Elaine Weiss at the Campaign for America's Future writes—
Can the 2016 Election be About Making it Work for American Families?
Millions of parents in states across the country work jobs that provide no time off at all to take care of their new babies. It is hard to fathom how this lays the foundation for healthy child development, let alone stable family life. Others who are searching for jobs at a time when there are five, ten, or even fifty people applying for an open position are hampered by their inability to pay for the child care that makes job hunting feasible. And if they do get the job, it is unlikely to pay enough to cover the cost of that care, which in some states now exceeds in-state college tuition rates. Not to mention the trade-offs among such basics as food, clothing, and rent that those families will be forced to make because wages are so far behind the cost of living.
In other words, as President Obama and Hillary Clinton hint, and Bernie Sanders loudly proclaims, the United States has spent the past few decades gradually becoming the least family- and child-friendly nation in the Western world. Indeed, findings from a study of a recent cohort of kindergarten entrants – children who began school in 2010-2011, and who spent their formative early years in the throes of the Great Recession – provide stark evidence of that sobering reality. When children step foot into their kindergarten classrooms for the first time, gaps in both reading and math skills between those in the highest and lowest social class quintiles are already a full standard deviation in size. To get a sense of how enormous those gaps are, the What Works Clearinghouse estimates that it would take at least four independent, highly effective interventions to close them. Before school even starts.
This election must be about changing that reality and giving our children and their families a real future.
One initiative that is out to do just that is the Make it Work Campaign. Recognizing the depth and breadth of the day-to-day struggles millions of working American families face, Make it Work developed a three-pronged, evidence-based policy agenda to help put our country back on the right public policy footing, laying the foundations to rebuild the middle class we’ve been systematically chipping away at since the early 1980s.
Together, the campaign’s three policy buckets – Equal Pay, Caregiving, and Work and Family – would provide a web of supports that enable parents to live dignified, productive lives, including caring for their children well. In particular, Make it Work’s ambitious goals of affordable child care and accessible high-quality pre-kindergarten for all children, bolstered by living wages for the providers and educators who work with them, alleviate critical stressors for working parents and ensure that all kids get the help they need to arrive at kindergarten ready to learn
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—Texans Perry, Cruz vie for stupidest tax plan:
In a campaign email to supporters Tuesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced he would reveal "exciting future plans" next Monday in San Antonio. But if Gov. Perry is planning to pass up a fourth term in order to wage a second campaign for president, he will find he already has plenty of company from inside the Lone Star State. After all, freshman GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, who like Perry is a pro-gun, anti-abortion extremist, has already begun staking out that ground. And as it turns out, Cruz is calling for a flat tax to deliver a staggering windfall for the wealthy, a scheme almost identical to Perry's 2012 proposal.
Last month, Sen. Cruz hit the airwaves to pitch his version of the GOP's toxic brew of IRS animus and irresponsible tax cuts. As Cruz explained to Fox News:
"We ought to abolish the IRS and instead move to a simple flat tax, where the average American can fill out our taxes on a postcard. Put down how much you earn. Put down a deduction for charitable contributions and home mortgage. And put down how much you owe." |
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