For you. For all of us.

Mothma

PEOPLE’S POLICY PROJECT

PART I:

Relative to its European peers, the United States spends virtually nothing on benefits for families with children.1 This dearth of family benefits leads to two cruel outcomes: it denies many people the ability to have the families that they want and inflicts financial ruin on many of those who go through with parenthood despite the lack of social support.

The prevalence of financial problems among families with children causes many would-be parents to have fewer children than they would prefer and causes some to forego parenthood altogether. A recent survey found that one-fourth of people between the ages of 20 and 45 had fewer or expected to have fewer children than they wanted.2 The most common reasons were economic: 64 percent said child care is too expensive; 44 percent said they can’t afford more children; and 43 percent said they waited too long because of financial instability.

When people do have children, they often struggle to afford child care, pre-k, and even everyday expenses. The effects of this social neglect are felt most severely by those on the bottom of our society. Twenty-one percent of American children live in relative poverty—a higher percentage than that of any European country.3

Current policy discussions around benefits that help families with children are fractured in strange and unhelpful ways. Ideas to expand child care and pre-k services tend to get grouped in with education policy or stand alone under the heading of “early childhood education and care.”4 Programs that provide public health insurance to children are categorized as healthcare policy.5 Paid leave proposals almost always seek to bundle leave for parents with leave for medical reasons and then wind up classified as women’s policy.6

These issue-area assignments are not wrong in an objective sense, but they create a muddled and rudderless policy framework. A more effective approach would be to bring all these policy ideas under the heading of family benefits and then pitch family benefits as having a simple unified purpose: making parenthood easy and affordable for everyone.

In Section One of this paper, I lay out a general theory that explains why having and raising children is so difficult in a laissez-faire capitalist system. In Section Two, I introduce the Family Fun Pack, a suite of family benefits that solves the problems identified in the first section. These benefits include free child care, free pre-k, free healthcare for children, and a child allowance, among other things.

Progressive candidates looking for a fresh platform would be wise to consider adopting the Family Fun Pack agenda. It is a coherent set of programs that conveys a simple message. These programs, which are common throughout the world, are extremely effective at reducing the burden of parenthood and especially effective at reducing child poverty.

The first problem, which I call the mere addition problem, is that adding children to a family unit increases the amount of resources and time needed by the unit, but our current economic system does nothing to address this need. Similar workers receive the same wages and time off even though some have to pay for diapers and child care while others do not. Because income is paid out to the factors of production without any regard for its final family-level distribution, families with children wind up in dramatically worse financial circumstances than families without children, even when the families are otherwise identical.

The best way to understand the severity of the mere addition problem is through a concrete example with realistic figures. So, imagine two married middle-class couples, the Smiths and the Johnsons. Both families earn $80,000 per year, but the Smiths have a son and a daughter when they are in their mid-20s while the Johnsons never have kids.

According to the latest figures from the usda and the Current Expenditure Survey, the Smiths will spend $233,970 out of their own pockets getting each of their children to age 18.7 That’s $467,940 for both kids. The Johnsons, being childless, will spend $0 over the same period. If both of the Smith’s kids attend a four-year public college, that will cost the family another $116,720, bringing the grand total with college to $584,660 versus the Johnson’s $0.8

Despite working the same middle class jobs, the Smiths are much worse off than the Johnsons. By merely adding two children to their family unit, they find themselves half a million dollars in the hole. This dynamic opens up huge inequalities between families with different numbers of children and causes many lower income families to drown under the financial burden.

In the above example, the Smiths earn $80,000 per year and therefore can probably absorb the extra costs of raising children without going broke. But for lower class families, the story is much more bleak. Retail workers, food service workers, and others with low incomes often find themselves completely crushed by these expenses. Without a robust set of family benefits available to offset child-rearing costs, these families frequently wind up in poverty.

Indeed, because of the mere addition problem, the presence of children is one of the leading causes of poverty in American life. In social statistics, poverty is a function of family income and family size. When children are added to a family, the family’s size increases, but the family’s income does not. This necessarily pulls a family closer to the poverty line and plunges many families below that line.

