Last Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced three actions on rulemaking to strengthen enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act to reflect today’s market dynamics. Collectively, these regulatory updates should result in more competitive, healthy markets for consumers, farmers, ranchers, producers, and our overall agricultural system.
In a policy brief released earlier this year, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI)called on the Biden administration to focus on stricter antitrust enforcement in the food industry to help consumers facing increasing prices for basic nutrition staples, such as meat and eggs.
Veronica Goodman, Director of Social Policy at PPI, praised the U.S.D.A. announcement:
“Market concentration in the agricultural industry has resulted in harm to farmers, ranchers, and consumers. The recent U.S.D.A. announcement will ensure our national food system is more equitable and competitive in today’s economy. We applaud the administration for working to strengthen competition in agricultural markets.”
The Progressive Policy Institute is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
Editor’s note: Throughout this piece, “prison” is used to represent places of detention, including county and regional jails, federal and state prisons, and juvenile detention facilities. Data from The New York Times includes immigration detention centers as well.
Women Behind Bars: Violence and Neglect During the Pandemic
Despite accounting for only four percent of the world’s female population, the United States houses more than 30 percent of the world’s incarcerated women. This rate has increased nearly 800 percent since the 1970’s. These inmates face a harsh and restrictive prison environment designed for violence-prone men, and the emergence of the pandemic has only further opened the doors for inhumane treatment. Prisons are among the primary hotspots for the coronavirus, with infection rates three times that of the general public. As the virus surges through correctional facilities, inmates are not able to social distance, quarantine, or benefit from adequate medical treatment. Depleted resources and insufficient space, combined with a vulnerable population, created the perfect storm for Covid-19 to spread quickly.
Inside the Danbury Federal Correction Institution in Connecticut, dozens of women tested positive with no space to quarantine. To prevent the virus from spreading, they were housed in the inmates’ waiting room with no beds, only rudimentary restrooms, and no place to bathe (although showers were eventually installed.) During months when nighttime temperatures still dipped below freezing, the women were instructed to assemble and to sleep on metal beds, with limited mattress availability. They lacked substantial food and were generally not granted over-the-counter medication except Tylenol. One sick inmate was hospitalized for dehydration, and many were left in the locked visiting room without attention to their severe symptoms. Despite these worsening conditions during the pandemic, the Connecticut Department of Correction claimed that Covid positive inmates were “provided medical care in accordance with CDC guidelines.” Stacy Spagnardi, an inmate at Danbury currently in home confinement, recalls something very different: “We were all thinking we would die in there, and nobody would know until count.”
If there is any silver lining to the misery inflicted by the pandemic, it is that the virus turned a spotlight on the lack of adequate healthcare in our country’s prisons, especially for women.
This is particularly true, for example, in the case of prenatal care. Roughly four percent of all newly incarcerated women arrive to serve their sentences while carrying a baby. On average, 2,000 children are born behind prison walls every year. While in prison, only 58 percent of pregnant women report receiving any prenatal care. The Prison Policy Institute found that 31 states lack any nutritional plan or dietary supplements for incarcerated pregnant women, a key component to delivering a healthy child. As a result, many expecting mothers in jail suffer from malnutrition.
Female inmates, many of whom were physically abused or addicted to drugs before their arrests, need better health care. This is especially true for women experiencing high-risk pregnancies because of their struggles with substance abuse.
Women in jail often give birth alone in their cells with no medical aid or assistance. Prisons also have been known to shackle or otherwise restrain inmates during labor. This increases risk by limiting the women’s movement, increasing pain, and obstructing the diagnosis of complications during birth.
After an often-precarious delivery process, most women are separated from their children within 24 hours. Their babies are placed with a relative, adoption family, or into foster care. Maternal separation, of course, can be highly traumatic to both mother and child. For the mother, it’s an additional harsh punishment over and above their sentence. For the newborn, separation can cause emotional and behavioral problems that can last a lifetime.
Research suggests that children born to imprisoned parents experience psychological and educational problems, such as higher rates of depression and suicide, antisocial behavior, learning disabilities, and behavioral issues that result in suspension or expulsion from school. On average, children with incarcerated parents are six times more likely to become incarcerated themselves.
Covid-19 has made prison even more perilous for pregnant women. Consider the case of Andrea Circle Bear, who was pregnant and serving a two-year sentence for selling drugs on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. Circle Bear contracted Covid-19 in the overcrowded prison in Fort Worth, Texas. She was on a ventilator when the time came to give birth. Three weeks later, she was the first federal female prisoner to die from Covid-19. “Not every prison death is avoidable, but Andrea Circle Bear’s certainly seems to have been — she simply should not have been in a federal prison under these circumstances,” contends Kevin Ring of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
For Circle-Bear and other non-violent offenders, early release or home-confinement policies could have prevented unnecessary sickness and death behind bars, but many states made few efforts to reduce their prison populations amidst the pandemic. In states that did try to halt Covid-19’s spread in their prisons, the response was uneven. Some states enacted limited early-release programs. A handful of governors have issued executive orders to grant early release for certain inmates, while the Federal Bureau of Prisons transferred some into home-confinement.
For example, Kentucky’s public defenders, prosecutors, Supreme Court, county jails, and Gov. Andy Beshear worked together to reduce Kentucky’s prison population. Those who were medically vulnerable, low-risk, or near the end of their sentences received priority in early release policies.
Of the 152,124 prisoners currently under federal jurisdiction, 7,314 have been placed in home confinement. The Attorney General released a memo in March of 2020 instructing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to allow inmates to serve out their sentences at home when appropriate. Since then, 24,668 inmates have been granted home confinement.
In April of 2020, Pennsylvania’s Governor Tom Wolf began the Temporary Program to Reprieve Sentences of Incarceration. Although the plan originally estimated that 1,800 inmates would qualify for reprieve, only 159 individuals were released through this program.
In an effort to reduce Covid-19 transmission, some states also have restricted the number of security guards on staff. Unfortunately, this has had the unintended consequence of making women more vulnerable to sexual assault and abuse. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 42 percent of sexual abuse in prisons is perpetrated by staff, while 58 percent is perpetrated by other inmates. However, this data reflects only substantiated sexual assault claims, which amounted to 5,187 of the 67,169 allegations from 2012-2015, or just eight percent of all claims. While it would seem that having less prison guards would reduce the number of potential abusers, a lack of security can empower predatory staff or inmates to commit sexual assault without supervision.
