” Specifically, the USDA has the power, in ways that it sees fit, to directly work with historically marginalized groups of people to counter systemic discrimination.
Debt forgiveness is one such initiative. After all, if people are in debt, then they are less likely and able to participate in other programs. For instance, Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS) loans — which provide resources to farmers to practice farming in ways that improve soil, water and animal health — in part depend on having sound financials. So, the case coming out of Florida misunderstands the SDFR designation, which has been on the books for over 30 years.
But really, these injunctions have little to do with sound reasoning. Digging into the actual forces behind these cases, we find Donald Trump loyalists including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller. They started the nonprofit that filed the injunction in the Texas case.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed the injunction in Florida, is bankrolled by various conservative and libertarian groups such as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation and the Donors Trust, which is tied to the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
Additionally, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is behind the case filed in Wisconsin, draws most of its financial support from the Bradley Foundation. This foundation is behind funding several right-wing nonprofits around the country that are hostile to unions and skeptical of climate change.
In line with this strategy, leaders of the Wisconsin Institute — a recipient of Bradley foundation grants — have publicly stated that they have political objectives in mind with this injunction, intending to expand nationally in projects that target leftists and anti-racism.
The point is that these lawsuits against farmers of color have little to do with “equality before the law.” Bankrolled by conservatives with political ambitions, this race-baiting, white-identity politicking is all about maintaining a conservative base of voters heading into 2022 and beyond.
If the interests behind these injunctions really thought farming was tough, then they would invest time and energy in backing legislation that would actually help our country’s producers, like the Justice for Black Farmers Act; the Farm System Reform Act; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposed program to restructure farm loans; and/or Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s bill that would strengthen antitrust enforcement.
Instead, what we have are nothing but right-wing ploys that do nothing but divide rural people and distract them from working on creating meaningful change in our communities.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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After Republican officials in Michigan voted to award themselves bonuses totaling $65,000 from federal COVID relief funds set aside for frontline workers, they have vowed to return the money — but only after public outcry and the filing of a lawsuit against them.
Earlier this month, Republican commissioners in Shiawassee county voted 6-0 to give themselves a significant portion of the $557,000 allotted to 250 county employees as hazard pay for working through the pandemic. MLive reports that they are the only county to have voted to do so.
While county employees received $1,000 to $2,000 for their work, the commissioners voted to give themselves much more. Commission chairman Jeremy Root received $25,000 last week. Two commissioners received $10,000, while others got $5,000 each.
The commissioners, all Republicans, voted to award higher sums to other top Republican officials as well — like Sheriff Brian BeGole, who received $25,000.
Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan) criticized the commissioners’ vote. A spokesperson for Kildee told ABC12 that the commissioners decided “to benefit themselves instead of the community.”
“American Rescue Plan dollars were intended to help frontline workers and families impacted by the pandemic, not elected officials,” Kildee said. While health department officials received $2,500 and other lower-level staff received only $1,000, the commissioners awarded themselves 10 times those amounts.
One Michigan resident has sued the officials, accusing them of violating the law by holding a “secret private meeting” in which they voted on the amounts that they were going to pocket “outside the view of the public.” Meanwhile, other county employees only received an average of $2,148 for their work, the lawsuit says.
The county prosecutor, Scott Koerner, also pushed back on the officials’ vote, saying that he believed the bonuses were illegal. The commissioners had voted to give Koerner $12,500.
It’s likely that the bonuses were, indeed, given out in violation of guidelines for the funds from the federal government. A Justice Department spokesperson told MLive that “[American Rescue Plan] dollars used for hazard pay should prioritize low-income workers who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and essential workers who have faced the greatest risk of exposure,” MLive wrote.
The GOP commissioners pushed back on the criticism. “Since these payments were made, confusion about the nature of these funds has run rampant,” they said in a statement. They wrote that they “deeply regret that this gesture has been misinterpreted, and have unanimously decided to voluntarily return the funds to the county, pending additional guidance from the state of Michigan.”
