Sometime it’s the case that people aren’t working because they’re aren’t any jobs close enough for them to commute. There can be infrastructure problems with public transit, getting loan help purchasing a private vehicle, or access to affordable housing and affordable education. Some people are located in what I call a Jobs Desert and we need to look more broadly at the urban planning around them as well as what challenges these individuals face in their own lives. None of that is in the GOP plan, but oh yes, here comes the be-all solve-all tax cuts.
The complicated interaction between wages, tax benefits, and welfare benefits is something that has been consistently raised as issue. If states had more flexibility to design customized packages of benefits, that could help make sure anyone who works more ends up better off.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is another potential solution. The EITC is a refundable credit available to low-income workers with dependent children as well as certain low-income workers without children. It can help with the transition
States do have plenty of flexibility and they use it. But y’know what else helps people out of poverty? Decent wages. Even the Wall Street Journal says so.
The study found that 56% of federal and state dollars spent between 2009 and 2011 on welfare programs — including Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit — flowed to working families and individuals with jobs. In some industries, about half the workforce relies on welfare.
“When companies pay too little for workers to provide for their families, workers rely on public assistance programs to meet their basic needs,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the university’s Center for Labor Research and Education and one of the report’s authors.
More than half of front-line fast-food workers receive some form of government assistance.
The fact is the public assistance isn’t subsidizing individuals to remain “trapped in poverty” laying on their couches eating food stamp shrimp, lobster and steaks, it’s actually corporate welfare that allows them to keep their employees at poverty wages while padding their profit margin.
A report from House Democrats in 2013 found that a single 300-person Wal-MartSupercenter store in Wisconsin costs taxpayers at least $904,542 per year, or about $5,815 per employee. Wal-Mart announced in February that all off its employees would earn at least $10 an hour by next year.
Also a large percentage of Walmart employees don’t get healthcare, meanwhile Trump and Ryan have both promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act which really wouldn’t be good for African Americans.
- Last year, an estimated 6 in 10 uninsured African Americans qualified for Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP), or lower costs on monthly premiums through the Health Insurance Marketplace.
- Many shoppers found coverage for less than $50 a month and nearly 7 in 10 found coverage for less than $100.
- 7.8 million African Americans with private insurance now have access to preventive services like mammograms or flu shots with no co-pay or deductible
- More than 500,000 African American young adults between the ages of 19 and 26 who would have been uninsured now have coverage under their parents’ plan.
- 2.3 million African Americans (ages 18-64) gained health insurance coverage, lowering the uninsured rate among African Americans by 6.8 percentage points.
- If all states took advantage of new opportunities to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, 95 percent of eligible uninsured African Americans might qualify for Medicaid, CHIP, or programs to help lower the cost of health insurance coverage in the Marketplace.
To replace it Ryan has essentially suggested that Medicare be gradually privatized, which again won’t help people working at Walmart, but will be a big boon for the private health insurance industry while driving costs up significantly for seniors. He’s also got some other really no good, baddy bad ideas on replacing the ACA.
The outline, released by House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday, consists of a cobbled-together greatest hits list of all the GOP’s bad ideas over the past few years — now, all in a single paper. All that’s missing is any indication of how many people would be covered compared to the ACA, or how much they would have to pay, or how much the proposals would cost. Or, of course, any admission that millions of people would lose coverage under these proposals.
He would gut the tax-credits which linking them to age, not to income, so if you’re young, really poor and really sick you’re subsidy wouldn’t keep up your costs.
We do know that, unlike the ACA, the credits would vary by age, not by income — which means low-income people wouldn’t get more help. And since their growth wouldn’t be tied to premium costs, the credits would grow more slowly than premium costs over time, leaving enrollees to shoulder an increasing share of costs on their own.
And it wouldn’t even attempt to fix the Medicaid Gap that’s been created by Republican Governors and Legislators which have left an estimated 12 Million from coverage.
Under Obamacare, states may offer Medicaid coverage to anyone whose income is at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. (The poverty line is currently $11,490 for one person and $19,530 for a family of three.) By that benchmark, 25 million Americans without health insurance are now eligible for expanded Medicaid coverage. Of those, 59 percent are people of color.
And that isn’t something that Ryan intends to fix, not hardly.