In 2017, 158 million Americans lived in families with children.9 Over 28 million of those people lived below the poverty line, and that’s even after counting transfer programs like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.10

If these children did not exist, then obviously there would be no child poverty. More interestingly, if they did not exist, then half of the poor adults who currently live in families with children would no longer be poor.11 That’s right: half of poor adults who live with children are only poor because of the expenses of raising children. It is thus the presence of children in these households that is driving the adults into poverty. Based on this analysis, children directly or indirectly cause 36 percent of all the poverty in America.

Since children increase the amount of resources families need to maintain their standard of living, a society that fails to match that need with public benefits will generally wind up with high levels of interfamily inequality and high levels of child and child-adjacent poverty.

The second problem, which I call the lifecycle income problem, is that peak childbearing years occur in early adulthood when individuals are working entry level jobs and therefore receiving entry level pay. As workers gain experience, they generally receive promotions and raises that increase their incomes, but much of this money comes too late to help with the punctuated costs of raising children. This mismatch between peak earning years and peak childbearing years drives up inequality and poverty in society.

People generally have children in their late 20s and early 30s. The average age of first birth is 26.6 years old.12 The birth rate, i.e. the percent of women who have children in a given year, peaks at 11 percent around age 30.13 The percentage of adults living with children under the age of 5 peaks at 35 percent around age 33.14 The percentage of adults living with children under the age of 18 reaches a high of 66 percent at age 39.15

Yet adults receive their highest levels of income in their 40s and 50s. Median personal earnings peak at age 44; median family income peaks at age 49; and median equivalized family income, i.e. family income adjusted for family size, peaks at age 59.16 The result of this lifecycle income pattern is that family incomes are lowest right around the time people start having children, increase gradually while people are raising kids, and then reach their peak after kids have moved out.

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The Urbanist Nightmare That Is Our Current Reality

Watch and scroll as Youtube urbanist Not Just Bikes explains the concept of a STROAD; a literal blight on the US  urban/suburban landscape that is also probably where you live…

Watch the full glorious video HERE

I wrote a mini-rant about trans kids in my newsletter (via charliejaneanders)

IN THESE TIMES

DES MOINES, Iowa — Wearing bright yellow Crocs, carrying a backpack and holding a clipboard stacked with papers, Ahmed Musa listens intently to a student. You would be forgiven for thinking Mr. Musa was a student himself; it is ​“staff dress like a student” day during spirit week at Theodore Roosevelt High School, and Mr. Musa looks the part.

Then again, Mr. Musa, 24, was a Roosevelt student not too long ago. He graduated in 2017.

He is talking with senior Jackie in a second floor hallway. She is animated, her purple and white braids falling across her baby blue N95 mask as she explains a problem. She is the president of the K-Club and there was an incident among members. The K-Club, she says, is about all things K-pop, from Korean music to food to movies to fashion. Mr. Musa laughs — he thought it was the ​“Kulture Club.”

Jackie goes on to give a broad overview of the situation: Racist and homophobic memes were posted in the group’s online chat of several dozen members. Tempers flared and arguments spilled over from social media into the classroom. Then a shouting match erupted during a club meeting. Fortunately, it didn’t come to blows. Members contacted the club’s teacher-advisor who contacted the school’s ​“restorative practices” team.

As a restoration facilitator, Mr. Musa’s job is to listen to problems and help students find solutions. Talking with Jackie that morning was the first step (a ​“prerestorative conference”) toward a formal ​“restorative circle.” Restorative circles are a group activity meant to help repair harm and restore relationships.

Jackie was one of several students I spoke with during two week-long visits to Roosevelt this year — once in the spring and once in the fall — to witness the school’s implementation of its new restorative practices program. Vanessa, a freshman struggling with the transition from remote learning during Covid, and Yonathan, a sophomore caught with drugs and weapons at school, were also among them. (Students involved in the RP program are referred to by first name to protect their privacy.)