One of the commissioners, Marlene Webster, pushed back on the statement that the public “misinterpreted” the bonuses. Webster wrote in a Facebook post — where she also insisted that she didn’t realize she was voting for a bonus for herself — that the statement issued by the board of commissioners is “an insult to the citizens of Shiawassee county.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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As the first round of monthly payments from an expanded child tax credit are set to go out on Thursday, Democrats in Congress and progressives elsewhere are calling for them to go beyond the time they’re set to expire later this year and become permanent.
The payments will be sent to every American family with at least one child in their home under the age of 18. Individual parents are eligible for the full credit if they earn less than $75,000 per year, and for joint filers if they earn less than $150,000 annually.
For each child under the age of six, families can expect a payment from the IRS of $300 on the 15th of every month through December this year. For each child over that age but under 18, families can expect payments of $250 per month.
Payments will be sent to households representing around 60 million children across the U.S., equivalent to around 88 percent of all children in the country. According to the Treasury Department’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Lily Adams, 86 percent of payments will be made available immediately by direct deposit into parents’ bank accounts.
The payments, which were passed as part of the American Rescue Plan in March, are considered the biggest anti-poverty program launched by the federal government in generations. Economists are predicting that the benefit could result in halving the childhood poverty rate currently seen in the United States.
“It provides children and their families with additional payments throughout the year that help them with the cost of food, child care, diapers, health care, clothing and taxes,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-California), who has pushed for these payments for decades, said earlier this year in promoting the tax credits.
Because of how significant an impact these payments will likely make, the White House this past spring called for them to go beyond December 2021 when they are set to expire.
President Joe Biden “is committed to working with Congress to achieve his ultimate goal of making permanent the Child Tax Credit as well as all of the expansions he signed into law in the American Rescue Plan,” read a statement from the White House in April.
That goal may well become a reality — if Democrats in Congress succeed in passing their proposed budget.
Democrats in the Senate Budget Committee this week announced a deal for such a budget, which would include much of what the president has asked for in his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan. Among the numerous items in the budget, is an extension of the direct payments to American families, although it is unclear whether they would become permanent or expire at some future date.
Even if the budget deal proposed by Democrats does attempt to make the payments permanent, that plan could change depending on how centrist Democrats feel about the costs associated and whether they are willing to go along with it for an indefinite period. As the budget deal gets negotiated in Congress later this year, amendments to the proposal by Senate Budget Committee Democrats could very well alter plans for the future of these tax credits.
Americans by and large are supportive of making direct payments to families a permanent thing. According to a recent Data for Progress poll, 56 percent of likely voters back extending the Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue plan, while only 36 percent are opposed to doing so.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Queen Freelove of New Haven, Connecticut, remembers when the pandemic transformed the daycare she ran out of her home, abruptly turning the atmosphere from cozy to clinical: “Things got extremely traumatic for us,” she recalled. She was constantly trying to keep the environment sanitized, keeping a stockpile of masks, wipes, and other equipment, stopping parents in the hallway when they arrived to pick up their kids to take their temperature and give them a squirt of sanitizer — the protocol for “contactless” drop-offs and pick-ups. Keeping parents outside to minimize direct interaction, she said, was “hard, because we look forward to having that great relationship with the parents, and that really helps. But we could no longer have that relationship that we once had, because of the pandemic.”
Despite the social distancing, Freelove’s work providing child care to local workers, many of them working rough, so-called “essential” jobs, made her feel closer to the community, because her services were indispensable. But she just wishes the government that pays her salary understood that.
“We had to do what those health care providers did for us, and we did our part to get this country back up and open,” Freelove told Truthout. “We were vital, and sometimes I think [the people in government] know it. They know it. But when they’re allocating funds…. No, absolutely not.”
Child care in the United States is frustrating for everyone involved: Families pay way too much for daycare, or are priced out of child care programs altogether and care providers earn far too little. The pandemic has made a child care overhaul both more challenging and more necessary. Though child care services are crucial for enabling parents to go back to work, many child care providers have shut down permanently over the past year, and countless parents in the coming months may struggle to find a spot in a quality daycare that they can afford.
