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Dismantling Inequality and
Building Economic Resilience
As the New
York Times editorial board writes in a new series on inequality and a
post-COVID economy, “the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare once again
the incomplete nature of the American project—the great distance
between the realities of life and death in the United States and the
values enunciated in its founding documents.” This crisis has held a
mirror to our patchwork health care system, labor market, and social
safety net. The reflection captures a familiar truth:
People
of color,
women, and low-income
workers are
bearing the brunt of our national suffering. In a statement this week,
progressive organization leaders—including Roosevelt President &
CEO Felicia Wong—called on Congress to act. “We urge Congress to move
quickly to pass additional legislation adhering to . . . principles to
prioritize aiding families and communities, especially Black and brown
people who are disproportionately harmed by both the public health and
economic crises, and making the structural changes needed to make our
economy more resilient in the long term.” Read
more.
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Hidden rules of race:
Black Americans have faced alarmingly disproportionate rates
of infection
and hospitalization—in
part, early findings show, because doctors are less
likely to refer them for testing. As Roosevelt
Managing Director of Communications Kendra Bozarth and Groundwork
Collaborative Deputy Executive Director Angela Hanks explain in
Ms. Magazine, housing discrimination, environmental racism,
and employment
discrimination have put Black women at particular
risk. “It’s often said that when white America gets a cold, Black
America gets the flu,” they write. “But that is not simply natural
law; it is the direct result of policy choices that allow such an
injustice to persist.” Read
on.
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Another angle: “After the pandemic is
conquered, we’ll still face two other crises: our inequality crisis
and our climate crisis,” Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz
writes for the American Prospect. “Addressing each of these
will require significant increases in government spending . . . If we
had to have a larger deficit to save the planet, the choice should be
a no-brainer. But moving towards a greener economy, even financed by
deficits, will lead us to a more robust and more innovative
economy—and as we’ve learned time and time again, that could even lead
to lower deficit.” Read
more.
 The Unemployment Crisis
The 17
million unemployment claims filed in the last
month have pushed the national unemployment rate to heights unseen
since the Great Depression. As Roosevelt Fellow Brishen Rogers writes
for Boston Review, “the pandemic is highlighting the
fragility of our labor markets just as much as the fragility of our
public health and welfare systems. In the short term we’ll need to
focus on providing health care, income support, and other needed goods
and services to all. But as we take the economy out of its induced
coma, we’ll also have to address more fundamental questions: What
kinds of jobs do we want and need? What sorts of labor markets and
other policies can deliver them? And at the most basic level, how do
we want our state, society, and economy to relate to one
another?” Read
more and watch Roosevelt Director of Progressive
Thought Mike Konczal and Community Change President Dorian
Warren make
meaning of the unemployment numbers.
- Remote inequality: “A month into the COVID-19
pandemic, many Americans are adjusting to the new routine of working
from home. But not all workers have this option,” Roosevelt Fellows
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Suresh Naidu write in a Washington
Post op-ed (co-written with Adam Reich and Patrick Youngblood).
“That is especially true for the low-wage, service-sector workers
responsible for providing the food and basic home necessities needed
to keep society going. A recent Pew Research Center poll found
that 73 percent of working-age adults with a
postgraduate education said they had worked from home because of the
virus, while only 22 percent of those with a high school degree or
less reported the same.” Read
on.
 Health Care Is a Public
Good
“There are many reasons the US
health care system is so ill-equipped to handle a crisis of this
magnitude. One of them is the decades-long trend of hospital mergers
and closures that have reduced access to care in communities across
the nation,” Roosevelt Director of Health Equity Andrea Flynn and
Institute for Local Self-Reliance Senior Researcher Ron Knox write for
the Washington
Post. “Hospital mergers
and closures have contributed to the reduction in the number of
hospital
beds in the United
States, from around 1.5 million in 1975 to just more than 900,000 in
2017 . . . A broader lesson we should take from this moment is that
public health is—as most other countries in the world believe—a public
good, and public goods require broad public investments.”
Read
on.
- A state solution: “To face the coronavirus
crisis head on, state governments must use their powers to get masks
and other personal protective equipment (PPE) to the doctors and
nurses that need them the most. As a first step, state governments
should institute voluntary PPE buyback programs without delay. To pay
for the policy, state governments can use some of the $150 billion the
recent stimulus package gave them,” Roosevelt Fellow Jacob Robbins
argues in a CNN opinion piece.
Read
more.
 Just Send
Checks
“. . . at the moment,
the US economy is threatened not just by the coronavirus, but also by
the American obsession with making sure that people don’t end up with
more than they deserve,” Roosevelt Fellow Mehrsa Baradaran
writes
for The Atlantic. “The CARES Act—the $2 trillion relief bill that Congress
recently passed—promises one-time payments of up to $1,200 to most
American adults. It also includes higher benefits for millions of
people who suddenly find themselves unemployed. Yet aid to individuals
makes up only about a quarter of the relief package . . . Unlike poor
people, corporations are not punished for failing to save their
money.” Next week, a new Roosevelt report from Baradaran will explore
why only a redesigned financial system can achieve true financial
inclusion and equity.
 How Regulatory Review
Can Help Respond to Existential Threats
Too often,
institutional roadblocks hinder adequate federal responses to
structural emergencies like the COVID-19 crisis. In a new report for
the Great Democracy Initiative, Roosevelt Fellow Todd Tucker and
Rajesh D. Nayak—a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard
Law School—suggest a novel solution: restructuring the Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Learn
more about the little-known government agency
and read
the full report here.
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