Sexual abuse is a notorious aspect of prison life for men and women. But it’s a special problem for women, a majority of whom previously have been victims of physical and/or sexual assault. The cycle of abuse continues in prison. The Department of Justice found widespread rape and sexual harassment inside the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama and the Edna Mahan Correction Facility for Women in New Jersey. Along with suffering severe mental and physical trauma, several women became pregnant after being raped by guards. The DOJ argued that these conditions violated women’s eighth amendment rights against “cruel and unusual punishment.” But under Covid protocols that limit personnel and surveillance, more women are at risk in understaffed facilities like Edna Mahan and Tutwiler.
Covid-19 also has created new stresses on female inmates’ social and emotionalwell-being. In addition to the life-threatening physical conditions during the pandemic, incarcerated women also are subject to the misuse of punitive policies like solitary confinement and terminated phone and visitor access that can impair their mental health. The use of solitary confinement as a blunt instrument for enforcing social distancing during the pandemic has increased 500 percent. Yet solitary confinement is known to increase anxiety and suicidal thoughts, particularly in women who have suffered sexual abuse and feelings of low self-worth. Prisons need to be more careful in calculating the trade-off between protecting inmates from Covid and endangering their mental health.
Covid-related policies preventing communication between incarcerated mothers and their children also have strained family relationships. As the general population has relied on technology to stay in touch with our loved ones, many prisons have restricted access to the phone and eliminated visitation. An overwhelming majority of female inmates are mothers, and these policies can degrade their mental health by cutting off communication with their children.
What Should be Done?
Even as Covid cases plateau nationwide, Covid-19 infections continue to rise in jails and prisons. Moreover, new variants found in Michigan, Colorado, and other states pose fresh dangers of contagion, since prison staff can carry the virus in and out of prison from these hotspots.
The task of mitigating the pandemic inside our jails and prisons is complicated by the fact that a multiplicity of federal and state jurisdictions cut across the U.S. criminal justice system. States decide their own policies, whether for early release programs, vaccine rollout, or correctional institution budgeting. As a result, prisoners across the country experience a variety of conditions and Covid-19 protocols.
“If there was clearly a right strategy, we all would have done it,” said Dr. Owen Murray, a physician in charge of correctional healthcare at dozens of Texas prisons. Nonetheless, America’s correctional facilities have a myriad of ways to create more humane and safe conditions for inmates:
Increase testing and dedicate spaces for quarantine. The first step is better measurement of the challenge. Correctional facilities should test all staff and inmates routinely and release results publicly. To limit transmission of the virus, symptomatic inmates should be placed in a separate space from other prisoners while they wait for their results. These areas should be adequately climate controlled and fully equipped with food, water, sanitary and medical resources, books or other sources of entertainment, and working phones for communication with loved ones during this short isolation period.
Prioritize inmates in vaccine distribution. The CDC and the American Medical Association have recommended that vulnerable populations, including incarcerated individuals, be given priority for receiving vaccines. Overcrowding, lack of medical care, and an at-risk population has made Covid-19 an even deadlier threat inside prisons. The federal prison system has administered at least the first vaccine dose to about 146,972 of its approximately 152,124 federal prisoners. However, vaccine distribution inside state correctional facilities is controlled by the state government and varies widely across the country. In Florida, no inmates in state correctional institutions have received the vaccine. Contrastingly, Kansas has vaccinated about two-thirds of its 8,700 inmates. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly faced intense political resistance to prioritizing inmates in vaccine efforts, but as John Carney, a member of the Kansas Coronavirus Vaccine Advisory Council explains, “All of us kind of came around to this notion that the most vulnerable is the most vulnerable.” Inmates should be considered high priority in state and federal vaccination efforts, especially now that the national vaccine supply has increased and shots are more readily available.
Adopt alternate forms of sentencing. When possible, courts and lawmakers should seek alternatives to incarceration, especially for non-violent offenders, to decrease the number of people in prisons nationwide. Fewer people entering correctional facilities means more room for social distancing, resources for other prisoners, and fewer Covid cases. Drug courts, fines, restitution, community service, probation, house arrest, psychiatric treatment, and work release are other plausible avenues to explore.
Increase and improve medical care for inmates. Correctional facilities should be given the resources to hire more medical staff trained to recognize inmates‘ Covid-19 symptoms and treat them appropriately, move prisoners to the hospital if their conditions become serious or require more equipment than on hand, and frequently monitor inmates’ health.
End solitary confinement for at-risk prisoners and as a method for social distancing. State and federal jails and prisons should be prohibited from using solitary confinement as a means of quarantining inmates. The practice can particularly harm pregnant women or those with underlying health conditions. New York recently ended long-term solitary confinement and banned the practice entirely for minors and pregnant women; correctional facilities should follow this lead to protect vulnerable inmates from the severe mental health ramifications caused by this isolation.
Reopen libraries and educational programs. In keeping with CDC guidelines, prisons should reinstate these crucial educational spaces and programs. Inmates who participate in educational programs have a lower rate of recidivism, higher rate of literacy, increased employment opportunities upon release, and receive fewer disciplinary infractions. The Utah State Prison houses five libraries with an array of books to keep inmates engaged and busy. Camille Randles, an inmate who regularly uses the women’s prison library, explains how books are a “safety net” that allow inmates an escape from reality. The prison also offers programs on substance abuse and sex-offender treatment that can help inmates gain parole upon graduation. The largest meta-analysis on correctional educational studies found that inmates participating in educational programs are 43 percent less likely to return to prison than those who do not. These programs are also cost-effective, reducing incarceration costs by $4-5 for every dollar invested in correctional education programs. If all safety precautions and social distancing measures are enforced, the benefits of these programs towards limiting future incarceration and reducing costs far outweigh the risk of transmission.
Allow for greater virtual communication. To connect prisoners with their families and attorneys, prisons should end restrictive communication policies and install video conferencing, increase access to phones, and expand computer usage. These shared tools and spaces should follow CDC guidelines and be thoroughly cleaned between prisoner use. They will allow incarcerated individuals to better communicate with their loved ones, which also has been shown to reduce recidivism by strengthening family support before the re-entry experience.
Institute job training programs. One of the largest obstacles for people re-entering society is securing a well-paying job. Job training programs equip inmates with the skills and confidence they need to be successful in the workforce and increase odds of employment by 28 percent. Some programs, like Trades Related Apprentice Coaching, partner with local businesses or labor unions to place women in jobs once their training is complete. Crystal Lansdale, an inmate at Washington Corrections Center for Women, explains, “The construction trades is something like a way out of the box for me. I need a career that is going to give me retirement, that’s going to give me benefits, that’s going to give me an opportunity to take care of my kids.” Many people like Crystal need legitimate work to support themselves and their families once they are out of prison. Furthermore, certain programs should be tailored specifically to youth workforce development, so that juvenile offenders can form connections with professionals and mentors that can influence them during their developmental years as well assist them in entering the workforce. The DOJ’s National Institute of Corrections highlights how building “employable skills” for incarcerated youth increases safety in the community and advances employment opportunities for juvenile offenders.