“A lot of the issues that we saw happen during the pandemic are a result of pretty consistent under-investment in child care over the course of several decades,” said Mario Cardona, Chief of Policy and Practice for Child Care Aware of America, a child care provider advocacy group. “We have a system that places far too high a burden on families paying for the high price of care, and for providers to operate on very, very thin margins, so they can keep their doors open and meet the needs of families.”
The Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan, passed in March, provided nearly $40 billion to help child care providers keep operating through the pandemic and pay their workers. Biden also recently rolled out his “American Families Plan,” which, if it becomes law, would dramatically expand subsidy eligibility and raise child care workers’ minimum hourly pay to $15 per hour. Advocates have welcomed Biden’s plan as a down payment on an overhaul of a system that was in tatters even before the pandemic forced many child care providers out of work.
Among those formerly employed by child care programs, the average pre-pandemic annual income of a child care worker or early childhood educator was just $11.65 per hour, or $24,230 in 2019 — less than half of what kindergarten teachers earn. In every state, the median wage for child care workers — who are nearly all women and more racially diverse than K-12 educators — was below the living wage for a parent with one child. There are also many home-based child care providers, or family child care homes, who are essentially self-employed, but struggle to scrape by due to the low reimbursement rates provided by the state child care subsidy systems. During the pandemic, many daycare centers and family child care homes closed due to a drop in enrollment and increased operating costs of additional sanitizing and protective equipment. Some saw their revenue plummet because states lowered enrollment caps as a safety precaution, which meant fewer subsidies just as their overhead costs were rising.
A nationwide survey of daycare centers and family child care homes conducted last November by the professional organization National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), found that more than half of child care centers reported “losing money each day they remain open,” and 44 percent of all respondents reported “confronting so much uncertainty that they are unable to say how much longer they will be able to stay open.” According to federal data, the number of child care employees declined by more than 130,000 nationwide between February 2020 and May 2021.
Maria del Carmen Macias, a home-based child care provider in Belmont Cragin, Illinois, said that family child care homes like hers play an especially critical role in her community. “In these 14 years that I’ve been a child care provider, 100 percent of my kids, 100 percent of my families live blocks away from me,” she said, noting that many do not have a car, so they need to place their kids with a daycare that they can walk to. But as executive board chair of her union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Illinois, she noted that during the pandemic, “We know of many centers that have closed their doors. And we also know that many family child care providers [who] have decided to close the doors [had] more than 25, 30 years of experience.”
These closures exacerbate massive deficits in the availability of care for low-income households. According to federal data, state and federal child care subsidies — based heavily on limited Child Care and Development Block Grant funds, a large pot of federal funding that is administered by states — reach only about one in seven federally eligible children as of 2017, and just 18 percent of low-income children are enrolled in “high-quality” preschool (a structured program with effective professional teachers, a research-based curriculum and other features of a supportive learning environment).
Prior to the pandemic, the total average cost of full-time child care for a typical family was between $9,200 and $9,600 a year — over 10 percent of household income for a two-parent household, and about a third of that of a single parent, according to Child Care Aware. In most regions of the country, child care is the largest household expense — above housing, health care and food — and often costs more than public university tuition. Although some states’ child care subsidy programs exempt low-income families from child care co-pays, most states require low-income parents to pay fees that can cost up to several hundred dollars per month. Child care costs will place an even heavier burden on families who have struggled with lost income or unemployment during the pandemic. Both child care providers and families lose out when cash-strapped parents get stuck on waiting lists or ensnared in the complex application process for subsidies.
On top of the unaffordability of child care for low- and middle-income parents, many communities simply lack access to affordable, quality licensed daycare. Latinx and Native American populations are especially likely to live in a “child care desert,” or a census tract with at least 50 children and either no licensed child care providers, or no more than one child care slot per three kids under the age of 5. Rural families suffer from some of the most severe child care shortages, in part because they rely heavily on smaller family child care homes, in which enrollment is limited to just a handful of kids per provider.
