Politicians across the ideological spectrum have pitched a variety of short-term fixes to address America’s affordability crisis – from rent freezes and caps on credit card interest rates to bans on diesel exports and waiving sanctions on Russia. Yale Law School Professor Natasha Sarin writes in the New York Times that we need to think beyond one-off solutions and focus instead on creating a government that works – what she calls a “Newer Deal.” That means addressing the cost of health care, housing and child care that are at the core of many families’ economic anxiety.
America’s social safety net has huge holes. If you can’t work six months because of a surgery, you’re disabled, but not enough for disability benefits. If you’re a Lyft driver in Massachusetts and you lose your job, you’re unemployed, but not eligible for unemployment insurance. If you’re 23 and working full time for very low wages, you’re poor enough to qualify for the earned-income tax credit, but you’re not old enough; the program doesn’t kick in until you’re 25. And if you’re 66 and in the same circumstance, again, you’re poor enough, but now you’re too old. When someone ages out of foster care at 18, she can get housing vouchers to help get a roof over her head, but it’s hard to find a landlord who accepts them.
Fixing these holes requires changing the federal tax code to ensure the wealthiest people and corporations pay their fair share. But throwing more money at the system won’t be enough.
The government has to make sure that the dollars are spent as intended. Those goals can be in tension. One path forward is to make our programs simpler and our government agencies less reliant on long-outdated technology. Elon Musk’s burn-it-down approach to federal agencies accomplished nothing (certainly not shrinking the budget), but it’s true that the government can be a bureaucratic nightmare of inefficiency, slowing change to a crawl or preventing it all together. Government has to meet people’s needs. We’re far from that today.
Colleges have massive repair backlog
The backlog of needed repairs and maintenance on Louisiana’s college campuses continues to pile up. The early findings in a report being prepared for the Board of Regents puts the backlog at $4 billion, including at least $50 million to upgrade the electricity grid at Southern University. The Regents are planning to ask for $702 million in next year’s budget to start addressing the problem, Haley Miller reports for The Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate:
Regents members and higher education leaders have described the maintenance backlog as a pressing issue that affects all students across Louisiana — and the state’s ability to retain them. “Our customers are the students,” Board of Regents member David Aubrey said. “We have to be more customer-centric. The students, they’re mobile now. They have a dollar amount. Other states are trying to take our students.”
Food security and early childhood
Food insecurity is a serious problem that is getting worse, as federal cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program take root in Louisiana and across the country. It is especially serious for families with young children, who need access to nutritious food to reach their full potential. LaMonika Jones of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) recently spoke with the Harvard Center on Developing Child about the ways that SNAP cuts affect different programs:
It will have an impact on households—but it will also have reverberating impacts on our entire system. For example, if someone diagnosed with type 2 diabetes is unable to modify their diet because they don’t have access to nutritious food items, we’re going to see health care costs go up. We’ll see more folks struggling to manage various conditions. More kids will show up to school and childcare on empty bellies, which can affect learning. Our schools will need more funding to provide breakfast, lunch, and snacks during the day. And there will be an increased need for charitable food organizations to try to fill the gap. We’ll see a greater strain on our food system that is just impossible to make up for.
“Trust the system”
Louisiana law is designed to honor and protect victims of crime. But sometimes the system fails at a most basic task: informing survivors of domestic violence when their abusers are released from prison or jail. That’s what happened to Tanja M. Davis of New Orleans, who recently detailed her experience in a guest column for The Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate:
Who was responsible for updating my stay-away order? Me. Making sure the assistant district attorney knew the offender had been released? Me. Finding and contacting his parole officer? Me. Contacting the parole victim advocate? Me. Trying to understand which agency is responsible for what? Me. At some point, we have to ask why a person who has already survived violence is expected to become the project manager of her own protection. Louisiana promises victims rights. But rights that require victims to understand a maze of agencies, forms, registration systems and legal terminology are not equally accessible to everyone.
Number of the Day
114,655 – Number of Louisianans who cast ballots Tuesday on the first day of early voting, the third-highest since 2008. Turnout was especially high among Black voters, who comprised 31.7% of the total. (Source: The Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate)