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HOW ANTI-WORKER POLICIES, CRONY CAPITALISM, AND PRIVATIZATION KEEP
THE SOUTH LOCKED OUT OF SHARED PROSPERITY  
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Nina Mast
June 18, 2025
Economic Policy Institute
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_ Southern lawmakers have neglected basic worker protections and
disinvested in social safety net programs while offering hefty
subsidies to corporations, privatizing public goods, and giving the
wealthy big tax breaks. _

, Economic Policy Institute

 

Key findings

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Many states across the South use an economic development model that
prioritizes the wealthy and corporations at the expense of workers and
their families and fosters precarity to maintain racial and
class-based hierarchies.

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Southern families face high rates of economic
insecurity, and underinvestment in health, child care, and
transportation infrastructure blocks working families from full
participation in the economy.

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Southern states have some of the weakest wage theft and paid sick
leave laws in the country and are less likely than other states to
enforce laws that do exist to protect workers.

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The racist attitudes that inspired discriminatory social welfare
programs 90 years ago persist today. These dynamics are especially
acute in the South, where the programs are less generous and reach
fewer eligible families.

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Many Southern lawmakers have repeatedly rejected efforts to expand
Medicaid in their states, which has led to thousands of premature
deaths and other health and economic consequences. And Southern
states account for six of the 10 states nationwide with the highest
uninsured rates.

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In 11 Southern states, the poorest 20% of residents pay more in sales
taxes alone than the top 1% of residents pay in all state and local
taxes combined. 

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High poverty rates, regressive tax structures, and a failure to tax
corporate income means that Southern states collect much
less revenue than other states and are highly dependent
on the federal government.

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In recent years, Southern states have given away billions of dollars
in public revenue in the form of direct subsidies and tax breaks to
corporations for projects that often do not benefit communities.

Why this matters

When policies in the South fail to raise adequate revenue to pay
for public goods and services, these same harmful
policies are leveraged as “the cure,” creating a vicious
cycle that keeps millions of Southerners locked into poverty and out
of the benefits from economic growth.

How to fix it

The Southern economic development model is the result of policy
choices that can and must be undone for the South to thrive. The
racism and anti-worker sentiments that have influenced economic
policymaking in the South for generations must be uprooted and
replaced by new policies centered on empowering and investing in
workers, families, and communities. 

Full Report

The central function of government should be to protect people from
harm, exploitation, and abuse. Yet on this core task, many Southern
state governments have performed abhorrently—largely by design.
EPI’s _Rooted in Racism and Economic Exploitation_ series1
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shown how for most of the past two centuries, Southern state
governments have embraced an economic development strategy—the
Southern economic development model—designed to undermine job
quality and suppress worker power, particularly for Black and brown
workers. The model aims to maintain a pool of exploitable, available
labor, and preserve the racial and economic hierarchies established
during slavery. This strategy has led to poor job quality for Southern
workers of all backgrounds; economic growth that has underperformed
much of the rest of the country; persistently higher poverty rates;
and the lowest economic mobility of any U.S. region (Childers 2024a,
2024b, 2024c, 2025).

These poor economic outcomes are both a consequence and an instrument
of the Southern economic development model. By generating precarity,
the Southern model weakens workers’ ability to reject low-quality
jobs. Workers in poverty typically have few, if any, assets on which
to rely in the event of a lost job. They have fewer resources with
which to move to new areas and seek out better job options. They are
more likely to face health challenges and will have a harder time
fulfilling any care needs—either for themselves or a family member.

It should come as no surprise then that one component of the Southern
model has been to do as little as possible to protect workers’
well-being on the job, in their lives outside of work, and the lives
and well-being of their families. In this report, we describe how
Southern state lawmakers have consistently made policy choices
weakening enforcement of workplace wage, hour, and safety laws. They
have sought to limit workers’ and families’ access to social
safety net programs, leading to fewer families receiving the aid for
which they are eligible, and providing notably ungenerous benefits to
those who do receive benefits. Southern policymakers have also failed
to invest in child care access, quality, and affordability; refused to
protect renters and homeowners or provide those facing financial
hardship with relief; and have deprioritized safe, reliable, and
climate-friendly transportation policies while giving away public
funds to corporate polluters.

Instead of investing in essential public goods and services that would
allow communities to achieve a better standard of living, proponents
of the Southern economic development model have sought to eliminate or
block regulations that govern the private sector and protect workers,
to reduce taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and to shrink the
functions of the public sector—replacing them with private,
for-profit services. The supports that Southern governments do provide
are frequently geared toward businesses—large economic development
packages, often with few strings attached—that have limited public
benefits while reducing funding for essential services like public
education.

This report highlights how Southern lawmakers have wielded the power
of the state to protect and support businesses and the wealthy at the
expense of working people and families. It covers many issue areas,
including labor standards enforcement, environmental regulations,
taxation and public spending, public education, and social safety net
programs. As described throughout this series, these policy choices
are often rooted in anti-Black racism and the desire to subjugate and
control workers of color economically, politically, and socially.

Southern lawmakers have disinvested in labor standards enforcement,
leaving workers at higher risk of abuse by employers

When it comes to protecting workers from having their wages stolen by
employers, from being forced to choose between working while sick or
going without pay, and from enduring other harms at work, Southern
states have some of the weakest laws in the country and are less
likely than other states to enforce those laws that do exist to
protect workers.

According to 50-state analysis of state minimum wage law enforcement
capacity, penalties for noncompliance, and the availability of
additional legal remedies for victims of wage theft, Southern states
have most of the lowest rankings. Seven of the 10 worst states for the
enforcement of wage and hour laws are in the South: Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee are the six worst,
and North Carolina is #10. Mississippi has no wage and hour laws at
all, Alabama only regulates child labor, and Florida—which has the
fifth weakest labor laws in the country—has no state Department of
Labor to investigate labor violations and enforce laws protecting
workers (Florida Policy Institute 2022; Galvin 2016).

A 2017 EPI analysis of wage theft in the 10 most populous
states—including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas—found
that workers were cheated out of $8 billion annually due to minimum
wage violations alone (Cooper and Kroeger 2017). In those four
Southern states, over 800,000 workers lost nearly $3 billion annually
due to minimum wage violations (see TABLE 1).2
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Table 1

Florida had the highest rate of minimum wage violations across the 10
most populous states with one-quarter of low-wage, minimum
wage-eligible workers in the state—over 400,000
workers—being underpaid. More than double this number of workers
(835,000) experience wage theft across these four states collectively.
Wage theft is rampant in these states in part because their
governments fail to regulate businesses and enforce the minimal labor
standards that do exist, whether local, state, or federal. States
with weaker labor laws tend to have higher rates of wage theft and
Southern states have some of the weakest labor laws in the country
(Galvin 2016).

Though state Departments of Labor and Attorneys General play an
important role in enforcement— their efforts accounted for around
19% of stolen wages recovered between 2017–2020—many Southern
states do not recover stolen wages on behalf of workers (Mangundayao
et al. 2021). Of the seven states that do not recover wages for
employees, six are Southern states. In Alabama, Delaware, Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, workers whose
wages are stolen must seek redress either through the federal U.S.
Department of Labor—which has just 611 wage and hour investigators
responsible for protecting workers in all 50 states and territories or
1 investigator for roughly 270,000 workers3
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through class action litigation—which more than half of workers are
barred from joining due to forced arbitration clauses in their
employment contracts (Barnes et al. 2025; Poydock and Zhang 2024).

Southern states that do conduct wage theft enforcement are chronically
understaffed. In Texas, for example, 80% of approved wage theft claims
from an 11-year period still had not been paid out three years later
(Galvin et al. 2023). Just as Southern lawmakers have vociferously
blocked efforts to strengthen labor standards such as the minimum
wage, paid sick leave, and workers’ organizing rights, they have
chosen to not dedicate public resources to policing bad employers.
They have prioritized businesses’ profit interests over workers’
right to be paid the wage they’ve earned and their ability to
enforce that right.

Rampant wage theft is an unsurprising outcome of an economic agenda
governed by low wages and anti-worker policies

Southerners are more likely than workers in other regions to be paid
low wages, a result, in part, of relentless opposition to higher
minimum wages by Southern lawmakers and their business allies. To take
just one example, a bill to increase the minimum wage in Georgia has
been repeatedly introduced since the federal minimum wage increased to
$7.25 in 2009. Yet over the past 16 years, lawmakers have repeatedly
failed to enact such legislation, leaving the statewide minimum stuck
at its 2001 rate of $5.15 (GSU 2012). Since Georgia’s minimum wage
remains $2.10 less than the federal minimum wage, most workers in
Georgia earn at least $7.25 an hour (because federal law preempts
lower state wage standards).

While the federal minimum wage is also far too low to support a basic
living standard for workers in 2025, Southern states are even further
behind. Only six Southern states and the District of Columbia have a
higher state minimum wage than the federal minimum—Arkansas,
Delaware, Florida, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia (EPI 2025b).
Arkansas and Florida only have higher minimum wages because their
residents voted to raise their statewide minimum wage through the
ballot measure process, not because state politicians chose to raise
wages for the lowest earners. This fact is not lost on Arkansas and
Florida’s lawmakers, who have used various tactics to block the will
of the voters. This year, Florida Republicans proposed a bill to let
employers ask young workers to “opt out” of the constitutionally
mandated minimum wage, and Arkansas lawmakers have passed a slate of
bills to make it more difficult for citizen-led ballot initiatives to
be considered (Rohrer 2025; Vrbin 2025).