Before the pandemic, armed officers known as ​“school resource officers,” or SROs, from the Des Moines Police Department would patrol the school hallways. But during the summer of racial justice marches and protests after the police murder of George Floyd, students, parents and community members spoke out against SROs at Des Moines School Board meetings. In the end, the police contract with the schools was terminated. After scrambling to make remote schooling work during the long, mournful slog of the pandemic, Des Moines Public Schools (DMPS) were left to find a way to reimagine school safety — and fast.

The district moved quickly to implement restorative practices, an increasingly popular educational model for school safety, violence prevention and mediation.

The 2021 – 2022 school year was a huge opportunity with the highest of stakes: DMPS could become one of the only districts in the nation to succeed in concurrently removing SROs and implementing restorative practices, or the district and its students could be thrown into crisis.

Restorative practices (RP) derive from ​“restorative justice,” which is used to bring together, in mutual agreement for mediation, the victim and the perpetrator of an offense. The goal is typically restitution for harm caused while helping the perpetrator restore community ties.

In education, ​“practices” is often swapped in for ​“justice” because it involves children who aren’t in criminal proceedings. Formal conflict resolution, after a dispute or rule-breaking, does play a role, but RP is also proactive, explains Anne Gregory, a Rutgers professor and one of the nation’s leading RP experts.

One core proactive practice is ​“check and connect.” This might be as simple as having teachers and staff say hi to each student as they enter the school, or asking a student between classes how their day is going. When there’s an issue, students can then sit down with a trusted adult to build ​“their own insight into themselves and what’s driving their behavior,” Gregory says.

Gregory emphasizes that relationship building is a two-way street. These micro-interactions of ​“check and connect” also change how teachers see students. They undermine ​“overgeneralization [and] negative stereotyping” and create space for understanding, Gregory says. When a student has ​“attendance problems,” for example, the right mindset involves ​“thinking about and understanding what’s going on for the family of that student that morning in getting out the door” — which is a ​“very different approach,” Gregory adds, from ​“sending a police officer to your house the fourth time you’re truant.”

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hey. don’t cry. crush three cloves of garlic into a pot with a dollop of olive oil and stir until golden then add one can of crushed tomatoes a bit of balsamic vinegar half a tablespoon of brown sugar half a cup of grated parmesan cheese and stir for a few minutes adding a handful of fresh spinach until wilted and mix in pasta of your choice ok?

You’re Lucky You Have a House, Peasant!

A history of company towns

by Joyce Rice and Kevin Moore

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TheNib.com

@thenib​

PEOPLE’S POLICY PROJECT

by Kendall Dix

The Flint, Michigan, water crisis has dramatically illustrated poor people’s lack of access to clean drinking water in the United States. But beyond lead contamination, there are more ways this country denies people that basic human right. The inability to pay water bills has become a significant problem for poor people.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic and accom­pany­ing economic downturn, an estimated 1 out of every 20 households, or about 15 million people, had their water turned off at some point during the year because of non­payment.1 In New Orleans, more than 75 percent of low-income residents have water bills that industry analysts say are unaffordable.2 During the pandemic, an es­timated 9,052 people died as a result of water shut-offs.3

Like all issues related to poverty, the problem of water affordability disproportionately harms Black people, making this a racial justice issue.4 The amount of household income spent on water is more than twice as high in majority Black cities as majority white cities.5

Most water for bathing, cooking, and drinking in the United States is provided by utilities, about 80 percent of which are publicly owned.6 Water utilities are funded by a combination of government money, user fees, municipal bonds, and private loans.7 Though household fees are often thought to discourage overuse, data show that demand for water is relatively fixed, and raising prices produces little reduction in usage.8 Furthermore, residential water use accounts for just 8.2 percent of overall water usage in the United States.9

The most effective and equitable solution to the affordability problem is to eliminate residential fees and simply fund water utilities entirely with progressive taxation. If governments are interested in reducing overall water consumption, there are a variety of other options such as physical infrastructure that limits the amount of water that flows through fixtures, water recycling, or limiting the largest users of water, which are farms and industrial facilities.