Improving Conditions for Women
In addition to these general reforms, policymakers should adopt specific strategies for creating more safe and humane conditions for incarcerated women vulnerable to ill-health, neglect and abuse:
Report accurate, disaggregated data. Providing disaggregated data will help to gauge the pandemic’s effect on incarcerated women and minorities. Only then can policies be designed to better encompass their needs. Congress should pass the Covid-19 in Corrections Data Transparency Act introduced by Representative Clarke, Garcia, and Pressley alongside Senators Warren, Murray, Booker, and Kelly. The legislation would require the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshall Service, and state and local governments to report disaggregated Covid data for federal, state, and local correctional facilities.
Prioritize women in early release policies. According to The New York Times, only about 5 percent of prisoners currently serving federal sentences have been granted home confinement. Some governors have implemented early release policies, but not at the rate that various prosecutors, judges, and interest groups have called for. Pregnant women, women in prison for non-violent offenses, and women with pre-existing conditions should be prioritized for early release. A two-year stint for selling drugs should not be a death sentence. Women also have a lower rate of recidivism than males, indicating that early release plans would not encourage future crime.
Increase and improve prenatal care. Comprehensive prenatal care should be extended to all pregnant inmates to decrease the risk of serious complications if they contract Covid-19. The House in October 2020 passed the Protecting the Health and Wellbeing of Babies and Pregnant Women in Custody Act, which dictates that the Bureau of Justice reports annual data on the demographics and health needs of pregnant women in custody, prohibits the use of restraints on pregnant inmates, and provides appropriate services, health care, and nutrition for pregnant women. The Senate should act quickly to pass this bipartisan bill.
Train, recruit, and oversee more qualified guards and officials. Improving the quality of prison staff is a key step toward increasing safety for female prisoners. Monitoring guards on duty, hiring more female officers, and educating personnel around the specific challenges incarcerated women face can decrease sexual assault and violence in prisons.
Provide enhanced nutritional options for female prisoners, especially pregnant women. According to national guidelines, women generally need more nutrients than men, especially for a healthy pregnancy. A balanced diet including folic acid, iron, calcium, zinc, and Vitamin D will help strengthen prisoners’ immune systems to fend off the virus and deliver healthier babies.
Supply adequate cleaning supplies and feminine hygiene products. Many states are not required to provide incarcerated women with menstrual products. In Alabama’s Tutwiler Prison for Women, the Department of Justice found that male guards withheld menstrual items unless prisoners would have sex with them. Correctional facilities should provide feminine hygiene products to all incarcerated women to ensure their basic needs are met. In addition, correctional facilities should be equipped with various cleaning supplies to limit transmission of the virus.
Conclusion
Prisons are dangerous places for everyone, especially women. The pandemic introduced a new threat to incarcerated women’s existing conditions of violence, sexual assault, and neglect. To make prisons safer for women, legislation must address the structural issues plaguing the criminal justice system. As the country works to rebuild itself, women in prison continue to struggle against mass incarceration, gender discrimination, and punitive methods. The pandemic magnified many of these issues and crafting a gendered response to the virus is the first step toward treating incarcerated individuals with respect and human dignity.
PPI Senior Fellow Joel Berg Interviewed on C-SPAN on Hunger in America
PPI Senior Fellow Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, was recently interviewed on C-SPAN to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on food insecurity and the success of the Biden administration’s response to curbing hunger in America. Berg underscored that the federal government plays a critical role in providing food assistance to families and that the hunger crisis is still not over and requires a concerted, national effort.
“It’s vital to understand that we were facing a hunger and food insecurity epidemic before the pandemic. In 2019, when the economy was theoretically in great shape, tens of millions of Americans couldn’t afford enough food primarily because they did not earn enough to meet their basic expenses. Even in 2019, more than 10 million American children lived in homes that couldn’t afford enough food.
By December 2020, we had a new methodology from the federal government that measured how much food people had on the weekly level and that spiked to 30 million Americans in one week that didn’t have enough food…that was reduced substantially over the last few months because of policies that put people back to work and policies that put cash in their pocket and food in their grocery carts. But still in April, about 17 million American still can’t afford enough food and they are still missing meals so we are still in the midst of a very serious hunger crisis,” said PPI Senior Fellow Joel Berg in the interview.
Congress responded to the pandemic recession with bold aid and stimulus programs that are fueling the economy’s impressive recovery. Yet lawmakers also set arbitrary expiration dates for many of those programs, such as the expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits that expire in September and the $350 billion aid program that state and local governments can use until 2024. These arbitrary dates risk ending aid well before — or after — the economy stops needing it.
To avoid these risks during future recessions, federal lawmakers should replace most ad hoc stimulus with stronger “automatic stabilizers,” stimulus programs that naturally adjust in size to the economy’s needs and can pay for their spending in downturns with savings during expansions.
Automatic stabilizers are government programs that benefit more people when incomes fall — such as UI and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — or those that grow more generous during downturns, such as the Extended Benefits program within UI that lengthens benefits by 13–20 weeks in states with high unemployment. Economic stimulus from automatic stabilizers is well-timed to ramp up at the start of downturns and wind down at the end because it responds directly to changes in peoples’ incomes or the unemployment rate. Timely stimulus can forestall layoffs early in a downturn without overheating the economy once it has recovered. As a result, automatic stabilizers dampened the severity of economic swings roughly as much as discretionary stimulus bills did between 1980 and 2018, according to experts at the Brookings Institution.
The enhanced stabilizers should include:
Adjusting the size and duration of UI benefits when the unemployment rate changes, as President Biden has proposed, as well as expanding UI eligibility and paying for the costs across the business cycle by taxing higher incomes than UI does today.
Increasing the federal share of Medicaid funding during recessions and reducing it during expansions.
Providing matching funds for state and local infrastructure maintenance projects with a higher matching rate during downturns.
Giving state and local governments direct aid during downturns, which could be paid for by making the cap on the regressive deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) permanent.
Lawmakers can always vote to spend more or less than automatic stabilizers prescribe, but strong stabilizers would mitigate changes in economic demand even if Congress failed to change aid policy quickly, as they often have during recent downturns. For example, Congress did not expand UI until six months after the Great Recession began, and Republicans let that expansion expire in 2013 even though nearly 4 million people were long-term unemployed.