When Southern localities have attempted to raise wages and workplace
standards in response to weak standards statewide, state legislatures
have frequently used harmful state preemption laws to block these
ordinances from taking effect. In the South, preemption has been used
as a means of entrenching white racial and economic supremacy against
the will of majority-Black or majority-brown cities and counties and
their elected officials. It is embedded in a long history of
anti-Black racism, and it is more common in the South than anywhere
else in the country (Blair et al. 2020). Additionally, in order to
maintain an unbalanced labor market and block workers from unionizing
to advocate for higher wages and better working conditions that unions
afford, Southern policymakers have implemented right-to-work policies
and bans on public-sector collective bargaining (Gould and Kimball
2015; Childers 2023; Morrissey and Sherer 2022).

Intentional disinvestment in public goods and services keeps workers
and families economically insecure

Anti-poverty programs and the social safety net were structured to
maintain racial hierarchy and economic precarity

Race is a social construct used to justify the subordination and
enslavement of Black people. Negative stereotypes associated with
Blackness—narratives of criminality, laziness, and immorality—were
fabricated to maintain racial hierarchy and exclusion (DiTomaso 2024;
Melson-Silimon, Spivey, and Skinner-Dorkenoo 2023). After slavery was
abolished, Black Americans were forced into menial, dangerous, and
low-paying jobs formerly dominated by enslaved labor: agricultural
work, domestic work, and other manual labor. Then, the jobs they were
segregated into were excluded from federal programs as a means of
blocking Black people from accessing these benefits.

The 1935 Social Security Act (SSA), which created a social insurance
program for workers after retirement and established Medicare,
unemployment insurance, and cash assistance for low-income families
(Aid to Dependent Children or ADC), excluded agricultural workers from
eligibility for these benefits. Since Black workers were
overrepresented in these jobs, the SSA served primarily to benefit
white workers in its initial decades and excluded Black workers until
key changes to the Act expanded its protections. To maintain racial
oppression, Southern members of Congress lobbied to allow states to
administer ADC themselves and to strip the SSA of a clause on ensuring
“a reasonable subsistence with health and decency” (Black and
Sprague 2017). Like SSA more broadly, the ADC program overwhelmingly
benefited white families (despite high rates of poverty among Black
families) and was structured to coerce Black families into accepting
low wages in farm work (Black and Sprague 2017). A 1987 House bill
proposed a national minimum benefit standard for AFDC, but the
legislation died in the Senate because Southern lawmakers opposed it
(Floyd and Pavetti 2022). 

Racist, anti-poor attitudes explain persistently low nutrition and
cash assistance benefits for Southerners

The racist attitudes that inspired racially discriminatory social
welfare programs 90 years ago persist today. For example, the public
greatly overestimates the share of Black people that receive welfare
benefits, and white people are less likely to support welfare programs
if they believe that a large share of recipients are Black (Akesson et
al. 2022). The intentionally stingy structure of public benefit
programs, particularly in the South, also persists. Though racist
attitudes are embedded in safety net programs across the U.S.,
Southern states have been particularly fervent in their disinvestment
in social programs that benefit low-income families and families of
color, reinforcing the harms of past policymaking. Of the 10 states
that spend the least revenue per capita on public welfare
expenditures, five are Southern: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South
Carolina, and Texas (Urban Institute 2022).

SNAP and Free School Lunch

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Special
Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
address food insecurity among low-income people and low-income
pregnant women and young children, respectively. SNAP is the largest
anti-hunger program nationwide, reaching 88% of eligible individuals
in fiscal year 2022 and an estimated 41 million people in an average
month in fiscal year 2024. However, participation rates are lower in
the South, and four states in the region are ranked in the bottom 10
for participation rates: Arkansas (59%), Mississippi (74%), Texas
(74%), and South Carolina (76%) (Cunnyngham 2025).

Despite already low participation in these programs amid considerable
need, Southern lawmakers have moved to limit SNAP further. Amid the
ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in 2022, six Southern states declined
additional SNAP benefits for their residents that the federal
government made available (Hernández 2022). Three of the four states
that proposed limiting access to SNAP in 2024 are in the South
(Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, and West Virginia) (Higham 2024). Many
of the proposals by Southern lawmakers to weaken SNAP are now being
copied by the Trump administration, which has threatened to make
drastic cuts to the SNAP program to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy
(Ross 2025). These cuts would have a devastating impact on millions of
families across the South that would go hungry if not for SNAP (Bergh
2025).

The National School Lunch Program is another federal food assistance
program, which provides free or reduced-cost meals to school children
across the country. During the pandemic, the federal government
reimbursed schools for the full price of school breakfast and lunch
for all students, regardless of income. The program was set to expire
at the end of June 2022 but was expanded through the summer months
thanks to the bipartisan Keep Kids Fed Act (Pérez and Fitzsimons
2022). Over two-thirds (29) of the 42 House Republicans who voted
against the budget-neutral bill to expand free school lunches
represent Southern states (U.S. Clerk 2022). Since the expanded
program ended in September 2022, school districts have struggled to
fill the gap between what the federal government will pay for meals
and the true cost of providing them to students. School nutrition
directors in the Southeast cited food, labor, _and_ equipment costs
as a “significant challenge” at statistically significantly higher
rates than the overall rates (the only region to do so) (School
Nutrition Association 2025).

Cash assistance

Federal cash assistance programs date back to 1935, with the creation
of Aid to Dependent Children, later renamed Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (AFDC). From the very beginning, this program
systematically excluded or discriminated against Black women and other
women of color (Floyd et al. 2021). Racial discrimination in and
exclusion from past programs endures today in the form of significant
racial disparities in access to Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF). TANF was the result of a bipartisan “welfare
reform” effort that replaced AFDC in 1996. The new TANF program
drastically restructured the funding, the generosity of benefits, and
the requirements for families to receive them (ASPE n.d.). As a
result, TANF reaches far fewer families in poverty than its
predecessor. Over the last several decades, both the share of eligible
families that receive TANF benefits _and _the maximum value of those
benefits have declined across the country, but this decline is most
severe in Southern states with large Black populations. Eligible Black
children are less likely to receive TANF benefits than white children,
and Black families are more likely to live in states where benefits
are the lowest (Shrivastava and Thompson 2022). 

In 2021, only 20.7% of eligible families received TANF benefits,
compared with 69.2% of families in 1997—the year TANF replaced AFDC
(Crouse 2024). Recipiency rates of TANF benefits among eligible
families in the South are often even lower. Among the 17 states where
fewer than 10% of eligible families actually received TANF benefits in
2022 and 2023, 10 are in the South, and six Southern states provide
TANF benefits to fewer than 5% of eligible families (see FIGURE
A) (Bowden, Azevedo-McCaffrey, and Manansala 2025). These 17 states
are home to 41% of the nation’s Black children, compared with only
28% of white children (Shrivastava and Thompson 2022).

Figure A

Southern states have also had the lowest maximum benefit levels
throughout the history of AFDC and TANF (Floyd and Pavetti 2022). In
recognition that benefit levels are far too low to keep up with the
rising cost of living, 21 states and D.C. recently raised benefit
levels, but only four of those states (plus D.C.) are in the South. As
a result, Southern states, which already had the lowest benefits in
the country, are now falling further behind. Among the 17 states where
the maximum benefit remains less than 20% of the poverty line, 11 are
in the South. And Southern states occupy seven of the 10 worst
rankings for benefits as a share of the federal poverty level
(see FIGURE B). In 2023, the maximum benefit for a family of three
was $204 in Arkansas, compared with $1,243 in New Hampshire
(Azevedo-McCaffrey and Aguas 2025).

Figure B

Additionally, because TANF is a block grant program, states can divert
the funds to a broad range of uses beyond cash assistance for families
with low incomes. TANF funds are misused in states across the country,
but Southern states facing budget crises have shown a particular
tendency to redirect TANF for other programs. For example, Louisiana
spends much of its TANF grant on college scholarships, often for
students whose families aren’t eligible for cash assistance. Georgia
spends nearly half of its TANF funds on the child welfare system
(Bergal 2020). And Mississippi illegally spent $77 million in TANF
funds; $1.1 million went to former NFL player Brett Favre for speeches
he never made and $5 million was used for a volleyball stadium at his
alma mater (and where his daughter played volleyball) (Levenson and
Gallagher 2022). In Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, and Texas,
the _majority_ of TANF funds are neither spent on meeting
families’ basic needs nor on connecting TANF recipients to work
opportunities, the two main goals of the program (Azevedo-McCaffrey
and Safawi 2022).

Lacking adequate public supports, Southern families face economic
insecurity at high rates

Because the social safety net across the South was intentionally
designed to be weak, families across the region face high poverty
rates and struggle to reach and maintain a basic standard of economic
security (Childers 2025). Economic insecurity can be measured across
many dimensions, but this report focuses on food and housing
insecurity since food and shelter are two of the most basic human
needs.

The South has the highest rate of food insecurity

In 2023, 18 million households nationwide had limited or uncertain
access to adequate food, and food insecurity was on the rise. Over a
third (34.7%) of U.S. households with children headed by a single
woman experienced food insecurity, and 7.2 million children lived in
households where at least one child was food insecure (Rabbitt et al.
2024). Black households experienced food insecurity at three times the
rate of white households, and Hispanic households experienced food
insecurity at more than double the rate of white households
(Coleman-Jensen et al. 2021).