Like many other child care providers who have kids of their own, Tunja Daniels, a family support worker at the Mary Crane Center in Chicago, has struggled to arrange care for her own children. After the daycare where she works shut down temporarily during the first months of the pandemic, she recalled, “my child care provider took the parents that were still going to work. And [because of] them having limited space, I lost my slot.” Now that she is working again, her children have to stay at home and attend virtual classes because neither parent would be able to pick the kids up from in-person school.
The Biden administration’s American Families Plan aims to invest in child care as part of the nation’s economic infrastructure, pumping $225 billion into federally supported child care programs. That would cap the cost of care at 7 percent of a family earning 150 percent of the state median income (that’s about $70,000 in Alaska and $94,000 in New York).
In addition to the increased access to child care, Biden’s plan to set a $15 per hour wage floor for child care workers may have an even bigger impact on the quality and availability of child care, as it could bring equity to a labor sector that has been historically dismissed as “women’s work.” The early childhood educator workforce, which is more than 40 percent people of color, suffers an extreme pay gap with their counterparts teaching in elementary or middle school: The poverty rate among early childhood educators is nearly eight times that of teachers in grades kindergarten through 8. Child care workers also often lack basic benefits like employer-sponsored health insurance and rely on public assistance programs. And within the early childhood education workforce, those working with infants and toddlers earn less than preschool teachers, and Black workers make nearly 80 cents an hour less than white workers.
An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would boost take-home pay for as many as 560,000 child care workers, or more than 40 percent; the vast majority would be women, more than a third Black and Latinx. Improved wages could also help stabilize the workforce by curbing the currently high turnover rates, which would help daycare programs attract and retain qualified staff, and put early educators on a sustainable career path. Early education advocacy and professional organizations such as the NAEYC have been pushing for more resources and infrastructure for educators seeking professional development and training.
Biden’s plan also broadly aims to promote parity between the pay of kindergarten teachers and comparably credentialed early childhood education workers, which parallel parity initiatives in some state and local universal pre-kindergarten programs, including Los Angeles, Oklahoma and Portland’s Multnomah County, that seek to reduce the pay gap between preschool and public school teachers.
Nonetheless, Biden’s child care plan would still fall short of what advocates say is needed to overhaul the system. Stephanie Schmit, director of child care and early education at the Center for Law and Social Policy, says a $700 billion long-term investment would be needed to truly meet the overall need for subsidized child care. Although Biden’s plan was “a very big improvement over the current system that we have,” she said, it should be seen as just the start of a long-term effort to “build a more sustainable and equitable child care system that will have a really big impact for children and families and workers.”
A parallel bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) earlier this year would ensure universal access through expanding center-based care and family child care homes, and guarantee that households that earn less than twice the federal poverty line (about $53,000 for a family of four) would be entitled to free child care. It would cost $70 billion per year or $700 billion over 10 years, or more than triple what Biden promised, funded by an “Ultra Millionaire Tax.”
Daniels wants to see the system support everyone involved; while parents struggle to pay for child care, while she is dealing with the student debt burden from trying to gain the educational credentials that will help her advance her career. “I want to see just universal child care where the parents are not going into debt wondering if they should pay the child care or rent or utility bill because they can’t make those child care payments. We can afford to have universal child care. We can afford to have local colleges award bachelor’s degrees in early education.”
As a member-organizer with SEIU, Daniels believes the child care crisis reflects lawmakers’ longstanding lack of respect for child care and early education workers. “I believe because we’ve never gotten credit for being educators, we’ve been considered babysitters in early education. So they felt that the funding wasn’t necessary for us,” she said. “But if we don’t work, parents can’t work. If we’re not there to support and educate children, the parents won’t be able to work and support their families.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The Biden administration announced on Monday that direct monthly payments to families with children would begin on July 15. The payments are child tax credit rebates — traditionally treated as tax refunds once a year — are part of the American Rescue Plan passed earlier this year.
Around 39 million families, accounting for 65 million children in the U.S., will receive direct payments from the IRS, through direct deposits, checks or debit cards. No action is required from parents to obtain the payments, which will be issued based on the tax information filed with the IRS.
“The American Rescue Plan is delivering critical tax relief to middle class and hard-pressed working families with children,” the White House said in a statement on Monday.