As the pandemic lockdowns took hold last May, Congress passed the CARES Act more quickly, but interrupted that aid by creating and then missing self-imposed deadlines to extend the bill’s programs. Republicans let a $600/week UI benefit increase expire in July after claiming it discouraged work, even though few jobs existed for unemployed people to fill even if they wanted to. President Trump then let expansions of UI’s duration and eligibility lapse briefly in December 2020 when he temporarily refused to sign a bill extending the provisions into 2021.
Republicans also opposed sending federal aid to state and local governments to cover income and sales tax revenue shortfalls, even though those shortfalls forced cuts to essential services such as education. Congressional squabbles such as these would be less likely to undercut the recovery if automatic stabilizers were more robust.
Expand Unemployment Insurance
As part of his new American Families Plan, President Biden proposed making UI a stronger economic stabilizer by extending benefits for longer and making benefits larger during downturns but offered few specifics for doing so. PPI recently recommended increasing the share of a worker’s lost wages replaced by UI when a state’s 3-month average unemployment rate is both above 5 percent and rises by more than 1 percentage point in a year. This proposal would have provided roughly $190 billion in stimulus during the Great Recession and ensured that unemployment benefits never deterred work by exceeding the jobseeker’s lost income. Unemployment benefits would also be extended by 14 weeks in states with unemployment rates above 9 percent and 13 more weeks where rates surpass 10 percent.
State UI programs should use $2 billion made available by the American Relief Plan Act that President Biden signed in March to ensure their computer systems can quickly calculate and deliver these benefits. The federal government should support state modernization efforts further if this aid proves insufficient, possibly by creating their own computer systems that states can use.
PPI also proposes to provide unemployment benefits to more workers. For example, although self-employed workers are hard to insure through traditional UI because they often set their own schedules, lawmakers could let them defer taxes on savings for periods when they cannot work. Congress should also expand work-sharing programs, which give prorated benefits to workers who temporarily lose hours instead of their jobs. Only 26 states currently have work-sharing programs and employers often underutilize them. UI should pay for all these expansions across the economic cycle by taxing higher incomes than it does today.
Use Medicaid Matching Dollars to Moderate Fluctuations in State Revenues
Automatically ramping up direct federal aid to state and local governments should prove simpler than these UI reforms because Washington already has pre-existing channels to give states money through pre-existing federal-state partnerships, such as Medicaid. The federal government sent states $103 billion in aid during the Great Recession and $70 billion so far in the pandemic recession by increasing its share of the cost of Medicaid. That money not only freed up state funds for other spending priorities without creating a new bureaucracy, but also helped Medicaid cover laid-off workers who lost job-based health insurance. It makes sense to use the federal government’s ability to borrow at favorable rates to cover more of a state’s Medicaid costs when its unemployment rate rises, and less as its unemployment rate falls.
Provide Variable Matching Funds for Infrastructure Maintenance Projects
Since state and local governments may sometimes need more support than Medicaid can deliver, federal lawmakers should also pick up a greater share of intergovernmental infrastructure projects during downturns. President Biden recently proposed the federal government commit $1.3 trillion to rebuilding the nation’s physical infrastructure as part of his American Jobs Plan. Such an investment is badly needed, as the McKinsey Global Institute found in 2017 that the United States must raise infrastructure spending by 0.5 percent of GDP through 2035 — about $2.6 trillion — just to keep economic growth from slowing. Downturns exacerbate underinvestment because state and local governments often deal with budget crunches by pulling back their spending on infrastructure.
PPI recommends that federal lawmakers structure some of the President’s infrastructure investment as permanent new federal grants that match spending by state and local governments on infrastructure projects of national importance. Whereas local leaders will generally want to spend as much of the federal government’s money on their constituents as possible if it comes with no strings attached, requiring state and local governments to contribute some funding incentivizes them to pursue only useful projects. The matching rates for these grants should rise during recessions so state and local governments are encouraged to undertake deferred maintenance efforts when it is more cost-effective to do so and discouraged from discontinuing worthwhile long-term projects just because of temporary revenue losses.
These infrastructure grants could not only make the nation more productive in the long run but could also stimulate the economy in the short-term by creating well-paying construction jobs at times when the economy needs them most. Funding maintenance work would be especially stimulative, as such work can often begin more quickly than new capital projects can. Routinely maintaining infrastructure can also reduce the cost of future repairs and replacements. Yet despite these benefits, almost three-fourths of federal investment in water and transportation infrastructure went to new capital projects in 2017, leaving maintenance work to state and local governments. The federal government should focus more of its spending on maintenance at all times, but especially during downturns.
Cover Remaining State and Local Revenue Losses Directly
Finally, if state and local governments need more aid than these channels provide, the federal government should make up the difference through direct aid. Experts at the Tax Policy Center recently proposed creating a “State Macroeconomic Insurance Fund” that would automatically give state and local governments aid based on factors those governments cannot control, such as the unemployment rate. Unlike aid through federal-state partnerships, which states would need to pass through to local governments themselves, such a fund could also give to local governments directly.
TPC would encourage fiscal responsibility among state and local governments by letting them pay into the fund with any surpluses they run in good times in exchange for larger benefits during downturns. TPC would finance the rest of the fund’s benefits by making the $10,000 cap on federal income tax deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) permanent instead of allowing it to expire in 2025 as it would under current law. Although many Democrats from high-tax states want to repeal the cap, their efforts are deeply misguided: 56 percent of the benefit of ending it would go to the highest-earning one percent. Keeping the cap and using its revenues to give state and local governments direct aid would prevent regressive budget cuts during contractions instead of giving the rich a lavish tax cut.
These and other automatic stabilizers would make timely, proportional aid the default policy when Congress is too inflexible to act quickly. Ensuring the federal government automatically mitigates swings in economic demand will lessen the pain of downturns, spread the cost of stimulus across the business cycle, and free Congress to focus on addressing the unique issues each downturn presents.
On Friday, April 23rd, PPI Director of Social Policy Veronica Goodman spoke with Professor Maya Rossin-Slater, a paid leave expert at Stanford University about her latest paper, The Impact of Paid Family Leave on Employers: Evidence from New York, co-authored with Ann P. Bartel, Christopher J. Ruhm, Meredith Slopen, and Jane Waldfogel. Watch the full interview below.
On Tuesday, April 27, theProgressive Policy Institute will host two events with Members of Congress and diverse panels of experts on supporting women in the workforce and creating more opportunities for students and young workers.