The South has the highest rate of food insecurity of any U.S.
region—in 2023, nearly 15% of Southern households were facing food
insecurity. All U.S. states with food insecurity rates that are
statistically significantly higher than the national average are in
the South: Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South
Carolina, and Texas. Nearly every state with a higher-than-average
rate of food insecurity is in the South, both prior to and after the
COVID-19 pandemic (Rabbitt et al. 2024).

Renters and homeowners alike struggle to afford housing

Southerners are burdened by high housing costs and face high rates of
evictions and foreclosures. Yet Southern lawmakers have failed to
invest in affordable housing policies and protections for renters and
homeowners. High-cost states like New York and California are commonly
cited for having unaffordable housing. However, low incomes in the
South have led to significant housing instability for renters across
the region as costs rise and demand outpaces supply. Over the past
decade, the states that have experienced the largest losses in
low-rent units include Southern states that were previously considered
affordable but have experienced increased rental demand, such as
Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. In three Southern states (Florida,
Louisiana, and Texas), over half of renters are cost-burdened, with
metro areas most heavily impacted (JCHS 2024a). Of the 10 metro areas
with the highest share of cost burdened renters, six are in the South
(five are in Florida, and one is in Texas) (JCHS 2024b).

Southern states have fewer tenant protections than other states and
implemented fewer emergency protections for renters amid the COVID-19
pandemic. Nine Southern states received a rating of one star or less
on the Eviction Lab’s COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard, which
evaluated states’ strategies for ensuring stable housing for their
residents. Arkansas, Georgia, and Oklahoma did not
implement _any_ statewide eviction moratorium during the pandemic
(Eviction Lab 2021). States with tenant protections have lower
eviction filing rates and reduced racial disparities in evictions than
states with few or none (Gartland 2022). Southern cities have the
highest eviction filing rates of any cities tracked, with Richmond,
Virginia; Greenville, South Carolina; and Memphis, Tennessee, at the
top of the list (Eviction Lab 2025).

Housing assistance programs are woefully inadequate

Housing assistance programs—like the Housing Choice Voucher program
(the nation’s largest)—are not entitlements, meaning they are not
available to all who are eligible for them. As a result, three in four
people who are eligible for housing vouchers never receive them, and
those who do obtain them face long waiting periods before receiving
assistance. Of the nine states plus D.C. where wait times to receive
vouchers exceed three years, six are in the South: Alabama, D.C.,
Maryland, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia. Two-thirds of households on
waiting lists for housing assistance at large housing agencies are
Black (Acosta and Gartland 2021).

Homeownership, an important wealth-building tool, is out of reach

Homeownership is most families’ primary source of wealth, and this
is particularly true for Black and brown families. Yet homeownership
is becoming increasingly inaccessible, due to the legacies of
exclusionary housing policy, limited housing stock, and—more
recently—the influence of real estate investment. In recent years,
these investment companies have significantly increased their presence
in the housing market, targeting areas of the country with fast
population growth and weak tenant protections.

According to a 2025 report, private equity firms now own about 10% of
all apartment units in the U.S., and more than half of private
equity-owned units are located in five states, four of which are in
the South (California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas).
Among the 10 metropolitan areas with the largest number of private
equity-owned units, 8 are in the South (Ash 2025). Black neighborhoods
have been heavily targeted; nearly a third of home purchases in 2021
were to investors, compared with 12% in non-Black majority
neighborhoods (Schaul and O’Connell 2022). Institutional investors
tend to either flip homes or rent them out, decreasing the housing
supply available to individual would-be home buyers while increasing
rental costs for would-be renters (NLIHC 2022). Nine states, including
North Carolina and Tennessee, have joined a federal civil lawsuit
accusing the Texas tech company RealPage of illegally fixing rent
prices to reduce competition and boost landlord profits. Florida,
Georgia, and Texas, which also have large shares of private
equity-owned apartment units, have not joined the lawsuit (U.S. et al.
v. RealPage 2024).

Even for Southerners for whom homeownership is within reach, their
access is more precarious compared with other regions. Foreclosure
rates are higher in the South than any other region and have remained
high in the wake of the pandemic. In 2024, four of the 10 states with
the highest foreclosure rates were Southern states: Florida (3), South
Carolina (5), Maryland (7), and Delaware (8) (Von Pohlmann 2024). Yet
Southern lawmakers have done little to provide relief that would allow
homeowners to stay in their homes. There are five states with no
income-based policies to provide property tax affordability and they
all are in the South—Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, South
Carolina, and Texas (Davis and Samms 2023).

Underinvestment in health, child care, and transportation
infrastructure block working families from full participation in the
economy

Affordable and accessible health care, child care, and transportation
infrastructure are essential public goods that support families’
well-being and workers’ ability to take and hold a job. Expanding
health care access and affordability allows people to get necessary
care to live and work. High-quality, accessible, and affordable child
care enables parents to remain in the labor market while their
children learn and grow. And transportation infrastructure—e.g.,
roads, bridges, and public transit systems—is critical to our
physical and economic mobility, enabling people to get to work or
school and buy goods and services that support the local economy. But
just as they have opted to not invest in safety net programs, Southern
lawmakers have similarly not prioritized investments in the region’s
care and physical infrastructure—policy decisions that further
exacerbate poverty and economic insecurity, deepen disparities by
race/ethnicity and gender, and prevent Southern families from
thriving.

Southern lawmakers have resisted opportunities to expand health care
access through the Affordable Care Act

The 2010 federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a
comprehensive health care reform law designed to increase health
insurance access and affordability, shift the focus of health care
from treatment to prevention, and improve the efficiency of our health
care system. Though the ACA is particularly beneficial to states with
limited health care access and poor health conditions—as is the case
across the South—Southern lawmakers led initial opposition to the
ACA and have remained resistant to implementing the law.

In 2010, the state of Florida sued the federal government over the
ACA, arguing that two key provisions in the law were unconstitutional.
Among the 25 states across the country that joined Florida in the
lawsuit, six were Southern states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana,
Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. Virginia filed its own lawsuit
in opposition to the law. The rest of the South, except for Delaware,
Maryland, and the District of Columbia, took no position—they did
not oppose the law, but they also did not support it (KFF 2012). In
2018, 18 state attorneys general and two governors—10 of them from
Southern states—sued over the law’s constitutionality again (CBPP
2021). Despite years of vocal opposition from Southern lawmakers,
particularly in Texas and Florida, as well as President Trump’s
promises to dismantle it, the ACA is increasingly popular in these
states (Sanger-Katz 2023). In 2025, an all-time record of 24.2 million
people signed up for an ACA plan, and enrollment has tripled since
2020 in six Southern states won by Trump in 2024, five of which had
sued to block the implementation of the law (Ortaliza, Lo, and Cox
2025).

Failure to expand Medicaid has led to premature death for Southerners
and hurt the South’s economy

Under the Affordable Care Act, states can expand Medicaid health
benefits eligibility to nonelderly people with incomes below 138% of
the federal poverty level, and the federal government will cover 90%
or more of associated costs. Over 3.5 million fewer people would be
uninsured if all states adopted Medicaid expansion, gains that would
primarily benefit Black people, young adults, and women (Buettgens and
Ramchandani 2022).

Though expanding Medicaid eligibility enjoys widespread public support
and provides substantial health and economic benefits to states at
very little cost, many Southern lawmakers have repeatedly rejected
efforts to expand Medicaid in their states. Of the 10 states that have
refused to expand Medicaid eligibility, seven are in the South:
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and
Texas (KFF 2025). Non-expansion states nationwide and in the South
have some of the highest uninsured rates in the country. Six of the 10
states nationwide with the highest uninsured rates are Southern
states, and four of those Southern states have not expanded Medicaid.
The District of Columbia is the only Southern jurisdiction with one of
the 10 lowest uninsured rates (see FIGURE C).

Figure C

By refusing to accept the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, Southern
lawmakers are denying tremendous welfare and economic benefits to
their states. Medicaid expansion improves access to care, health
outcomes, and financial security. When low-income adults have access
to insurance, they are more likely to get regular preventive
screenings, treatment for chronic conditions, and mental health and
substance use disorder care.

Medicaid expansion has saved tens of thousands of lives and has also
reduced racial and ethnic disparities in health insurance coverage and
access to care. In states that have expanded Medicaid, low-income
adults have less medical debt and better access to credit, and are
less likely to face eviction (Harker and Sharer 2024). Medicaid
expansion also has implications for the broader economy of a state,
including boosted federal revenues to the state and millions more in
state and local taxes generated through increased economic activity
(Ku and Brantley 2021). Despite arguments by critics that Medicaid
expansion disincentivizes work, multiple studies have found little to
no reduction in labor force participation because of expansion.4
[[link removed]] Conversely,
Medicaid is an important support for working people—particularly
those with disabilities or chronic conditions—because it makes it
easier for recipients to look for a job, work, and do a better job at
work (Harker and Sharer 2024). Disabled adults are significantly more
likely to be employed in expansion states versus non-expansion states
and, as shown in FIGURE D, Southern states have some of the highest
disability rates.

