The Tax Code’s Hidden
Rules of Gender
To advance gender (and racial)
equity, we must reform the tax code, as the National Women’s Law
Center (NWLC) and co-partners explore in a three-part
series of reports.
The second report—co-authored by Roosevelt Director of Advocacy and
Policy Katy Milani and Vice President for Advocacy and Policy Steph
Sterling—argues that low taxes on the wealthy and corporations have
harmed women’s economic security: “Power and wealth beget power and
wealth, and accordingly, an agenda to advance racial and gender
justice must reckon with these rules—including provisions in our tax
code—that perpetuate and enable these inequities.”
Read
more.
-
Why this matters:
“The tax code has profound power to close the gender wage-and-wealth
gap, as well as to support equality in the workplace and help families
thrive at home. As the country debates taxing billionaires out of
existence, it might consider taxing the patriarchy out of existence,
too,” The
Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey
writes in an exclusive about the series. Read
on.
-
Another angle: “The
tax code is a social document,” report co-author and NWLC Vice
President for Income Security and Child Care/Early Learning Melissa
Boteach tells
MarketWatch. “What
these tax preferences are saying is this pain is more important than
that pain.”
-
Who writes the rules: “Depending on where it starts, a 15 percent rate would be a
relatively small tax cut for middle-income people,” Roosevelt Fellow
Michael Linden tells the Washington Post.
“This is an acknowledgement that Republicans’ original tax plan was
heavily skewed to the wealthy, the middle got almost nothing, and
people at the bottom got literally nothing.” Read
more.
-
Rewrite the rules:
This week on CNBC’s Squawk
Box, Roosevelt Vice
President of Strategy and Policy Nell Abernathy debated Arthur
Laffer—economic advisor to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign—on the effects
that regressive tax rates have on inequality and investment. As
Abernathy explained, “. . . not only have we seen inequality increase
and the middle class undermined, but we really have seen a decline in
the kinds of productive investments that we need to grow our economy .
. . We are not in a pro-innovation, pro-investment economy.”
Watch
here.
A Radically Inclusive Housing
Proposal
“The need for a dramatic shift in housing policy is clear: There
are 43 million renter households in the United
States—nearly
half of whom spend
more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Approximately
3
million people
experience homelessness every year. There is no
county in the nation where a full-time worker earning the minimum wage can afford a
two-bedroom apartment. And the wealth of the average black American is
just 10 cents on the dollar compared to the wealth of the average
white American—in part because public and private-sector policies have promoted white homeownership,
while excluding people of color and extracting
wealth from their communities,” Roosevelt Journalist-in-Residence Greg
Kaufmann writes for The
Nation. One solution: a
homes guarantee. Read
on.
- On the trail: “Vermont
Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have
fused two major presidential campaign issues—housing and climate
change—in a $172 billion policy proposal released Thursday. Dubbed
the Green
New Deal for Public Housing Act, the proposal aims to transform the entire stock of public
housing in the US, 1.2 million units, into energy-efficient homes
powered by onsite renewable energy.” Read
more from Vox.
What We Know About the Debt-GDP Ratio
On Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair
Jerome Powell testified before the House Budget Committee. As
Roosevelt Fellow JW Mason noted in a Twitter thread, things got interesting: “One puzzle in
this testimony: Several times Powell responded to questions about
whether federal debt is ‘sustainable’ by pointing [o]ut that the debt
is growing faster than GDP. This is true. But that's not the normal
definition of sustainable!” Learn why federal spending is
sustainable.
Why Narrative Matters in
Economic
Policy
“In the course of our policy
setting work, we realized that there were three quintessential harmful
narrative buckets that we must name and address while pushing for
policy change: notions of personal responsibility, personhood being
tied to traditional ideas of work/having a paid job, and pervasive
anti-blackness/racial resentment,” Roosevelt Fellow and Insight Center
President Anne Price and Insight Center Vice President of Programs and
Strategy Jhumpa Bhattacharya write for the Economic Security Project.
“All three of these buckets hold major ramifications on who we see as
deserving (and who we don’t)—and serve as a foundation to build our
social and economic policies off of.” Read
more.
Democratizing Economic
Power
“The crises of democracy and
inequality are deeply interrelated. Concentration of political power
helps ensure that public policies continue to serve the interests of
the wealthy and well-resourced. Meanwhile, concentration of economic
power helps megacorporations and wealthy interests dominate, while
also ensuring a concentration of political influence that blunts
policies that could undermine this vicious cycle,” Roosevelt President
& CEO Felicia Wong, Demos President K. Sabeel Rahman, and
Community Change President Dorian Warren write for the
Stanford Social Innovation
Review. “Realizing
democracy requires democratizing economic power across the areas of
corporate power, public power, and inclusive economic governance.”
Read
the piece here and learn more about its parent project Realizing
Democracy.
|