In the morning, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Terri Sewell (AL-07) will keynote an event focused on policies that help women return to the workforce as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Later that day, Rep. Chris Pappas (NH-01) will keynote an event with PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project on creating more school-to-work pathways for our students and young adults. Recently, PPI’s Veronica Goodman, Tressa Pankovits, and Tess Murphy published a report titled Preventing Failure to Launch: Creating More School-to-Work Pathways for Young Adults, which focused on four key themes across school-to-work models, including the importance of work-based learning that connects students to employers, re-designing curriculums to emphasize soft skills and social capital, increasing supportive or wraparound services to help students get across the finish line, and helping high-school students earn credits toward postsecondary education.
Information and registration links for both events are below:
Helping Women Return to the Workforce with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Terri Sewell
On Tuesday, April 27th, PPI is hosting a webinar with special guests Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Terri Sewell on policies to help the women return to the workforce following the devastating effect of the pandemic on women’s labor force participation. Our panel includes policy experts on labor, child care, and gender and racial equity.
Date/Time:
April 27, 2021 at 10:30AM ET
Keynote Speakers:
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
Rep. Terri Sewell (AL-07)
Panel:
Veronica Goodman, Director of Social Policy at PPI
Chandra Childers, Study Director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research
Elliot Haspel, Author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It
Rhonda V. Sharpe, founder & president, Women’s Institute for Science, Equity, and Race
Kate Bahn, Director of Labor Market Policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Preventing Failure to Launch: Creating More School-to-Work Pathways with Rep. Chris Pappas
On Tuesday, April 27th, PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project is hosting a webinar with special guest Rep. Chris Pappas on creating more school-to-work pathways for our students and young adults.
Date/Time:
April 27, 2021 at 1:00PM ET
Keynote Speakers:
Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH)
Jennifer Kemp, Director of Youth Services, U.S. Department of Labor; Office of Workforce Investment
Panel:
Veronica Goodman, Director of Social Policy at PPI
Tressa Pankovits, Associate Director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project
Jeanne Russell, Executive Director of the Centers for Applied Science and Technology
Cate Swinburn, President of YouthForce NOLA
Ryan Craig, Managing Director of Achieve Partners
On this week’s Radically Pragmatic Podcast, PPI President Will Marshall and Senior Policy Fellow Crystal Swann sit down with Rep. Marilyn Strickland (WA-10), a former Mayor of Tacoma, and Sly James, former Mayor of Kansas City.
They discuss a new “metro-federalism” – the role of local leaders in effectively deploying the public resources provided by Congress in the American Rescue Plan Act, and how mayors will support the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 relief and recovery goals – often as Republican-controlled state legislatures are hostile to the new Democratic administration.
The leaders also discussed the American Jobs Plan, the Biden Administration’s next phase of the Build Back Better agenda, which will invest billions in traditional and human infrastructure so we can get every American – including women – back to work and back on track.
“We think about infrastructure as very traditionally roads, bridges, mass transit, sewers, et cetera. Now it includes broadband, now it includes affordable housing, and now it also includes what I call the “continuum of care-giving” – the way we care for our youngest and the way we care for our eldest, because when we talk about infrastructure as job creation, that is very male-dominated for a few reasons. But when we talk about the care-giving infrastructure, now we’re talking about more participation by women, and this is important because COVID has just disproportionately affected women’s participation in the workplace and on top of that women of color’s participation in the workplace. So we’re going to have a truly equitable and inclusive sustainable economic recovery, we have to look at the care-giving infrastructure as part of our holistic approach to how we invest in infrastructure,” said Rep. Marilyn Strickland on the podcast.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
When teachers locked up their classrooms last March, few thought that a year later schools would still be shuttered and that millions of children would lack access to essential services, such as meals, and that millions of jobs would be lost, leaving many individuals and families struggling to put food on the table. America’s hunger crisis is now so acute that a recent analysis found that the number of children not getting enough to eat was ten times higher during the pandemic, while nearly 1 in 6 adults – or close to 24 million Americans – reported that their households did not have enough to eat sometimes or often in the past seven days.
The sharp rise of hunger during the pandemic is yet another woeful legacy of the Trump administration’s mishandling of the Covid crisis, including trying to deny access to food relief by placing unnecessary bureaucratic barriers on states and even attempting to kick nearly 700,000 unemployed people off of food assistance in the midst of a once-in-a-century public health crisis. President Biden has thankfully made quick progress to address the hunger crisis through executive action and proposed legislation, but there is more work to be done to make our federal anti-hunger policy more resilient going forward for the next crisis, and to address the structural barriers to food affordability and access.
In his first week in office, President Biden signed an executive order that will help alleviate the hunger crisis by increasing benefits of the Pandemic-EBT program (P-EBT) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as well as calling for the Agriculture Department to modernize the Thrifty Food Plan to better reflect the cost of a market basket of foods upon which SNAP benefits are based. Biden’s American Rescue Plan will also significantly bolster food assistance programs around the country. Collectively, these changes should make food aid more generous and better targeted.
However, many anti-hunger innovations were born of necessity during the pandemic, and these should serve as lessons learned going forward to better prepare for a future crisis. The P-EBT program has been a success at bridging the gap in nutrition for low-income children who used to obtain meals through programs at their schools, but who could no longer do so with schools closed. This program should be studied to see if it can be converted to a Summer EBT option going forward. Furthermore, to stay ahead of a future crisis, researchers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have suggested that Congress “leverage the P-EBT structure to create a permanent authorization for states to issue replacement benefits (similar to P-EBT, and perhaps renamed “emergency-” or E-EBT) in case of lengthy school or child care closures resulting from a future public health emergency or natural disaster.” This would make it easier for states to act quickly and not rely on Congressional action should schools need to close in the future. Finally, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici has introduced a bill that would more effectively allow schools to distribute free meals to students and other community members in need, and to extend meal service for afterschool meals and snack programs. These measures would make our systems nimbler and more responsive should a future disruption, national or local, occur.
America’s hunger crisis did not start with the pandemic, and policymakers should go further to address three key underlying causes and structural barriers to food access and affordability. First, the White House should focus on stricter antitrust enforcement in the food industry. The U.S. food and agriculture industry is concentrated, with a few large firms dominating many markets, which can drive up consumer prices on basic nutrition staples. Second, Congress should enact the HOPE Act, introduced by Reps. Joe Morelle and Jim McGovern and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) which would create online accounts that enable low-income families to apply once for all social programs they qualify for, rather than forcing them to run a bureaucratic gauntlet that makes it difficult for low-income Americans to get public assistance. Third, Congress should take up legislation, such as the bipartisan Healthy Food Access for All Americans (HFAAA) Act put forth by Sens. Mark R. Warner, Jerry Moran, Bob Casey, Shelley Moore Capito, that incentivizes food providers to set up shop in rural and hard-to-reach communities to improve food access for the estimated 40 million Americans living in “food deserts” that lack a nearby grocery store or food pantry or bank.