The health care sector is a major employer across the country and in
the South. Twelve Southern states have a higher-than-average share of
the population employed as health care practitioners and technicians,5
[[link removed]] the
majority of whom are employed in hospitals (BLS 2023). Hospitals in
states that expanded Medicaid—especially those in rural areas—have
fared better than those in non-expansion states, as increased insured
rates lead to Medicaid covering care costs that would otherwise be
uncompensated (Broaddus 2017).

The health and economic benefits of Medicaid expansion are numerous,
but so are the costs of failure to expand. Between 2014 and
2017—just three years—an estimated nearly 12,000 older adults in
the South died prematurely because of their states’ failure to
expand Medicaid (Broaddus and Aron-Dine 2019). States that have not
expanded Medicaid have experienced large increases in hospital
closures, particularly in rural areas (Lindrooth et al. 2018). In the
South, which is the most rural region of the country, a single rural
hospital may be the only accessible point of health care for an entire
community and its single largest employer. The closure of rural
hospitals leads to increased transit times to access care—including
for life-threatening emergencies—as well as losses in jobs and
population that hinder the community’s ability to raise revenue and
attract employers (Wishner et al. 2016). Of the 148 rural hospitals
that have closed since 2011 (the year after the ACA was passed), just
over half (76) of those closures occurred in the 10 states that have
not expanded Medicaid, and 66 of those closures occurred in Southern
non-expansion states. Nearly half of all Southern hospital closures
occurred in just Tennessee and Texas (UNC Sheps 2023).

The failure to expand Medicaid has also led to worsening economic
disparities. In states that have not expanded Medicaid, medical debt
has become more concentrated in low-income communities in these
states. While Southerners were more likely to have medical debt prior
to the ACA, the failure to expand Medicaid widened debt disparities
between the South and other regions. A recent nationwide analysis of
credit scores found that the South had the lowest credit scores of any
region, and that the share of residents with overdue medical debt was
the strongest predictor of these scores (Van Dam 2023).

Refusal to invest in child care exacerbates economic insecurity for
Southern families and providers alike

States in the South and across the country are facing a child care
crisis, both for families who cannot afford the steep cost or for whom
there are few available child care providers, as well as for early
educators who are frequently paid poverty wages to provide this
essential care. In most of the country, monthly child care is more
expensive than housing, and in 38 states and D.C., child care costs
more than public college tuition. Monthly infant care costs range from
$572 in Mississippi to as high as $2,363 in D.C. Though costs are much
lower in Mississippi than D.C., the impacts are felt similarly because
household incomes are much lower in Mississippi. A median family with
children in Mississippi would have to spend 10% of their income on
child care, compared with 11.8% in D.C. (EPI 2025a).

During the pandemic, the federal government invested $24 billion into
child care stabilization through the American Rescue Plan Act, an
unprecedented lifeline to the child care sector that supported
hundreds of thousands of providers and nearly 10 million children (ACF
2022). As these federal investments phased out, some states sought to
fill the gap with state funding for child care (as in Vermont) or with
tax credit expansions to pay for child care (as in Colorado, New York,
and Utah) (Cohen 2023; Butkus 2024).

However, lawmakers in the South have deprioritized bills to address
the child care crisis. In Florida, Kentucky, and West Virginia,6
[[link removed]] bills
to address child care affordability failed this legislative session—
even though capping child care costs would boost labor forced
participation, increasing these states’ economies by billions of
dollars per year (EPI 2025a). And in Texas, despite a record state
budget surplus of $32.7 billion in 2023 and advocacy by nearly three
dozen child welfare organizations, state lawmakers declined to spend
just $2.3 billion (less than a tenth of the surplus) to keep child
care providers afloat amid the expiration of federal COVID-19 relief
funds (Dey 2023). Instead, the state spent over a third of the surplus
on new property tax cuts, which inherently benefit the wealthiest
property owners.

Child care affordability is often measured based on the share of
family income spent on a certain type of care—often infant care,
since this is the expensive type of care. Though the share of families
that can afford infant care is higher in the South than in other
regions because infant care costs are generally lower, this
affordability is based on median family income across all family types
in aggregate, with most families with children comprising a two-parent
married couple. This affordability calculation masks disparities in
child care affordability between single- and two-parent households: As
unaffordable as child care is for typical families, it is even more
out of reach for single-parent households. In Southern states, an
average of 38% of children live in a single-parent household—the
highest nationwide (Annie E. Casey Foundation 2023). Single-parent
households have a much higher cost burden, spending an average of
three times as much for child care as married-couple families (35% of
their income, compared with 10% for a married couple) (CCAoA 2025).

In the South, many states that pay the lowest minimum wages allowed by
federal law, lag in workers’ rights, and refuse to expand Medicaid
now also ban or severely limit abortion access (Banerjee 2022) while
failing to take action to make child care affordable. For low-income
women and women of color in states that have not prioritized health
and economic security for children and families, forced childbirth and
associated long-term, steep child-rearing costs will only exacerbate
poor economic and health outcomes for both parents and their children,
as well as racial and gender disparities in those outcomes.

Existing transportation infrastructure is inadequate for drivers,
riders, and pedestrians

Safe, reliable, and affordable transportation is another huge factor
affecting people’s access to good jobs (and the quality of their
commute), access to essential goods and services, and overall
well-being. It is also a major category of spending for U.S.
households, accounting for 17% of annual household expenditures—more
than every category except housing (BLS 2024a). At the same time, the
U.S. transportation system faces major challenges, including high
rates of injuries and fatalities, increasing roadway congestion, aging
infrastructure, poor public transit access, and the need to reduce
emissions in the face of climate change. These challenges have
significant consequences for the U.S. population. Transportation
incidents are the leading cause of death for U.S. workers, nearly 40%
of major roads are in poor or mediocre conditions, transportation is
the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and 45% of
people in the U.S. have no access to public transportation (BLS 2024b;
TRIP 2022; EPA 2022; APTA n.d.).

One reason U.S. roads are in such disrepair is because of insufficient
state spending on road maintenance. When states do invest in
transportation infrastructure, they often use federal funding to build
new roads or expand existing ones instead of prioritizing road repair,
leaving existing roads in poor condition to worsen and creating new
unfunded maintenance liabilities. After the Obama administration
directed $47 billion for transportation projects in 2009, the share of
U.S. roads in poor condition increased as states—especially Southern
states—used the money for continued road expansion instead of road
repair. Of the eight states that spent at least 45% of highway capital
funds for roadway expansion (Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi,
Nevada, North Carolina, Texas, Utah), four are in the Southeast
(Bellis, Osborne, and Davis 2019). This pattern has continued with the
latest batch of federal infrastructure funding. The Biden
administration’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)
directed $643 billion for highways, roads, and bridges over five
years—the largest ever federal infusion for transportation. Yet
three years in, fully a quarter of the funds have been used to expand
highways, which will create new emissions equivalent to the operation
of 20 coal-fired power plants for a year. Of the 10 states spending
the most IIJA funding on highway expansion, six are in the South.
Meanwhile, of the 10 states spending the most IIJA funding on public
transit and passenger rail per capita, only D.C. is in the South
(Salerno 2024).

Public transit remains deprioritized in comparison with automobile
transit, even as the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while
expanding transit equity becomes more urgent. According to the
National Resources Defense Council, of the 10 states doing the least
to improve equity and climate outcomes in transportation, six are in
the South, and the Southeast ranked lowest of any region on its
commitments to these goals (Henningson 2025). In 2024, Georgia’s
governor, acknowledging “record job and population growth” in the
state, announced a $1.5 billion transportation funding plan to improve
and expand roads, highways, bridges, and freight infrastructure, but
did not dedicate any funding to public transit projects (Kemp 2024).
In fact, Georgia’s MARTA system is the only transportation agency in
operation that has never received any state funds (King 2023).

There are also substantial disparities in transportation access based
on race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and ability across the
country. Because of racial and ethnic income and wealth disparities,
workers of color are less likely to own a car and be more dependent on
public transit (Austin 2017). Yet due to legacies of segregation,
white flight and suburbanization, and corresponding disinvestment in
urban transit in favor of the federal highway system, Black workers,
other workers of color, and low-income people face worse transit
quality and longer commute times (Sánchez, Stolz, and Ma 2003;
National Equity Atlas 2019). They are also more likely to be killed in
traffic accidents while walking, cycling, or riding in a car (Raifman
and Choma 2022).

How historic racism shaped Atlanta’s transit network

In the mid-20th century, in metropolitan areas across the country,
white suburban homeowners and their allies in elected office and the
business community lobbied for public transit systems that prioritized
their interests at every turn while denying access to Black
communities in the urban core. The development of highways and the
Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) in Atlanta,
Georgia, is a case in point. In the post-WWII era, white business
elites who increasingly lived outside the city but sought to remain
connected to the urban core aggressively pursued highway development
and other land use policy that facilitated this movement, while
systematically segregating the city and displacing Black communities.
Among the approximately 70,000 people displaced because of “urban
renewal” (demolition) of residential urban areas to make way for
interstate construction in Atlanta, 95% were Black (Keating 2001).