Two related, but distinct, problems characterize the term “water affordability”:

Poverty. 

Many people in the United States have low amounts of income and no or negative wealth. This makes it difficult for them to afford their household expenses, including rent, food, and water utility bills.10 In addition to their inability to pay, poor people who have bad credit scores are often seen as risks to utilities, which force them to pay high deposits or sometimes even deny them water service altogether.11

(“Older Housing In The Black Community On Chicago’s West Side.” U.S. National Archives / EPA.  “Old Cars Serve as Water-Break on Navajo Reservation.” U.S. National Archives / EPA.)

Public Disinvestment. 

Despite overall water consumption decreasing,12 people’s water bills are getting more expensive, in part because of decades of federal dis­invest­ment from public infra­structure. Federal spending on water has dropped steadily since the 1980s.13 Utilities’ costs have risen, in part because of climate change,14 and those costs are passed on to the public through increasing rates.15 Private utilities, which serve about 20 percent of the population, exist to make a profit and have higher water rates than public utilities.16 As federal spending on water has fallen, private water utilities have been on the rise. From 2010 through 2020, just 12 large, for-profit water companies acquired 353 water utilities at a total cost of about $5.8 billion.17

Water rates function as consumption taxes that fund infrastructure projects, much like gasoline taxes help fund highway maintenance and construction.18 In theory, these taxes can be used to influence consumer behavior to decrease usage. In practice, households largely cannot and do not respond to increased water rates by reducing consumption.19 Replacing water bills with more progressive sources of funding would increase access and improve the income distribution without causing overuse.

Eliminating water bills not only ensures universal access for those with housing, it also lowers utilities’ costs by reducing the need for billing and collections staff. Fees and rates alone cannot maintain our water system; only about 17 percent of utilities say they can maintain existing service without additional funding sources.20

(“Public Playground on the Charles River, near Soldiers Field Road.” U.S. National Archives / EPA.)

Water utility costs can be broken down into two broad categories:

At present, capital expenses are often covered by loans taken out by utilities and repaid by the fees collected from water users. The main federal funding mechanism for drinking water is the State Revolving Loan Fund (SRLF), which provides low-interest loans to utilities. The SRLF provides useful financing for utilities across the country, but many smaller utilities struggle to pay those loans, and some states struggle to provide the required matching funds.

Water infrastructure did not always depend so heavily on loans. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the federal government provided significant grant money to water utilities. There are still a number of federal grant programs, including Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN), Public Water System Supervision (PWSS), Tribal Public Water System Supervision, and Training and Technical Assistance for Small Systems.21

Congress should revive this approach and replace water infrastructure loans with grants. This would ensure that all utilities can afford to build out and maintain necessary infrastructure as well as eliminate the water rates that are used to directly or indirectly finance capital expenses.

Water utilities’ day-to-day expenses are currently distributed down to users through water bills. Replacing these charges with more progressive taxes would allow for the total elimination of residential water bills and result in a more equal distribution of income and consumption. Any level of government could do this. Municipalities could use property taxes to eliminate user charges, states could use state income or sales taxes, and the federal government could use the federal income tax. But if equality is the goal, it is worth noting that the federal tax system is currently much more progressive than state tax systems.22

This is not a new idea. Ireland does not charge residents for water and an effort to introduce charges in 2014 led to such immense backlash that the government scrapped them two years later.23 Some US cities have already begun experimenting with progressive water billing. For example, Philadelphia offers income-based water rates for those whose income is below 150 percent of the federal poverty line.24 Though this is good because it caps the amount any one household pays for its water bill, only households that apply are enrolled in the program. There are poor households that would qualify but are not receiving the benefit because they haven’t filled out the paperwork. Eliminating rates and fees altogether would be more effective.

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women should NOT be having sex

sex is a sacred act between two men for the purpose of strengthening male bonds

Happy international working women's day y'all

The Intercept | The Ignored and Bloody History of the U.S. in Haiti and El Salvador