Food insecurity is not just a moral issue, it also has economic and social costs. Adults who go hungry are less productive and are more likely to suffer from chronic illness. Hungry children are more likely to get sick and fall behind in school. One in five Black and Hispanic households report they are unable to afford food. Poor nutrition and soaring rates of metabolic disease are a drag on the economy and contribute to rising healthcare costs and early deaths in minority and low-income families that are disproportionately more likely to experience poor nutrition and health as a result of food insecurity. And a boost in food assistance programs has even been found to speed economy recovery during a downturn and serve as an “automatic stabilizer”, an added bonus of fighting hunger during the Covid recession.
It’s time for a new national commitment to wiping out hunger and malnutrition in America. The pandemic and the associated hunger crisis have taught us valuable lessons that we should use so that we can be better prepared to face a future crisis and to curb hunger in America.
*Veronica Goodman is the Director of Social Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute. In her role, she develops and analyzes policies designed to help lift more Americans out of poverty and to strengthen the middle class, focusing on social mobility, inequality, labor, and modernizing social services. Veronica earned graduate degrees in economics and public management from Johns Hopkins University, and her undergraduate degree from The George Washington University.
You can find Goodman’s full paper on a comprehensive federal approach to the hunger crisis here.
This piece was published on On Food Law, a forum for food law scholars to discuss ideas and to share work, managed by the Food Law Lab at Harvard Law and the Resnick Center for Food Law & Policy at UCLA Law.
Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Schumer and Members of the 117th Congress,
As a member of the first Cohort of the Mosaic Economic Project — an effort to advance women experts in the policy debate — and in the spirit of International Women’s Day 2021 “Choose to Challenge” theme, we ask you to choose to deepen your bench of economists, business leaders, and technology experts on Capitol Hill.
The under-representation of women in economics and technology, despite women constituting a larger share of the population and having a commensurately greater economic influence, has many causes, including lack of educational opportunity and unequal opportunity within the workplace and male-dominated professions. We need Congress to be part of the solution.
The lack of diverse experts in senior staff, as resources, and those called to provide informal expertise as well as formal testimony has long been a blind spot among policymakers. You—the most diverse Congress in history—can do better. Otherwise, Congress will continue to advance economic policies lacking the perspective of all Americans.
As authorities on pocketbook issues that affect us all, economists are highly sought-after, with celebrity-like status among reporters, investors and policymakers. Why? With increasingly frequent and severe episodes of economic volatility, that politicians seek guidance from those who specialize in rigorous analysis makes sense. Yet tens of thousands of hours of expert testimony show mostly men have been called upon. Despite our contributions, women still do not have equal opportunities to showcase our expertise.
It will take time to fix the broken educational pipeline, wherein elementary school girls too often don’t receive the same encouragement in math and science as boys do. Congress must dig a little deeper to find women experts in economics, business and technology. They are out there. We are out there. The Mosaic Economic Project will be happy to help you connect.
Michigan and Georgia state legislators are considering legislation that would expand access to telehealth services for contact lens and eyeglasses prescription renewals. While a seemingly small change, it would make it easier for consumers to get new glasses and contacts and help push the states toward more innovative health care more broadly. This week I had the opportunity to testify to both state legislatures why I agree with these proposed changes.
Under current law, both Michigan and Georgia treat ocular health differently than other types of health care. Patients can see physicians remotely to renew drug prescriptions but not eyeglass or contact lens prescriptions. The states legislatively limited access to telehealth over safety concerns rather than letting the governing boards of medicine decide where a person could receive ocular health care.
In recent years, renewing contact lens and eye glass prescriptions has become commonplace is many states. After an initial prescription is provided with an in-person exam, certain low-risk contact lens wearers can use home computers and mobile phones to check their vision and take a picture of their eye to renew prescriptions for up to five years. The information is sent to a local ophthalmologist, who reviews the results and issues a prescription renewal if appropriate.
But this type of renewal is banned in Michigan and Georgia. The good news is, the state legislatures are considering HB 4356 and HB 629, innovative bills which would roll back these limits and allow the residents of Michigan and Georgia, respectively, to use telehealth to renew lens prescriptions.
While telehealth will never be a panacea of all of health care, it does have the potential to increase access and reduce costs. But using state law to unnecessarily blocking access to certain telehealth services is just one (of many) reasons why health care costs too much in the United States. Here’s a technology that allows people to avoid unnecessary in-person visits, and yet it’s banned from being used for basic lens prescription renewals. And as we’ve seen from the Covid-19 pandemic, telehealth can BOTH improve access and reduce costs when used appropriately.
During Covid-19, it’s been laid bare how some parts of the health care system maintain barriers to access solely for revenue purposes. To reduce costs and improve access, we need to make it easier to access needed care – whether or not we are in a pandemic.
Michigan and Georgia should vote to approve these bills to make it easier for their constituents to get their eyeglass and contact lens prescriptions.
President Biden’s upcoming address to Congress is an opportunity to speak directly to the more than 10 million Americans who find themselves out of a job because of the pandemic recession. On the question of how to help these workers, Biden need look no further than the Build Back Better platform he campaigned on. A key element of the BBB platform is a $50 billion investment in workforce development, including apprenticeships.
Americans, especially young adults, need more pathways to careers that don’t require a traditional four-year college degree. While Millennials are the most educated generation in history, as of 2015, only about a third of Americans ages 25 to 34 were college graduates. That number is even lower for older Americans. Most people don’t go to college, and apprenticeships are an underappreciated way for finding jobs for the millions of job seekers who will have to find work after the pandemic, including those whose pre-Covid jobs might never come back. Compared to other high-income countries, the U.S. lags significantly when it comes to apprenticeships and other “active labor market” policies and it’s time for us to make investments to fill this gap.
Recently, the White House announced several ways that the Biden administration is strengthening registered apprenticeships across the country.
President Biden has endorsed Congressman Bobby Scott’s bipartisan National Apprenticeship Act of 2021, which will “create and expand registered apprenticeships, youth apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeship programs.” This legislation had been passed in the House in November 2020, in the last Congress, but the Republican Senate Majority failed to take up the bill for a vote. With Democrats now in the majority, there is renewed hope that the country’s underfunded and outdated apprenticeship system can finally be modernized to meet our 21st-century workforce needs. The reauthorization of the National Apprenticeship Act is estimated to create nearly one million high-quality apprenticeship opportunities and includes provisions that target opportunities for key groups, such as young adults, childcare workers, and veterans. The bill also aims to increase apprenticeships in industries that do not require a four-year degree for well-paid jobs, such as healthcare, IT, and financial services. We’ve supported this bipartisan legislation in the past and we look forward to seeing it make its way through Congress.