The child tax credit was raised this year, from $2,000 to $3,000 or $3,600, depending on a child’s age. But rather than have families wait until tax season to receive their rebates, the American Rescue Plan creates monthly payments, helping families with their cash flow.
Families can expect a $300 payment from the government for every child under the age of 6 in their household. For children ages 6 to 17, families will receive payments of $250 per child. The amount of the child tax credit will decrease on a sliding scale for individuals with children who earn more than $75,000 and for couples who earn more than $150,000 annually.
Payments will continue to be made from the IRS to families on the 15th of each month throughout the remainder of 2021.
There were some previous concerns that the IRS would not be able to implement the rebate payment program fast enough, as the legislation was just passed in March. But in late April, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said his agency would be ready to make payments in July, barring any significant problems in the system.
With the program set to end in December, however, President Joe Biden has pushed for it to be extended for at least 10 years within the American Rescue Plan his administration recently proposed.
“Congress must pass the American Families Plan to ensure that working families will be able to count on this relief for years to come,” the White House added in its statement on Monday.
Other Democrats have said it should be made a permanent fixture, including Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), who described the payments being made to American families as a “lifeline to the middle class.”
The program “puts money in families’ pockets and it cuts all child poverty in half,” DeLauro added. “It provides children and their families with additional payments throughout the year that help them with the cost of food, child care, diapers, health care, clothing and taxes.”
Child poverty in the U.S. is indeed a major problem, as the nation’s rates are significantly higher than what other wealthy nations face across the globe, with around 4 in 10 children living in households struggling to afford basic needs. Child poverty also disproportionately affects marginalized families, making the rebate payments an issue of race and gender parity as well.
Whether extended temporarily or permanently, the plan to create payments in the future faces an uncertain future, as Republicans in both houses of Congress will likely attempt to obstruct the American Families Plan in any way they can.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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We’ll take what we can get. This seems to be the general sentiment around the Biden administration’s response to COVID. We didn’t get $2,000 stimulus checks as originally promised, but we’ll take the $1,400. They didn’t raise the minimum wage to $15 during the midst of a devastating pandemic and recession, but the American Rescue Plan does include a child tax credit beginning in July.
As COVID continues to expose the innumerable gaps in our already dysfunctional political and economic system, policymakers and political leaders have demonstrated that they are only willing to fill in some of these gaps, temporarily, and maybe just halfway.
In response to the half-measures of the Biden administration, communities are taking matters into their own hands, as they have done since the pandemic began. Many of these responses are taking place in communities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic and take the form of grassroots mutual aid projects and campaigns.
The Sacramento, California-based organization NorCal Resist is just one of many groups focusing on a specific community that has been hit particularly hard: those living in this country without documentation. When the pandemic first hit, an organization named Resource Generation, a multi-racial membership community of young people with wealth or class privilege committed to the equitable distribution of power, wealth and land, launched a #ShareMyCheck campaign, encouraging people who received a stimulus check, but don’t feel they urgently need it, to donate it to be redistributed to undocumented individuals and families who are largely ineligible for stimulus aid.
NorCal Resist, along with many other organizations around the country, decided it was going to participate.
“We have had about 2,000 people donate all, or part of a stimulus check so far,” Autumn Gonzalez of NorCal Resist told Truthout. “We’ve raised $950,000 so far, for the most part from smaller donations of under $250, but certainly we’ve had a good amount of people donate $1,000 or more of their check. And we’ve been able to distribute those funds out to around 3,000 families.”
This kind of wealth redistribution has made a significant impact for many of the individuals and families who have been hit hardest by COVID and the recession.
“I mean, honestly, I felt like it’s just the right thing to do,” John Hershey, a pipefitter and union member who donated $860 from his stimulus check to NorCal Resist’s #ShareMyCheck campaign told Truthout. “Mutual aid definitely is sort of a survival response to where there are gaps in the state or whatever authority having the ability to take care of or resolve issues.”
In addition to donating part of his check, Hershey works with NorCal Resist on some of its other mutual aid projects, such as community fix-its, food delivery programs and brake light repair events.
