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A Paradigm Shift
Yesterday
was historic.
One year into a pandemic that has
taken over 530,000 US lives and left millions without jobs or economic
security, the American Rescue Plan is now
law, and will
soon bring urgently needed relief to
individuals, small businesses, and state and local
governments.
But what makes this an
“FDR-size
piece of legislation,” as New York
Times columnist Jamelle
Bouie calls it, is the sweeping expansion of the nation’s social
safety net: from annual cash payments of up to $3,600 for parents to expansions of the
Affordable
Care Act and
Earned
Income Tax Credit.
Experts project that the law could
cut childhood poverty by over half and overall poverty by a
third, while reducing the number of uninsured people by as much as
4.4
million.
The after-tax income of
middle-income
families,
meanwhile, is estimated to rise 5.5 percent—about double the increase
of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
“As I see it, both the scale and
the direction of the American Rescue Plan break the neoliberal,
deficits-and-inflation-come-first mold that has hollowed out our
economy for a generation,” said Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia
Wong.
“They’re a tangible acknowledgment
that economic policy exists to
serve all people, especially those who are most in need and have been
historically excluded. That our government should assertively work to
invest in a better and more equitable future.”
“We need to remember the government
isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital,” President Biden said
during his primetime
address last night. “It’s us, all of
us.”
Economic Recovery Begins
at Home
“We have a Congress that is
formulating a massive infrastructure package as part of the next wave
of stimulus response,” Roosevelt Fellow and Evergreen
Collaborative
co-founder Bracken Hendricks told Bloomberg CityLab this week. “Unless
homes and buildings are at the center of that infrastructure package
and job creating agenda, we will fall short.”
In a new report from Roosevelt and
Evergreen, Hendricks and co-authors Kara Saul Rinaldi, Mark Wolfe,
Cassandra Lovejoy, and Wes Gobar offer a roadmap: specific federal
policy proposals to rebuild housing stock, promote health, lower costs
for homeowners, advance 100 percent clean and carbon-free energy
goals, and protect the global environment.
Another plus: The
Economic
Recovery Begins at Home plan can be achieved in a
budget reconciliation package.
Learn more in this fact
sheet and Bloomberg
CityLab’s exclusive on the report.
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