In the early 1960s, in order to further their business interests and
boost downtown land values, white elites pursued the development of
light rail transit despite its higher cost and more limited
effectiveness than bus transit, which lacked “social status.”
Initial proposals for MARTA included more rail lines in white
communities than in Black communities, but advocacy by Black community
members led to the development of a more equitable transit system.
Instead of sharing transportation with a majority low-income Black
ridership, white people simply declined to take public transportation
and drove their cars instead, leading to significant underfunding that
restricted MARTA’s expansion. Over the next three decades, the
Atlanta metro region population grew significantly alongside a wave of
corporate job growth in the suburbs to the detriment of jobs in the
city and along racial lines (the regions that gained the most jobs
were majority-white). By 2000, the metro region population had grown
by 128% while the city of Atlanta’s population declined by 16%. The
movement of jobs from the mostly Black urban core to the mostly white
suburbs and the failure to develop a system of transit to allow for
transit between them both prevented Black Atlantans from accessing
economic opportunities afforded to whites and led to traffic- and
transportation-related challenges that have only worsened as the
region has continued to grow (PSE 2017). 

The lack of affordable, accessible public transportation is also
unevenly distributed across disability status and urbanicity. Across
the country, disabled adults of all racial and ethnic groups are twice
as likely as non-disabled adults to face inadequate transportation
access, and over a half a million disabled people are unable to leave
their homes as a result (Urban Institute 2020). Of the 10 states with
the highest share of adults with a disability, eight are Southern
states (see Figure D).

Figure D

Additionally, though public transportation is more commonly discussed
in the context of cities, access to transportation in rural areas
poses unique challenges that are becoming more urgent as the
population ages and demand for accessible public transit grows. The
East South Central Census division encompassing Alabama, Kentucky,
Mississippi, and Tennessee is the least urban area in the country
(U.S. Census 2022). And in nine Southern states, the share of rural
residents with no access to intercity transportation—rail, bus, or
airline—exceeded the national average (14.6%). While some Southern
states have increased access to intercity transportation between 2006
and 2021, seven Southern states have seen declines in access over the
same period, with double digit declines in Oklahoma (11.7 percentage
points) and Arkansas (18.5 percentage points). Populations in rural
areas without access to intercity transportation are more likely than
those in more connected rural areas to be over the age of 65,
low-income, in poverty, unemployed, and carless. With no car and no
public transit, many rural residents in the South and around the
country are effectively denied access to employment, education, and
other pathways to greater economic security, and older adults are
forced to rely on the kindness of others to meet their basic needs
(BTS 2023). 

The failure to invest in affordable health care, accessible
high-quality child care, and convenient climate-friendly
transportation systems is shortsighted and has worsened quality of
life across the South. When workers and families are not able to
maintain their health and well-being and access services that enable
them to fully participate in civic, social, and economic institutions,
we all suffer.

Southern lawmakers weaponize the poor outcomes of their own public
revenue failures to fuel a vicious cycle of bad policies

The Southern economic development model is characterized by regressive
tax and budget systems, with revenue programs that extract a larger
share of income from families with the least ability to pay and often
deliver targeted benefits specifically to businesses and the wealthy.
These policies weaken the labor market power and jobs options for
low-income families, contribute to income and wealth inequality, and
fail to raise adequate revenue for public goods and services. Southern
lawmakers have then frequently responded to revenue shortfalls with
additional regressive forms of revenue generation like fees and fines,
while providing tax cuts and economic development subsidies to
businesses with the claim that such benefits to businesses will
“trickle down” to the public at large. They also use the failure
of such policies as a pretext to shrink the public sector and
outsource core government functions to private companies motivated by
profit as opposed to effectiveness or equity.

Regressive tax and budget policies exacerbate inequality

Taxes are the primary means by which state and local governments raise
revenue to pay for essential goods and services, such as education,
health care, infrastructure, and public safety. However, the Southern
model’s tax policies have resulted in chronic underfunding that
exacerbates income and wealth disparities by race and class and keeps
living standards inadequate for many residents.

Anti-tax sentiment in the South is a direct legacy of slavery. Because
enslaved people were treated (and taxed) as property, enslavers saw
property taxation as an existential threat and worried that
non-enslaving majorities would use taxation to weaken—and eventually
abolish—the institution of slavery. Enslavers went to great lengths
to preserve their power through anti-democratic means, including
manipulating the rules of the legislative process, ensuring weak
government, and limiting the constitutionality of taxation (Einhorn
2006). During Reconstruction, racist former enslavers rebranded
themselves as “concerned taxpayers” to forge an alliance with
small white farmers, sow racial division, and justify racist violence
(Das 2022). Through the mid-19th century, taxes levied on enslaved
people and the wealth they created for white enslavers through their
forced labor were the single largest revenue source for state
governments (between 30–60%) and were paid mostly by large
landowning enslavers. When slavery was abolished, white Southerners,
particularly small non-enslaving landowners, vehemently opposed all
efforts to replace “slave tax” revenue with other tax measures
(Lyman 2017).

In the mid-1880s, Southern states relied heavily on corporate income
taxes—a legacy of slavery-era opposition to property taxes that was
nonetheless fairly progressive in the sense that corporations
generally have a higher ability to pay. However, amid the economic
expansion following WWII, Southern states slashed corporate tax rates
to lure businesses to the region and enacted sales taxes to fill the
revenue gap (Das 2022). This tax policy agenda is being reenacted in
many Southern states under the modern Southern economic development
model. Rather than being described as “anti-tax” this model is
better characterized anti-tax _for the wealthy and corporations_.
Since corporate taxes are paid primarily by wealthy shareholders and
sales taxes are paid primarily by low- and middle-income households,
this shift in the tax burden amounts to an upward redistribution of
income that persists in the modern South and hinders the region from
raising adequate revenue.

Today, state taxation structures in Southern states are some of the
most regressive in the nation. A tax is “regressive” when it
forces people with lower incomes to pay a higher share of their income
in taxes than people with higher incomes. The states with the most
regressive tax systems typically rely heavily on sales and excise
taxes (extremely regressive) and property taxes (somewhat regressive).
States with regressive tax systems also typically lack a graduated
personal income tax or impose low corporate income taxes. Of the 10
states with the most regressive tax structures, half are Southern
states: Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas (ITEP
2024). In 11 Southern states, the poorest 20% of residents pay more in
sales taxes alone than the top 1% of residents pay in all state and
local taxes combined (see FIGURE E and APPENDIX TABLE 1).

Figure E

Regressive taxes are not only inequitable from an economic justice
perspective but also as a matter of racial and gender justice. Since
Black, Hispanic, and women workers are more likely to earn low wages,
they disproportionately bear the brunt of tax structures that tax the
lowest paid workers the most. Tennessee, a state that also lacks a
personal income tax and relies heavily on sales and excise taxes, is a
case in point. In Tennessee, Black and Hispanic families—whose
median household incomes are 19% less than the statewide median of all
families—are taxed at a rate higher than the statewide average,
while white and Asian families—with median household incomes 22%
above the statewide average—are taxed at a lower-than-average rate.7
[[link removed]] Meanwhile,
in the more progressive taxation state of Minnesota, Black, Hispanic,
and Indigenous families are taxed at below-average rates, in line with
their relatively lower family incomes. Regressive taxes exacerbate
racial, ethnic, and gender income inequality while progressive taxes
can counteract these disparities (Davis and Guzman 2021).

Yet instead of addressing their inequitable tax structures, the South
has led the charge of further increasing tax regressivity in recent
years. Of the eight states that have moved toward regressive state tax
structures since 2018, five are in the South: Arkansas, Kentucky,
Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia (ITEP 2024). In
four of these states, lawmakers have expressed interest in fully
eliminating the personal income tax (Davis and Trinidad 2023). In her
inaugural address, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders committed
to “eventually wipe the income tax off the books” and an overall
agenda of deregulation (Sanders 2023), declaring:

“We will no longer surrender our jobs, our talent, our businesses
and our economic might to states like Tennessee and Texas that have no
income tax. Arkansas is going to fight for every job – and let me be
clear, Arkansas is going to win. … s long as I am your governor, the
meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington DC will
be stopped cold at the Mississippi River. We will get the
over-regulating, micromanaging, bureaucratic tyrants off of your
backs, out of your wallets and out of your lives.”

In 2024, Sanders signed into law a bill to reduce tax rates on the
wealthy and corporations, which will cost the state hundreds of
millions of dollars per year (DeMillo 2024). In 2025, Mississippi
lawmakers passed a bill to reduce the state’s personal income tax
from 4 to 3%, and eventually eliminate it entirely, replacing it with
an increased regressive tax on gasoline (Vance, Goldberg, and Pender
2025). Also this year, Kentucky passed a similar income tax
elimination bill (Sonka 2025) and Florida’s governor proposed
eliminating all property taxes (Perry 2025). Florida already has the
most regressive state tax system in the country, in part because it
has no personal income tax and relies heavily on sales and excise
taxes, the most regressive type of tax. But property taxes account for
over 40% of the state’s total tax revenue (ITEP 2024), so unless
that lost revenue is made up through progressive means—which the
governor has ruled out—eliminating property taxes will be disastrous
for the state’s budget and could lead to a complete dismantling of
the public school system (which gets around half its funding from
property taxes) (Sczesny 2025). Of course, for Florida’s
governor—who has been on a years-long crusade against public schools
(Strauss 2022) and recently applauded President Trump’s move to
shutter the federal Department of Education (DeSantis
2025b)—dismantling the state’s education system may, in fact, be
the goal.