The paper disingenuously accuses the structure of the ACA of creating a “coverage gap” for low-income people in some states — without mentioning that this coverage gap is entirely due to the refusal of some Republican governors and legislators to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Incredibly, the paper then abruptly pivots from decrying this coverage gap to proposing that it be permanently locked in, by preventing the remaining 19 states from expanding Medicaid in the future.
And Ryan would take away the protection against pre-existing conditions.
The only problem is that his policies wouldn’t actually provide that protection. Rather, only people who maintain continuous coverage would be protected from price discrimination for pre-existing conditions. If Ryan’s tax credits aren’t large enough for you to afford your plan and you have to drop your coverage for a few months, then insurers would be free to price discriminate against you and your pre-existing conditions.
And like with public assistance and TANF he would put also work requirements on Medicaid recipients.
Furthermore, the GOP outline proposes to give states the power to impose work requirements on Medicaid enrollees. Apart from the fact that most Medicaid enrollees who can work are already employed, such a change would be bad policy. Ironically, although Ryan talks about the need to improve health care portability between jobs in the private sector, imposing work requirements in Medicaid would reduce portability, since low-income enrollees who got laid off would also lose their health coverage.
None of that is very good, particularly to African-Americans and minorities who are the majority of people using Medicaid, something that many of them have to rely on because the work for companies that don’t pay them squat or provide healthcare benefits.
It seems to me that corporations who fail to keep their employees off of public assistance and have to use Medicaid for their healthcare should not be getting massive tax breaks and incentives then dolling massive payouts to their executives, but not their employees.
Wal-Mart, one of the nation’s largest, most-profitable companies, has received $104 million in tax breaks for giving its executives huge bonuses, according to a report released on Wednesday.
The retail giant received tax write-offs for doling out $298 million in performance pay to executives over the last six years, according to the report’s authors, the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, and Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 400 national and state organizations for tax reform. Such loopholes ultimately cost regular taxpayers dearly in terms of government service and higher tax rates, the groups said.
We all know that the GOP is essentially pro-corporate and anti-worker. That’s who they are. They openly and quite deliberately have sought to bust public unions in order to undermine a base of Democratic support and implemented “Right to Work” rules that drive down wages and since a large portion of African-Americans are public union workers this has had a strong negative affect on them.
For the Ingrams and millions of other black families, working for the government has long provided a dependable pathway to the middle class and a measure of security harder to find in the private sector, particularly for those without college degrees.
Roughly one in five black adults works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses, processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics.
“Compared to the private sector, the public sector has offered black and female workers better pay, job stability and more professional and managerial opportunities,” said Jennifer Laird, a sociologist at the University of Washington who has been researching the subject.
During the Great Recession, though, as tax revenues plunged, federal, state and local governments began shedding jobs. Even now, with the economy regaining strength, public sector employment has still not bounced back. An incomplete recovery is part of the reason, but a combination of strong anti-government and anti-tax sentiment in some places has kept down public payrolls. At the same time, attempts to curb collective bargaining, like those led by Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, a likely Republican presidential candidate, have weakened public unions.
Unions help create good jobs and protect workers from the mendacity and greed of management, they aren’t always perfect, they have issues, but it’s not like the GOP is going to generate the types of jobs that help people bridge the gap from poverty to the middle class, they never have. All they’ve done is make the super rich become uber rich while everyone else lags further and further behind.
There are policy solutions to many of these problems — because many of them were created by policy such as red-lining, white flight and business divestment some of which was driven not just by racism but also by pure naked greed — using partnerships and potential direct investments in companies that choose to actually provide good jobs in the areas that are most impoverished and to workers who are most in need, businesses who subsidize training and education so their employee’s careers can advance and their pay can rise re-envigorating entire communities is still a good idea but you don’t hear any of that from the GOP now do you?
We can try those kinds of solutions or else we can keep trying to accomplish everything the Republican way by further strangling public assistance for those most vulnerable, trimming down well paying public sector jobs that have helped people pull themselves up when private industry tends to turn a blind eye to minority communities and relying on nebulous unfocused tax cuts that evaporate into a rabbit hole and ultimately produce nothing but higher stockholder profits instead of economic growth as Jack Kemp’s well intentioned, but ultimately ineffective empowerment efforts ultimately did.
GOP policies have failed to produce jobs and raise wages for African-Americans, in fact each time a Republican sits in the White House African-American poverty rises, and when a Democrat is President it decreases.