“We just invite people to come in and we’ll fix all their exterior lights on their vehicles to eliminate at least that part of the probable cause for a cop to pull them over and escalate the situation,” Hershey told Truthout. “We’re trying to prevent the chance of another Daunte Wright.”
Unsurprisingly, there’s very little trust in the authorities within the communities that NorCal Resist serves.
“Right now, I think mutual aid is filling a gap that we can’t rely on the state or the federal government to fill,” Gonzalez told Truthout, “especially when folks have so much distrust for the government and whether or not their information is secure.”
With ICE raids and harassment being an ever-present reality for these communities, it’s not surprising that many undocumented individuals feel hesitant to put their information out there, either to the state or in the nonprofit sector. One of the important aspects of mutual aid versus state assistance in contexts like this is that mutual aid organizations have already built community trust and are often embedded in the communities they work with.
NorCal Resist is just one of many organizations running stimulus check redistribution campaigns around the country, from California’s UndocuFund to New Mexico’s Santa Fe Mutual Aid to New York’s Make the Road, which has raised over $150,000 through its #ShareMyCheck campaign.
“I am thankful for the funds that I received — it was money that I was able to use to go to the grocery store and put food on the table for my children,” Reyna, a single mother of two who is excluded from federal and state pandemic relief, told Truthout. “Before the pandemic I worked as a domestic cleaner, but since the pandemic began, I have been struggling to get by because I went from working almost every day to just working one day.”
The funds from organizations like Make the Road NY are critical for families like Reyna’s, which have been impacted the most and helped the least during the pandemic.
“Over the last year, immigrant and working-class people of color have been struggling financially through this crisis,” Arlenis Morel of Make the Road NY told Truthout. “While this [campaign] has allowed us to provide vital support, we will continue to fight to ensure all, regardless of immigration status, are included in Congress’ next COVID-19 relief package.”
Another important way that mutual aid is being deployed during the pandemic comes as a response to the vaccine rollout. As of April 21, the United States has fully vaccinated roughly 87 million people — that’s more than 1 out of every 4 residents. In terms of numbers of people reached, the vaccine rollout in the United States is coming along quite well, and the Biden administration is already ahead of its vaccination goals.
When you look at the numbers, things seem promising. However, numbers only tell one story. When you begin asking where these vaccines are concentrated and which communities have access to them, an entirely new story emerges — one with a less triumphant tone.
“What we’re seeing right now is that communities of color are less likely to get early access to the vaccine for many different reasons,” Gregorio Millett, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist and current vice president of amfAR, an international nonprofit dedicated the support of AIDS research and prevention, told Truthout. “For example, not having access to the internet when vaccine appointments are available over the internet, or the distance to a vaccine center is much farther in Black and Brown communities as it is and compared to white communities.”
These patterns are nothing new when it comes to public health, and they have prompted many mutual aid organizations and collectives to focus on vaccine equity. One of these collectives is Get Out the Shot: Los Angeles, co-founded by Liz Schwandt.
“I live in an area of Los Angeles called Lincoln Heights, which is an area that is one of the ones that was hardest hit by COVID,” Schwandt told Truthout. “When I started looking at those early maps of vaccinations and where the rates were higher and lower, the places with the worst impacts from COVID economically and loss of family members, it was an exact overlay of the places with the lower vaccination rates and penetration.”
After realizing how complex and difficult the process of signing up for a vaccine appointment could be, Schwandt decided to put up a sign on the front gate of her home encouraging folks to call her if they needed help with the process themselves. This sign grew into a Facebook group aimed at crowdsourcing information, which led to a request phone line, which has now grown to a group of over 400 volunteers who receive about 250 requests per day, now that eligibility has opened up to everyone in California.
“We’re working with a lot of non-U.S. nationals, a lot of folks who were working in the informal economy, a lot of domestic employees — people who don’t have those types of job protections like time off to get the vaccine,” Schwandt told Truthout. “Another barrier we’ve identified is folks who will need to continue to care for their children while they are having their appointment.”
Another very significant barrier to making an appointment is how much time it takes to search for an appointment, plus the wage loss from taking time off of work to go to the appointment.
