Economic Resources
Economic Insecurity
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
America Has Turned Its Back on Its Poorest Families (behind paywall), Ezra Klein
The expanded child tax credit. It gave parents $3,000 for every child age 6 to 17 and $3,600 for every child under age 6. There were no strings attached. It was just money. It could be used for child care, for food, for clothes, for anything. It treated parents, even poor parents, as the experts on their family’s finances, a quietly radical idea in American social policy. It was a huge experiment, it was studied exhaustively, and we can now say this definitively: It worked...
The Biden administration added an extension in Build Back Better, but that bill died, and there’s no immediate hope of revival. Once again, we are accepting our prepandemic levels of child poverty as a permanent feature of our democracy.
And so the Biden administration’s single biggest policy success has turned, for now, into a signal political failure.
READ MORE (behind paywall)
Getting Old Is a Crisis More and More Americans Can’t Afford, Michelle Cottle.
“Growing old is an increasingly expensive privilege often requiring supports and services that, whether provided at home or in a facility, can overwhelm all but the wealthiest seniors. With Americans living longer and aging baby boomers flooding the system, the financial strain is becoming unsustainable…” (read more)
Restaurants Will Never Be the Same. They Shouldn’t Be, Peter Hoffman.
“Few business sectors have experienced such violent swings between feast and famine in the last year as restaurants. Early in the pandemic, there was a demand problem: Few to no customers were willing to take the risk of eating in a dining room. Today, people are going out to eat again, and amid overwhelming demand, there’s a supply issue: A serious labor shortage confronts restaurants across the country.
As a chef and former restaurant owner, I know that the root causes of this predicament date to well before the pandemic. To address it, restaurants must fundamentally change. Diners must, too. (read more)
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Originally published on The New York Times, 8/10/21
The Insecure American, Jack Beatty.
“Most Americans today are on an unstable financial footing. Could this become the next hotbutton political issue?”
The Rotting of the Republican Mind, David Brooks.
“…And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.”