Inadequate revenue generation leads to low public spending,
exacerbates racial disparities

Due to their high poverty rates, regressive tax structures, and
failure to tax corporate income, Southern states collect little
revenue per capita compared with other states (TPC 2023a) and are
highly dependent on federal government spending to meet their
residents’ basic needs. Southern states receive more federal
government spending than they contribute to the federal government
income and business taxes. Because Southern states have
lower-than-average income levels and higher poverty rates, these
states receive higher-than-average federal contributions to social
safety net programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF. Of the 10 states
that rely on federal government funding the most, seven are Southern
states. In Florida, where the governor has boasted about saving
taxpayers’ money by returning federal funds (DeSantis 2025a), the
state accepted nearly $37 billion more in federal funds than it paid
in the form of taxes, equivalent to about a third of the state’s
budget for fiscal year 2026 (see FIGURE F).

Figure F

As a result of chronic revenue shortfalls, state governments in the
South spend less per capita overall than other regions, as well as
less per capita on primary and secondary education and public welfare
(TPC 2023a; TPC 2023b). Lawmakers in these states justify low spending
on public welfare and programs that benefit all low- and middle-income
workers by weaponizing ideological narratives about deservedness that
are steeped in racism and misogyny and sowing racial and class
division (Black and Sprague 2017). In reality, public revenue
shortfalls harm everyone because the goods and services provided by
the public sector are used by everyone. And when states are unable to
raise adequate revenue, rather than making up the shortfall by seeking
additional revenue through progressive taxation or clawing back
subsidies provided to private businesses, the first budget items to be
defunded are frequently public-sector jobs and the services
public-sector workers provide.

These dynamics were further exacerbated by the pandemic.
Revenue-starved states received millions of dollars in federally
provided fiscal recovery funds as part of the package of federal
COVID-19 response bills. Yet instead of using those funds for
necessary public services, nine Southern states exploited resulting
temporary budget surpluses to enact costly permanent personal or
corporate income tax cuts.8
[[link removed]] In
North Carolina and West Virginia, the cost of the cuts exceeds 10% of
total general fund revenue (Tharpe 2023). In Texas, nearly half of the
$15.8 billion in fiscal recovery funds the state received were used to
shield businesses from future unemployment insurance tax increases
(Villanueva 2022).

Southern states rely heavily on non-tax revenue sources like fees and
fines, which exacerbate income and racial inequality

The failure of states and localities to raise adequate revenue
equitably imposes a double penalty on low-income communities of color.
Lawmakers impose regressive tax systems that prioritize the wealthy
and corporations, raise insufficient revenue, and then use budget
shortalls to justify deep cuts to the public sector and social
programs. At the same time, lawmakers in many Southern states
simultaneously impose regressive fines and fees on these same
communities to offset budget gaps. States and localities across the
country, particularly rural and low-income communities, are heavily
dependent on fees and fines imposed for minor violations or as
alternatives to incarceration. Of the 10 states that rely most
heavily on non-tax revenue (including fees, fines, and other
surcharges) to fund the public sector, five are Southern states. A
third or more of these states’ revenue comes from non-tax sources
(ITEP 2024).9
[[link removed]]

There are racial disparities in every aspect of the criminal legal
system, and the assessment and collection of fines and fees is no
exception. Black people are more likely to be subject to traffic stops
(Pierson et al. 2020)—the most common way people encounter police in
the U.S.—and Black communities are also targeted with higher rates
of fine and fee enforcement (USCCR 2019). Cities with larger Black
populations (most of which are in the South) rely more heavily on fine
and fee revenue. Southern states—particularly states with a history
of convict leasing10
[[link removed]]—impose
more fees and more mandatory (as opposed to discretionary) fees than
any other region (Zvonkovich, Haynes, and Ruback 2022). Though
lawmakers in many Southern states have introduced proposals to curb
regressive fines and fees, such proposals have made little progress in
the states most reliant on them (FFJC 2024).

The expectation that public agencies—charged with serving the public
good—seek revenue from fines and fees in order to fund the agencies
that employ them represents a profound conflict of interest. Indeed,
all six of the small cities across the country that rely on fines and
fees for at least half their revenue (five of which are in the South)
spent at least a third of their budgets on law enforcement activities
in 2017 (TPC 2024). The use of fees and fines to fund government or
even new law enforcement activities can undermine public trust in
institutions and their perceived legitimacy as agents of the public
good (Boddupalli and Mucciolo 2022).

On top of the enduring harms that fines and fees impose on adults and
youth of color and their corrosive influence on democracy, fines and
fees are an inefficient method of raising public revenue. A study of
10 counties across Texas, Florida, and New Mexico found that these
jurisdictions spent an average of 41 cents for every dollar collected
from in-court and jail costs alone, and billions of dollars go
uncollected every year because individuals are unable to pay (Menendez
et al. 2019).

Southern dependency on fine and fee revenue deepens poverty and racial
inequality, encourages expansion of the criminal legal system, and
limits localities’ ability to invest in public services that benefit
everyone. While Southern states are structuring their public financing
in regressive and harmful ways, they are simultaneously giving
enormous tax breaks and public subsidies to corporations. As the next
section explains, the one area where Southern governments are not
stingy with public dollars is in providing supports to business.

Economic development incentives fail to produce community benefits and
drain limited public revenue to the private sector

Modern urban governance in the United States is so dominated by
entrepreneurialism—a stance that prioritizes economic development
and public investment into projects that mainly benefit the private
sector—that this mode of governance may feel natural or
unassailable. However, entrepreneurialism is a relatively new
advancement, one that emerged in the early 1970s in response to a
combination of deindustrialization, fiscal austerity, and the rise of
neoconservatism and privatization (Harvey 1989). Whereas
“managerialism” (which primarily focused on the local provision of
services for the benefit of residents) was once commonplace, state and
local tax and budget policy today is increasingly tilted in favor of
the private sector, while benefits to the public are second-order and,
in some cases, nonexistent.

Entrepreneurialism often takes the form of corporate subsidies:
economic development grants, reimbursements, loans, tax abatements,
infrastructure development, and other forms of financial assistance to
businesses by federal, state, or local governments. Although not
unique to the South, the use of publicly funded corporate subsidies is
particularly harmful to Southern states that have long faced revenue
shortfalls. These tax abatements (which allow a selected business to
pay lower taxes or eliminate its tax obligation entirely) and other
subsidies (such as direct cash grants to companies) are taxpayer
funded and directly reduce the state’s ability to fund public
services.

Working families pay their fair share (or more) in state and local
taxes, with the expectation of public investment in essential public
goods and services like schools, health care, food assistance,
transit, and affordable housing. Instead, this public revenue is given
to corporations in the form of subsidies or tax breaks. In exchange
for corporate tax benefits, firms that receive such awards often make
vague promises about projects’ benefits for local communities.
However, these promises are notoriously difficult to assess. Southern
states have particularly low disclosure requirements—Alabama and
Georgia have no meaningful disclosure at all. Nine Southern states
have below-average disclosure scores according to public-spending
watchdog group Good Jobs First (Tarczynska, Wen, and Furtado 2022). As
a result, it is extremely difficult for researchers, advocates, and
the taxpayers themselves to investigate whether corporate incentives
serve the public good. 

In 2022, a banner year for corporate subsidy packages to individual
companies exceeding $100 million, nearly half (14 out of 30) of these
“megadeals” were awarded to businesses in Southern states (GJF
2022a). These megadeals—which include but are not limited to tax
breaks—amounted to at least $10.7 billion dollars in taxpayer funds
given by these state and local governments to large corporations
(see FIGURE G). Of the nine companies that received megadeals worth
$1 billion or more in 2022 (the costliest year on record for
megadeals), four of those deals were provided by Southern states
(Tarczynska 2022). And three of the four megadeals in the South went
to the auto manufacturing industry, which has grown significantly in
the South over the past two decades as businesses seek to take
advantage of the South’s weak regulatory environment, anti-worker
policies, and use of public revenue to attract private investment. But
these incentives have not produced the family-sustaining, union jobs
historically associated with the Midwestern auto industry. Instead,
faced with low wages, unsafe workplaces, and the anti-union sentiment
inherent to the Southern economic development model, Southern
autoworkers must fight tirelessly just to achieve any benefits from
the public subsidy afforded their employers (Childers 2024d).

Figure G

In recent years, Southern states have given away billions of dollars
in public revenue in the form of direct subsidies and tax breaks to
corporations. This is revenue the state _would have_ raised if it
taxed corporations regularly, as opposed to preferentially. For
example, in Tennessee, forgone revenue between fiscal years 2017 and
2021 exceeded the state’s total budget for transportation in 2021 by
over $100 million (GJF 2022c). In the city of Memphis, where public
pensions are chronically underfunded, public dollars spent on tax
abatements and subsidies could have fully funded the city’s pension
obligations for every year between 2009 and 2012 (Cafcas et al. 2014).
In Louisiana, the state lost more due to economic development tax
breaks than it spent on transportation, corrections, youth
development, and agriculture combined in 2021 (GJF 2022b).

The impact of tax abatements on public education is particularly
extreme because property taxes (which are a common target of economic
development tax breaks) are the single largest source of funding for
public schools across the country. In 2019, of the 10 school districts
that lost the most revenue to tax abatements, six were in Southern
states—three in South Carolina, two in Louisiana, and one in Texas
(Wen, Furtado, and LeRoy 2021).

In South Carolina, public school districts lost almost $3.2 billion to
corporate tax abatements between 2017 and 2023, forgone revenue that
schools could have used to hire more than 6,600 educators each year to
address the state’s severe teacher shortage (Gizis 2025).