Additionally, the White House has reversed a harmful Trump-era policy by rescinding the industry-recognized apprenticeship programs (IRAPs), which threatened to undermine registered apprenticeship programs across the country and weakened employer-protections for trainees.
These are important steps, but the White House and Congress should go even further to modernize the current apprenticeship system. First, they should formalize and incentivize intermediaries (public or private) who create “outsourced” apprenticeships programs that get paid for each placement when they hire candidates who meet certain criteria (such as eligibility for Pell grants), provide them with an apprenticeship that pays minimum wage or better, train them, and place them in permanent positions. Second, they should create relationships with high schools to set up apprenticeships and career and technical education programs that begin in the 11th or 12th grade and pair students with local employers. These have shown promise in other high-income countries that employ a high percentage of their younger workers through apprenticeships. And, lastly, they should create public service apprenticeship opportunities and programs at all levels of government, including in industries such as information technology, accounting, and healthcare.
As President Biden crafts his address to Congress in the coming weeks, we hope that he acknowledges that millions of Americans who are out of a job lack a college degree. For them, other pathways to jobs, such as through investing in apprenticeships, will be a critical step forward in regaining their economic footing.
It discusses the valuable policies contained in President Biden’s recent executive orders and the proposed American Rescue Plan legislation and also identifies additional policies to address hunger, including reducing concentration in the food industry, using modern information technologies to help low-income Americans cut through siloed bureaucratic obstacles, and expanding food aid for low-income children.
Key recommendations from the brief include:
• Extend the Pandemic EBT program through the pandemic and economic recovery to provide low-income children with free or subsidized meals during weekends, holidays, and summer break. To be better prepared for a future crisis, Congress should also leverage the P-EBT program to create a permanent authorization for states to issue replacement benefits, giving them more flexibility to respond in a crisis.
• Study the success of the P-EBT program with an eye to converting it into a Summer EBT program post-Covid to bridge the gap in nutrition during the summer months and reach more low-income children in rural and underserved communities.
• Pass legislation, such as the Pandemic Child Hunger Prevention Act, in future recovery legislation, to allow all children free access to breakfast, lunch, and after school snack programs either in school or through “grab and go” and delivery options, as well as reduce bureaucratic barriers for schools to deliver meals to kids.
• Focus on stricter antitrust enforcement in the food industry to help consumers facing increasing prices for basic nutrition staples, such as meat and eggs.
• Use information technology to modernize social service delivery and reduce the administrative burden on low-income people. For example, Congress should enact the HOPE Act, which would create online accounts that enable low-income families to apply once for all social programs they qualify for, rather than forcing them to run a bureaucratic gauntlet.
• Pass the bipartisan Healthy Food Access for All Americans (HFAAA) Act, put forth by Sens. Mark R. Warner, Jerry Moran, Bob Casey, Shelley Moore Capito, which provides incentives, including tax credits or grants, to food providers who serve low-access, rural communities. Draft legislation that provides grants to states to fund the establishment and operation of grocery stores in rural and underserved communities.
Veronica Goodman, PPI’s Director of Social Policy, and Crystal Swann, Senior Policy Fellow, are co-authors of the brief, and said this:
“The Trump administration’s feeble response to America’s hunger crisis was a national disgrace, one of the many ways in which it thoroughly bungled the nation’s response to the Covid pandemic. The contrast with the Biden administration’s sharp focus on hunger and decisive moves to alleviate it couldn’t be more dramatic.
Nonetheless, it should be just the beginning of a new national commitment to wiping out hunger and malnutrition in America. It’s time for a vigorous public response to growing concentration in the food industry, as well as a new push to use modern information technologies to help low-income Americans cut through burdensome bureaucratic obstacles and take charge of their economic security. We’ve also learned lessons during the pandemic for how to provide meals to families outside of the traditional systems, and we should preserve these going forward in the effort to be better prepared for a future crisis and to curb hunger in America.”
From May 2019 to May 2020 theCDC reported over 81,000 overdose deaths from opioids in the United States, the biggest annual death toll to date. In a belated effort to mitigate the crisis, the Trump administration changed regulations to make it easier to access the opioid treatment drug buprenorphine in the waning days of his presidency. But the new Biden administration has reversed those changes because of legal concerns over the way the Trump administration implemented the policy.
The Trump changes were released amidst the chaos of the Capitol insurrection. When Elinore McCance-Katz, the health and Human Services (HHS) assistant secretary for mental health and substance use, resigned in the aftermath of the riots, the White House quickly appointed a replacement who greenlighted new “clinical guidelines” that made it easier for physicians to prescribe buprenorphine. McCance-Katz had refused to push these changes forward during her tenure. McCance-Katz had favored more safeguards to prevent buprenorphine from being overprescribed in fear of the drug starting a new epidemic of its own.
Buprenorphine is one of three pharmacological treatments for opioid use disorders and is considered the easiest tolerated of the options. It has been shown to reduce overdose mortality by 50% and comes in a variety of forms, dissolvable films, and tablets being the most common. But stringent regulations make the drug difficult to get for people seeking opioid treatment.Under current law, doctors are required to complete special training and obtain an “X-waiver” license in order to prescribe buprenorphine. Only 5% of doctors in the country have the necessary waiver to prescribe it, and in rural areas, it’s even less.
The new guidelines allowed any physician with a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) prescriber license to prescribe buprenorphine. The drug is a narcotic that diminishes the symptoms of opioid withdrawal and is also safer, less addictive, and less likely to be misused. Despite its safety and efficacy, The federal government crafted these rules over two decades ago before the drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat opioid use disorder in 2002. Ironically, opioids require no special training to be prescribed, unlike buprenorphine.
Many addiction researchers, physicians, and policy experts applauded the change in regulation. In the hasty process, however, the Trump administration did not obtain the necessary approval to change the regulations from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Though the Trump administration may not have followed proper procedures, Biden’s decision to reverse its action sparked backlash from many policymakers and physicians who believe quick and drastic measures must be taken to ease the toll of the pandemic for people with substance use disorders.
Overdose deaths have been steadily rising in the past decades and the pandemic has significantly exacerbated the rate. Synthetic opioids are believed to be the main substance that accelerated the overdose death rate during the pandemic. TheCDC reported that two-thirds of opioid overdose deaths involve synthetic opioids.Experts estimate that the total economic burden of the crisis is over $78 million per year.