“I’ve heard multiple stories from our volunteer corps of people calling in with these impossible parameters,” Schwandt said. “A woman we were working with said, ‘Yeah, my boss told me that I would be fired if I didn’t get the vaccine. But I’m not being given any time off to go to the appointment and I don’t know what to do.’”
Another person that volunteers spoke to said he had refused to book his second shot because he was almost fired for taking the time off to get his first one.
“So, for our folks who are really vulnerable economically, we’re trying to get them those early morning appointments, those late appointments, the weekend appointments,” Schwandt told Truthout.
But the mutual aid provided by Get Out the Shot is not just about the logistics of making appointments — it’s also about truly understanding the needs of Lincoln Heights, deferring to community and family leadership, and ultimately, helping to facilitate the strengthening and safety of a neighborhood that has been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic.
“We know that we can’t solve health and wellness justice — but we really think that we can provide a little barrier removal to getting this care,” Schwandt said. “And in the process, I just feel really lucky to have [so many] new neighbors that I hadn’t met before and that we’ve gotten to connect with. We’ve all agreed to about 999 Sunday suppers when everyone is allowed to get back together again.”
Building and strengthening community connection and power are very integral parts of mutual aid as both a practice and a theory. This dual strategy of helping communities in very practical ways while simultaneously organizing them is exemplified clearly through the work being done by the San Francisco East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (East Bay DSA) in California.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, DSA chapters all across the country have been practicing mutual aid by purchasing and delivering food, personal protective equipment, and other supplies to those who couldn’t safely leave their homes during lockdown; delivering supplies to folks experiencing homelessness; and much more. Most recently, East Bay DSA has been putting together virtual mask-building workshops.
“During the mask builds we have a breakout room with a teacher for folks that are new and who are learning how to make masks,” East Bay DSA member Genean Wrisley told Truthout. “And then in the other room … we’ve had really interesting and inspiring discussions around mutual aid, building power and tenant organizing.”
As volunteers gather around their Zoom screens to make high quality N-88 masks together virtually, they are also discussing, for example, the ideas of Marxist theorist Anton Pannekoek, the work of union organizer and author Jane McAlevey, or the writings of revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, whose books they are currently reading.
“We’ve been able to engage a bunch of people in DSA,” Wrisley said. “One of the goals of this project is really building community — and I think we’ve seen that happen. People are staying on these Zoom calls for hours after they’re over. People are coming to the [mask] builds and hanging out and getting pizza afterwards and relationships are being built.”
On the distribution end of things, East Bay DSA has been working with Tenant and Neighborhood Councils (TANC), which is a prominent tenant organization in the Bay Area. They have been distributing their masks primarily at food banks with volunteers that speak the languages of many of those standing in line for food — whether that’s Chinese, Vietnamese or Spanish — and asking them if they’re having trouble with their landlord or paying rent.
“Giving someone a mask and then asking that question opens up the ability to build some trust rather than just asking random people if they’re having trouble with rent,” Wrisley said. “It loosens barriers and allows us to have some really meaningful conversations. We’ve been able to bring folks into TANC and give folks the tools to organize around issues that they’re facing, issues that are directly related to their lives.”
One of most important principles in mutual aid is the principle of “solidarity not charity.” The idea of charity is often based on the premise that marginalized communities are suffering from some kind of deficit. Solidarity, on the other hand, is premised on the idea that marginalization is the result of structural barriers and systemic equities. Community organizing to overcome these barriers is a necessary component of any mutual aid project. These principles drive much of the mutual aid work being done by groups like NorCal Resist, Get Out the Shot and East Bay DSA.
“Community building is really necessary in order to fight capital, and you can’t go up against a state if you don’t have relationships that are already formed,” Wrisley told Truthout. “We’ve seen how terrible capitalism has been for this pandemic. We’ve seen how the state has ignored and looked the other way as people have died. We’ve seen how rent forgiveness still is not a thing and that’s primarily affecting Black and Brown tenants. Through building relationships, we really can make a difference and start to organize collectively for a system that actually takes care of people.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.