Louisiana’s five most populous school districts lost nearly $40
million to economic development tax breaks in 2021. And Texas, which
lost $1.23 billion to corporate subsidies in 2022, is home to 49 of
the 52 school districts nationwide where per-pupil losses exceed $1000
per year. These revenue shortfalls disproportionately harm low-income,
Hispanic, and Black students whose school districts are more likely to
hand out costly tax abatements (Wen, Furtado, and LeRoy 2021).

To hold companies accountable to the expectation that publicly funded
projects benefit the public, advocates for workers and communities
have leveraged tools like Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) and
Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs). A PLA is a pre-hire collective
bargaining agreement negotiated among multiple contractors, unions,
and project owners that establishes the terms and conditions of
employment that will apply to a specific construction project, and
CBAs are PLAs that also involve community stakeholders and may include
community-focused benefits beyond any employment requirements.

Unfortunately, most Southern states have provisions in state law that
block local governments from abiding by PLAs, resulting in economic
development projects that often do not support local workers and
communities. In the past two years, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee
have signed measures into law that bar companies from receiving state
economic development funds if they voluntarily recognize unions, and
Tennessee enacted a bill that bars companies from receiving state
economic development funds if they enter into a community benefits
agreement. These policies reflect an economic model that seeks to
enrich business interests at the expense of workers and communities,
in this case using public money to disempower workers and block
communities from benefiting from economic development (Sherer 2024;
Tennessee General Assembly 2025).

Privatization is offered as the cure for hollowed-out public services

From public schools to the social safety net, Southern lawmakers have
led the charge to privatize public services and replace them with
for-profit alternatives that are often worse, more expensive, and
unconcerned with values like equity and fairness. Privatization is a
central tenet of the Southern economic development model because it
prioritizes the interests of the wealthy (who are overwhelming white)
and businesses at the expense of working people, low-income Black
communities and communities of color, and public-sector workers. The
public sector has historically been a source of good union jobs and a
pathway to the middle class—particularly for Black workers
(Morrissey 2020). Thus, privatization serves the Southern model both
in its service of business interests at the expense of workers and in
its agenda to limit the role of the public sector in regulating
corporate power and serving the public good.

Private school vouchers are a modern-day effort to reinstitute
segregation, whether by race, class, or religion

The privatization of public schools in the United States is rooted in
anti-Black racism and efforts to resist desegregation. In the decade
prior to the 1954 _Brown v. Board of Education_ ruling mandating
school segregation, private school enrollment increased 43% in the
South. By the end of 1956, six Southern states had passed
constitutional amendments permitting the state to divert public funds
to private schools (Suitts 2019), and by 1965 there were nearly one
million private school students in the South. While public schools
desegregated slowly over the 1960s and 1970s, private school
enrollment grew, particularly in the South. By the early 1980s, the
South accounted for nearly a quarter of private school enrollment
nationwide, and most students attended schools where 90% or more of
students were white (SEF n.d.). 

Though voucher advocates have claimed that such programs improve
educational outcomes for low-income Black and Hispanic children, an
extensive body of research finds that vouchers do not improve
educational outcomes and more likely worsen them (Mast 2023). Voucher
programs divert public funds to private schools (predominantly
religious schools) where white students are overrepresented—these
margins are greatest in the South (Suitts 2019). Private school
voucher programs allow primarily white wealthy families, many of whom
are already sending their children to private schools, to offset these
costs with public dollars that are intended for public schools. In
many states with private school voucher programs, most voucher
recipients attend religious schools, amounting to billions of taxpayer
dollars being used to subsidize religious education.

This subsidization of religious education parallels a simultaneous
effort—popular in Southern states—to implement
government-sponsored, often conservative religious ideology in the
public school system (Meckler and Boorstein 2024). Oklahoma approved
an application for a publicly-funded Catholic charter school back in
2023 (Perez Jr. and Gerstein 2025). The case went all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court, which recently affirmed the decision of the
Oklahoma Supreme Court blocking the use of public funds for the
nation’s first religious public charter school. However, given an
evenly split vote, the ruling lacks precedential force (Saiger 2025),
leaving the door open for states to continue eroding the separation
between church and state through the use of government funds for
religious education. A decision approving of the direct use of
government funds to pay for religious education would amount to a
significant erosion of the separation between church and state.

Today, 31 states and D.C. have some sort of voucher program in place
that diverts public funds to private schools (Wething 2024). Though
only 13 of those states (plus D.C.) are in the South, the South has
some of the most established and expensive programs, spending hundreds
of millions—or, in the case of Florida, billions—of public dollars
to subsidize private schools (Dollard and McKillip 2025). In 2025
alone, public education advocates tracked voucher expansion bills in
at least 22 states (PFPS 2025). After years of opposition, Texas
passed a private school voucher program that will cost the state
billions over the next few years (Edison 2025), and South Carolina
reinstated a private school tuition subsidy program that had been
ruled unconstitutional (Kesler 2025).

Efforts to implement and expand voucher programs in states across the
country—through private school vouchers, Education Savings Accounts,
and tax credits—are key to the relentless and enduring campaign to
defund and privatize public education, a movement that also includes
manufacturing mistrust in public schools and targeting educators and
their unions (Mast 2023). The result, by design, is the defunding of
the public school system, which in turn strengthens the arguments in
favor of privatization as a solution to an ailing public school
system. The Trump administration’s move in early 2025 to shutter the
Department of Education is the culmination of the decades-long
campaign to abolish public education, a campaign that began in the
South and has been spearheaded by Southern lawmakers and
billionaire-backed right-wing groups (Sullivan 2025; Blake 2024; Gott
2018).

Southern lawmakers have long sought to privatize our most important
and popular social programs

Republicans in Congress and at many levels of government have long
sought to privatize even the most overwhelmingly popular federal
social programs, particularly Medicare and Social Security. Social
Security is the largest anti-poverty program in the country and is the
most important source of income for seniors; without it, over 25
million more people would be in poverty (Banerjee and Zipperer 2022).
More than 64 million people rely on Medicare coverage for their health
insurance coverage (CMS 2022). From Texas President George W. Bush’s
plan to privatize Social Security in 2005, to Florida Senator Rick
Scott’s plan to phase out all federal social programs in 2022
(Everett 2022), Southern Republicans have consistently been among the
most vocal supporters of privatization (Scott 2022).

Privatization is often touted as a solution to bureaucratic red tape
or cutting “wasteful” government spending, but in practice, it can
mean cutting the experienced public workforce who administer
complicated government programs. This can result in prolonged delays,
more people wrongly denied benefits, and ultimately worse outcomes for
people who need the benefits most. For instance, when Texas outsourced
its SNAP eligibility determinations to a for-profit company in 2006,
thousands of people were unable to apply or were given incorrect
information and many were wrongly denied benefits. Public-sector staff
were then forced to fix mistakes, and eligible SNAP participants were
subject to long delays to receive benefits (Sanders and Mast 2024).

Privatization across criminal legal system threatens progress to undo
mass incarceration

Since the 1990s, the U.S. criminal legal system has become
increasingly privatized as private, for-profit companies have taken
over many aspects of correctional control. Private prisons—prisons
owned and run by private companies—are the most visible form of
privatization. The use of private, for-profit prisons to incarcerate
people convicted of crimes and detain immigrants grew significantly in
the first decade of the 21st century but has declined nationwide since
2010. Nevertheless, as of 2022, approximately 91,000 people nationwide
are currently incarcerated in private prisons, representing 8% of the
total prison population. Across the country, 27 states and the federal
government incarcerate people in private prisons, and states vary
significantly in their use of private prisons (Budd 2024). Southern
states have historically incarcerated more people in private prisons
than any other region (Geiger 2017) and have increased their usage of
private prisons at a time when other states are moving in the other
direction. In Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, the use of private
prisons has increased considerably (by an average of 131% across those
three states since 2000), and these states confine 15% or more of
their incarcerated population in prisons motivated by profit (Budd
2024).

The private sector’s quest to extract profits from the U.S. prison
system and those under correctional control within and outside prison
is not limited to the small share of privately run prisons. Instead,
the entire carceral system, which spans public and privately run
facilities and services, has become increasingly privatized over the
past several decades. Though this phenomenon is nationwide,
incarcerated people in the South may be most heavily impacted. Within
public and private prisons, private companies are granted contracts to
provide food, health services, telecommunications services, and
commissary functions. In turn, the private company earns a profit by
marking up the price of goods and services, and the prison receives
millions of dollars in revenue in the form of commissions
(Katzenstein, Bennett, and Swanson 2020).

This system of “prison retailing” is supposed to be reinvested
into the prison to pay for programs that benefit the incarcerated
population, but many times these funds are improperly diverted to
other purposes (Nam-Sonenstein 2024). The prices of privately
administered goods and services in prisons and jails vary widely by
state, but Southern prisons charge some of the most exorbitant rates
for basic food items like instant ramen noodles, fans to keep cool in
prisons that lack air conditioning, and even water (Weill-Greenberg
and Corey 2024). At the same time, as shown in FIGURE H, incarcerated
people in the South who work for the benefit of their prisons and
prison owners are paid the lowest wages of any region—if they are
paid at all—putting these heavily marked-up items even further out
of reach for incarcerated people in the South (Mast 2025).