In addition to limited providers, people with substance use disorders often face other barriers to receiving treatment, especially in disadvantaged communities. These include lack of stable housing, health insurance, and stigma. COVID-19 intensified these problems by limiting in-person support groups, public transportation, and job security while increasing social isolation and stress.
Since buprenorphine is an opioid it does have the potential to be addictive. It is, however, safer and less addictive than the opioids that it is used to treat because of its pharmacological properties. It is also unlikely that the deregulation of this drug will lead to more opioid use disorders since it is only prescribed to treat opioid use disorders– unlike other opioids that are prescribed to alleviate pain. Ultimately the life-saving benefits that buprenorphine offers far outweigh the potential risks.
Although the legal concerns over the way the Trump Administration removed these regulations are legitimate, the longer it takes the Biden administration to ease the restrictions on buprenorphine – or find an equivalent treatment – the direr the situation will become.
As a part of launching his multifaceted Opioid Crisis plan, President Biden should take executive action to remove X-Waivers in a legally surefire and quick manner. While removing the waivers will not solve the crisis overnight, it is a step in the right direction to treat people with opioid use disorders and prevent the overdose death rate from rising further.
On Monday, congressional Democrats unveiled a proposal to dramatically expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC), one of the bigger policies in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. On the same day, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) gave the concept bipartisan backing by offering a Republican proposal for turning the CTC into an expanded child allowance. Both proposals would raise the current benefit from $2,000 per child to $3,000, provide additional credit for children under age six, make the full value of the benefit available for low-income families, deliver the payments in a monthly installment instead of a lump sum at the end of the year and dramatically reduce child poverty in America.
It’s no surprise that policymakers in both parties are prioritizing child poverty. As many as one in seven children, or close to 11 million, are poor. The United States consistently has among the highest levels of child poverty among the world’s wealthiest countries, many of which offer so-called “child allowances” to support low-income parents. The Democratic proposal would not just help these kids in the short term by lifting an estimated five million children out of poverty. It would also have long-run benefits for social mobility and support Black and Hispanic families the most. This Democratic proposal is estimated to cut child poverty nearly in half while the Romney proposal would reduce it by one-third.
For those concerned about nicotine addiction and tobacco consumption, a ban on flavored tobacco might sound like a good idea. But as Nkechi Taifa explains in this week’s PPI Podcast, such bans are going to almost entirely fall onto minority communities.
Several states are considering or have already banned flavored tobacco. Nkechi Taifa agrees with Crystal Swann that in time a time when we are rolling back the war on drugs in favor of a public health approach, we should be doing the same with tobacco.
Earlier this month, I attended the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA), organized by the American Economic Association, on behalf of PPI. The three-day conference featured hundreds of presentations and papers on economics and social science research and was held virtually this year, sparing me a frigid trip to Chicago. The three topics that I highlight below from the conference address housing, inequality, and wealth building, with links to relevant PPI policy ideas.
Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice
Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard University presented the latest findings from their housing mobility program in the Seattle area, Creating Moves to Opportunity. The researchers designed a randomized controlled trial that gave low-income families the choice to move to higher opportunity areas through housing vouchers. They “provided services to reduce barriers to moving to high-upward-mobility neighborhoods: customized search assistance, landlord engagement, and short-term financial assistance” and families were not required to move to high-opportunity neighborhoods to receive a voucher.
Their services-based intervention proved successful. Families who received support in search assistance, landlord engagement, and short-term financial assistance moved to high-upward-mobility areas at a rate of 53%, compared with 15% of those who did not. Additionally, families who chose to move to higher opportunity areas reported higher levels of neighborhood satisfaction after moving, tended to stay in their new neighborhoods, and did not make sacrifices on other aspects of neighborhood quality.
This study fits into a larger body of research and evidence illustrating that social programs are more effective when explicitly designed to reduce administrative burdens and search costs for participants. The authors note that “these findings imply that most low-income families do not have a strong preference to stay in low-opportunity areas; instead, barriers in the housing search process are a central driver of residential segregation by income. Interviews with families reveal that the capacity to address each family’s needs in a specific manner from emotional support to brokering with landlords to customized financial assistance was critical to the program’s success. The authors conclude that “redesigning affordable housing policies to provide customized assistance in housing search could reduce residential segregation and increase upward mobility substantially” and note that the intervention is relatively inexpensive given the induced outcomes and overall size of the programs.
Rethinking Inequality with James K. Galbraith, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jason Furman, and Teresa Ghilarducci
This macroeconomics panel provided a sweeping assessment of different trends in inequality, shining a light on the way that the pandemic has revealed and worsened inequities.
Of note, Jason Furman of Harvard University focused his discussion on several key points about inequality. He explained that while the pandemic has caused a massive increase in inequality, an overlooked outcome of government aid through stimulus checks and unemployment insurance might ultimately be a reduction in inequality as measured in many Americans’ after-tax income. Furman discussed that the causes of inequality are complex and that there is not one grand unifying theory for the widening gap over the past few decades. He did point to competition policy as one key area where inequality could be reduced through more “vigorous antitrust enforcement” to bring the market closer to competition.
With reference to his first point on a potential decrease in inequality during the pandemic, PPI’s Brendan McDermott recently discussed in a blog post the essential role that government assistance has played in poverty reduction during the Covid recession and how at the onset of the pandemic, researchers found that the poverty rate fell because of “a massive infusion of federal aid.”
Can Baby Bonds Address Historic Racial Injustice?
Steven McMullen of Hope College shared his paper examining whether baby bonds can help reduce the racial wealth gap among Black families. A baby bond is a government-funded trust account which every child receives at birth. He considers higher deposits from the government for children in lower-income households, creating a progressive impact. The policy would be race-neutral, even if the effect is not. When the participants reach adulthood, the money would be released to be used for purposes such as education, housing, or retirement spending. The author concludes that this is a promising proposal to increase intergenerational wealth among Black and lower-income families and close the yawning racial wealth gap.
In a 2020 paper titled “Democratize Capital Ownership,” PPI’s Jason Gold discusses his idea for government-funded baby bonds linked to national service as a way to tackle the widening wealth gap. He proposes that the federal government seed an account at birth for every U.S. child and the initial investment would be put into a market index or target date fund. Families would be able to contribute post-tax earnings and the funds would be released at age 18 if the account holder agrees to perform a year of national service before they turn 25. The account savings could be used for “post-secondary education, a down payment on a first home, or starting a business.”
Thank you to the ASSA organizers and presenters for a smooth and productive conference this year despite the pandemic and virtual format!
