From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject The Poor Aren’t Getting the Help Democrats Want to Give Them
Date July 29, 2021 6:50 AM
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[ Pandemic relief measures are hobbled by serious failures of
program design and implementation.] [[link removed]]

THE POOR AREN’T GETTING THE HELP DEMOCRATS WANT TO GIVE THEM  
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David Dayen
July 23, 2021
The American Prospect
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_ Pandemic relief measures are hobbled by serious failures of program
design and implementation. _

People rally for housing reform in Columbus, Ohio, June 30, 2021. A
federal eviction moratorium is set to expire at the end of this
month., STEPHEN ZENNER/SOPA IMAGES/SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES

 

One of the oldest clichés in the book is that Washington political
elites live in a bubble, insulated from the hardships of the outside
world. That’s definitely what came to mind when I saw a Treasury
Department press release
[[link removed]] touting
success with the emergency rental assistance programs advanced in two
separate coronavirus relief bills.

“June Emergency Rental Assistance Resources to Households More Than
All Previous Months Combined,” the headline
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highlighting the more than $1.5 billion in payments delivered, and
triple the number of households helped relative to April. It sounds
like a real achievement if you don’t know the denominator; that is,
the total amount of rental assistance Congress approved in relief
bills last December and this March. That number is $46.5 billion,
which means that the June total amounted to a little over 3 percent of
available funds.

It’s a simple math equation to get to what Politico figured out
[[link removed]],
that in the first six months since rental assistance was made
available, only 6.5 percent of the funds have been distributed. At
this rate, the money would dribble out between now and 2028.

Renters don’t have that kind of time. Next Saturday, July 31, the
federal moratorium on evictions expires, and the Biden administration
opposes an extension. In a world where rental assistance is flowing
and the economy booming, policymakers could rest easy that a spurt of
evictions will not ensue. But that reality only exists on charts and
unofficial estimates.

In the real world, the assistance spigot has turned from completely
dry to only a few drips at a time. Around 7.4 million Americans are
behind on rent, but the assistance program has helped around 600,000.
Tenants have been unable to access rental assistance for a variety of
reasons
[[link removed]].
First of all, it’s a completely decentralized program; every
locality must build from scratch its own process for getting the money
out. Each initiative varies widely on verifying rental debt and
placing paperwork burdens on the renter, and some give landlords
discretion on whether to accept the assistance. If they would rather
kick out the renter and bring in someone else at higher rent, they can
reject it.

The real world of bureaucracy in programs like this seems to be the
last thing policymakers think about when designing programs that
actual Americans have to use. If nobody can access the relief, why
pass the law at all? Simplicity in program design is rare, and public
awareness often low. This is precisely why voters often view
government as out of touch, and it doesn’t need to be this way.

Take the advance payments of the Child Tax Credit, which began to flow
this month. If you’re already known to the Internal Revenue Service,
this program is a model of simplicity: The money just showed up in
your mailbox or bank account. For those who have gotten the payments,
it has been in some cases life-changing and life-affirming
[[link removed]].

But the people most in need of between $3,000 and $3,600 in advance
tax credits per child are poor people who do not file federal taxes,
and therefore aren’t on the IRS’s existing lists.

This amounts to seven million children, and the government has not
done a good job in finding them and signing them up for the
program. Barely 1 in 10
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made themselves eligible, according to _The Washington Post_.
That’s probably because there’s been scant public education
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it; the main outreach from the government to sign people up is merely
a portal
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non-filers at the IRS website.

Aside from it being not very user-friendly, bad on mobile, and not
available in Spanish
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throwing up a website by itself is a poor substitute for actual
outreach. The only physical outreach to ensure sign-ups has
been undertaken by volunteers
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nonprofits. Absent a real, heavily resourced campaign, how will people
know the IRS’s non-filer website exists? Will they be able to
navigate through it? Put it this way: Consumer brands that need to
find customers for their very survival do not spend their entire
marketing budgets on a single website.

There were other options for setting up the CTC payments. You could
have run it as a welfare benefit through the Social Security
Administration, which has 1,500 retail offices throughout the country.
You could have paid canvassers to get sign-ups, and navigators to help
with the website.

Instead, Democrats’ main reaction to the low take-up of non-filers
has been to dismiss it. “I went on the website myself,” Senate
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told HuffPost
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“It’s very simple and easy to do as long as your kids have a
social security number.” This assumes that the families in question
(a) have a computer (the site is almost nonfunctional on mobile), (b)
have internet access, and (c) have knowledge about filling out online
forms. It’s the height of hubris and a denial of reality to just
assume that people on the wrong side of the digital divide will figure
everything out.

But wait, policymakers might say, we fixed the internet access
problem. In the American Rescue Plan, they created an emergency
broadband benefit that gives low-income people up to $50 a month to
purchase high-speed internet service. Well, since its inception, just
1 in 12 eligible people
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enrolled in that benefit, according to data reviewed by the Benton
Institute for Broadband & Society.

These numbers are remarkably consistent: Over the past year, when the
U.S. establishes a benefit for low-income or struggling people, about
90 percent or more tend to miss out on it. That’s true of rental
assistance, the Child Tax Credit, and emergency broadband assistance.
It may also be a factor in vaccination rates, a critical issue with
the emergence of the delta variant
[[link removed]].
It turns out that vaccine take-up is strongly correlated with income
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One reason why: Many low-income workers in America have no sick days
and would lose their jobs if they missed a day of work. And they fear
being put out by vaccine side effects for a day and risking their next
paycheck. The government simply did not include paid vaccine recovery
days as part of any of the relief bills.

Meanwhile, the delta variant and the concurrent spike in COVID cases
have raised concerns for economic recovery. First-time unemployment
claims increased last week
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and while lockdowns of the variety of last year are unlikely, lagging
demand from frightened consumers could pinch in-person establishments
like restaurants. Yet because we have tied relief efforts to certain
dates rather than economic conditions, things like the eviction
moratorium and the pause on student loan payments and payments to
small businesses have expired or will do so soon
[[link removed]].

It is very good that the Democratic majority wants to provide more aid
to the poor and disadvantaged. That alone is a sea change from years
past. But it seems like nobody tries to assess how these programs
operate when making contact with ordinary people.

Access, implementation, and design are as critical to improving the
lot of at-risk communities as appropriating the money. There’s a
failure to think through the challenges and find ways around them.
Believing that you can get billions of dollars in welfare payments out
the door by putting up a website, or that you can protect delinquent
renters through some brand-new form that needs to be filled out in
triplicate and can be vetoed by their landlord, suggests that nobody
putting together these programs has ever had to use one of them.

_David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has
appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is
‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’_

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