Figure H

Privatization is also pervasive in alternative forms of correctional
control. As the prison population declines modestly, both in private
and public facilities, the corrections industry has shifted its focus
to extracting profit from community supervision, which includes
pre-trial supervision, probation, and parole. Of the 5.5 million
people under some form of correctional control, over half are on
probation (a million more than those incarcerated in correctional
facilities) (Wang 2023). Privatized correctional control and
supervision originated in the South—Florida implemented private
probation in 1975, followed by Tennessee in 1989 and Georgia shortly
thereafter (Zvonkovich, Haynes, and Ruback 2022)—and persists there
more than any other region (Ramachandra and Darehshori 2018). Today,
of the 12 states that rely on private, for-profit companies for
misdemeanor probation services, seven are Southern states (Huebner and
Shannon 2022). Georgia law prohibits the state from supervising
misdemeanor probations and requires that these services be contracted
to local or private entities. More people are on probation in Georgia
than any other state, and 80% of the state’s courts use private
probation (Khalfani 2022). As with other privatized services, there is
little transparency around the bidding process for these contracts,
and private probation companies are not required to make financial
disclosures to the state. Research suggests that private probation
companies charge higher fees than state-run probation (Shannon et al.
2020). Numerous lawsuits across several states allege private
probation companies charge inappropriate fees, violate probationers’
14th Amendment rights, and engage in racketeering.11
[[link removed]] 

Though the use of private prisons has declined, President Trump’s
anti-immigrant agenda has reinvigorated the market for private prison
operators, especially in border states in the South. Private prisons
are slated to make billions from new contracts to detain undocumented
immigrants while they await immigration proceedings or deportation.
The companies plan to make use of vacant detention facilities, some of
which had been closed after reports of unsanitary conditions,
overcrowding, and detainee deaths (Hurwitz 2025). The CEO of CoreCivic
(formerly Corrections Corporation of America), the second largest
private corrections company in the U.S., called it “one of the most
exciting periods in my career” (Berzon, McCann, and Aleaziz 2025).
Most immigration detention facilities are run by private prison
operators and are clustered along the Southwest border and the gulf
coast (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida).

Immigrant detention as a profit-seeking enterprise is not limited to
privately owned prisons. For example, in Louisiana, which is now being
dubbed “detention center alley” (a play on “cancer alley”12
[[link removed]])
because of its significant role in immigrant detention (Maschke 2025),
a detention center may be publicly owned and then privately operated
(Hefferman 2025). In small localities across the country, jail bed
rentals for immigrant detainees provide a large—if perverse—source
of revenue. In Louisiana, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement pays
localities $74 per day to rent beds in their facilities, nearly three
times what the state prison system pays local sheriffs. And in one
economically distressed North Carolina county, a newly built jail
earned $2 million in the first 18 months for holding immigrants for
the federal government, which comprised two-thirds of its detainees
(Eisen and Subramanian 2022).

Privatization masks the true costs of mass incarceration by shifting
many of the system’s costs to those under correctional control while
creating incentives for the public and private sector to expand the
system, either as a source of private or public revenue. But the
revenue produced through criminal legal system privatization exacts
high costs on communities, particularly on low-income Black and brown
people who are disproportionately ensnared in it. Given the racist
roots of the Southern economic development model, it is not surprising
that these dynamics have manifested so acutely in the South.

A thriving South requires a new economic development model

The South is home to the nation’s weakest social safety net, the
lowest wages, the most anti-worker policies, and the most regressive
systems for raising revenue to pay for essential goods and services.
As a result, the region suffers from high rates of poverty and food
insecurity and poor health outcomes, and workers and their families
struggle to achieve a basic standard of living. These outcomes are by
design, the consequences of an economic development model that
prioritizes the wealthy and corporations at the expense of workers and
their families, and fosters precarity as a means of maintaining racial
and class-based hierarchies.

W.E.B. DuBois famously said “as the South goes, so goes the
nation.” This adage very much applies to the Southern economic
development model, as conservative state lawmakers across the country
have sought to duplicate the Southern policy agenda in their states.
Now, this model has found a home in the Trump administration, which
has taken every opportunity to prioritize the interests of the wealthy
and corporations at the expense of working people and their families.

The _Rooted in Racism _series has shown across a wide range of
dimensions that the Southern economic model fundamentally does not
serve workers and their families. It does not lead to stronger growth;
it does not lead to greater or more widespread prosperity; it does not
lead to better health or educational outcomes or greater economic
mobility.

But it does not have to be this way. Because the South’s poverty,
precarity, and economic underperformance are the consequences of
intentional policy choices, they can be undone by different policy
choices. The racism and anti-worker sentiments that have influenced
economic policymaking in the South for generations must be uprooted
and replaced by a new economic model centered on empowering and
investing in workers, families, and communities. There are proven
strategies that lawmakers can take—proposals for which advocates
have been fighting for years—to build a South where workers are
empowered and families are supported to not just survive but thrive.
It is time to retire the Southern economic development model and
replace it with a model that serves everyone.

APPENDIX

Appendix Table 1

Notes

1.  [[link removed]]See
Economic Policy Institute, “Rooted in Racism and Economic
Exploitation” (web page), [link removed].

2.  [[link removed]]The
author acknowledges that these data are now over a decade old.
Estimating the incidence of wage theft is extremely challenging,
especially because victims often don’t know they’ve been cheated
and even when they do, they often don’t have a paper trail.
Consequently, there are few studies that have attempted to quantify
the incidence and value of wage theft. Because the minimum wage has
risen in Florida since this study, it’s quite likely that the
incidence of minimum wage violations and value of that theft is higher
than it was when these data were produced.

3.  [[link removed]]As of
May 2025, there were an estimated 810 Wage and Hour Division
investigators for 165 million workers, roughly one investigator per
every 270,000 workers (165 million / 611). This was prior to layoffs
and mass resignations at DOL induced by the Trump administration’s
attacks on civil servants. As a result, there are now likely even
fewer than 611 wage and hour investigators at the department.

4.  [[link removed]]See
Frisvold and Jung 2018; Lavender and Johnston 2024; and Leung and Mas
2016.

5. 
[[link removed]]Author’s
calculation using Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment
and Wage Statistics and Local Area Unemployment Statistics, March
2024.

6.  [[link removed]]See
Florida HB 47, Kentucky HB 460, and West Vest Virgina HB 2605, HB
2730, and HB 2731.

7. 
[[link removed]]Author’s
calculation using U.S. Census Bureau 2023 ACS 1-Year Median Household
Income in the Past 12 Months in Tennessee, by race/ethnicity (tables
B19013B, B19013D, B19013H, B19013I, S1903).

8. 
[[link removed]]Although
the federal money explicitly could not be used to finance tax cuts,
the fungibility of the resources meant determined conservative state
lawmakers were able to find ways to shift resources such that they
could cut taxes and then use federal funds to fill the revenue gap.

9.  [[link removed]]The
five states and their rank regarding their reliance on non-tax revenue
are: Alabama (3), Florida (7), Mississippi (8), Oklahoma (10), and
South Carolina (4).

10. 
[[link removed]]Convict
leasing was a system for preserving forced labor after the abolition
of slavery in the U.S. Southern states criminalized Black people for
trivial “offenses” (such as loitering, breaking curfew, or failing
to show proof of employment) and then leased them to private employers
to work without pay to do dangerous, sometimes deadly, work under
threat of punishment.

11.  [[link removed]]See
recent news from private probation lawsuits in Georgia
[[link removed]], Tennessee
[[link removed]],
and Alabama.
[[link removed]]

12. 
[[link removed]]”Cancer
Alley” refers to the communities along the banks of the Mississippi
River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where residents
suffer from high rates of cancer and other health issues because of
air pollution caused by the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries.
These harms disproportionately impact Black residents, whose
communities are commonly targeted for industrial development.

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focus on child labor standards.  Mast is a graduate of the Master of
Public Policy program at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School, where she
served as a researcher for the UC Berkeley Labor Center and
represented academic student employees as a union steward with
UAW-2865._

_Mast has been interviewed or quoted by numerous outlets including ABC
News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post, CNN, and The New Yorker, and appeared on American
Public Media for “Marketplace” and the popular “Pitchfork
Economics” podcast. _

_Before graduate school, Mast worked as a researcher in the labor
movement and at issue advocacy organizations focused on health care
and the economy. At SEIU Local 32BJ, she conducted research to support
fast-food workers in Connecticut and commercial cleaning workers in
New York. Prior to 32BJ, she worked on issue campaigns at The Hub
Project and efforts to advance a progressive economic worldview at the
Groundwork Collaborative._

_The Economic Policy Institute’s vision is an economy that is just
and strong, sustainable, and equitable — where every job is good,
every worker can join a union, and every family and community can
thrive._

_ABOUT EPI. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit,
nonpartisan think tank working for the last 30 years to counter rising
inequality, low wages and weak benefits for working people, slower
economic growth, unacceptable employment conditions, and a widening
racial wage gap. We intentionally center low- and middle-income
working families in economic policy discussions at the federal, state,
and local levels as we fight for a world where every worker has access
to a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, retirement
security, and a union._

_We also know that research on its own is not enough—that’s why we
intentionally pair our research with effective outreach and advocacy
efforts as we fight to make concrete change in everyday people’s
lives._

_Read about the history of the Economic Policy Institute -- the
workers' think tank
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