Inflation may have dipped below 3% for the first time since March 2021, but food prices still remain much higher than pre-pandemic levels. These stubbornly high costs are leading many state leaders to eliminate or reduce sales taxes on groceries. Route Fifty’s Elizabeth Daigneau reports:
Most states have already done away with a tax on groceries—at least at the state level. With the legislation in Oklahoma and Illinois, now only 10 states impose a grocery tax. That number could soon be down to seven as Idaho is considering eliminating its 6% grocery tax in the 2025 legislative session, and voters in Utah and South Dakota will decide in November whether to get rid of their 3% and 4.2%, respectively, grocery taxes.
Louisiana could go in the opposite direction. The state’s constitution currently exempts groceries, prescription medicines and home utilities from sales taxes. But those sales tax exemptions could present an inviting target for conservatives as they look for revenue to offset the massive cuts in corporate and personal income taxes they are proposing.
Broadband expansion will be a game changer
Louisiana is set to use $1.36 billion in new federal funding to expand broadband internet access to 140,000 locations across the state. A Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate editorial explains the game-changing effects this effort will have:
This will impact everyone from kids in school to remote workers. It will enable businesses to fully and efficiently participate in the digital economy. It will allow community institutions to avail themselves of the best information and systems modern technology has to offer. Gov. Jeff Landry and U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy project that GUMBO 2.0 will create 8,000 to 10,000 jobs and generate $2 billion to $3 billion in new revenue for Louisiana companies.
Banning CRT could hinder environmental justice
There’s a growing effort in some states, including Louisiana, to stymie discussions of systemic racism in classrooms and other public venues. At the heart of the controversy is critical race theory (CRT), the study of how public policy and laws perpetuate systemic racism. Brookings’ Keon L. Gilbert and Calvin Bell explain how banning CRT could hinder the pursuit of environmental justice for historically marginalized communities of color.
CRT helps to explain why policies and legal strategies have been used to expose communities of color to polluted landscapes and why predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods benefit from environmental protections and amenities. Communities of color and lower-income communities often find themselves without the same levels of political capital compared to white and affluent communities, contributing to the concentration of many sources of pollution (e.g., manufacturing waste, hog farms, municipal landfills, etc.). Recognizing the role of legal strategies and policies is critical to understanding how environmental racism operates.
The benefits of improving teacher diversity
Public schools around the country are struggling to find quality teachers to fill their classrooms. The teachers that remain in classrooms don’t always look like their students. While almost half of K-12 students were Black, Hispanic or Asian-American Pacific Islander in 2023, only a quarter of teachers identified in the same way. A new blog from the Economic Policy Institute explains how same-race teachers can improve education outcomes and help address teacher shortages.
Cheng (2017) finds that increasing the representation of Black teachers “even by a single percentage point” is associated with lower suspension rates among Black high school students. … Moreover, same-race teachers are shown to improve test scores at magnitudes that could potentially help close the Black-white achievement gap. … Taken together, this array of benefits for students of same-race teacher matches underscores the importance of recruiting more teachers of color as part of any effort to address the national teacher shortage and reduce racial disparities in academic outcomes
Number of the Day
$1.14 trillion – Total credit card balances in the United States, up 5.8% from last year. (Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York)