New Mexico Gonna Do Free Child Care, Just Like A Civilized Place!
But it's only for a year — to start.
If you want a vision of a possible future, maybe stop imagining George Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face, forever," and instead imagine a preschool class full of squirmy youngsters, learning and playing and generally being wonderful and sometimes a pain in the ass, as small children can also be.
What can I say? I love the pessimistic old English socialist who rightly feared the totalitarian impulse, but sometimes I end up feeling far more hopeful, like when I read about New Mexico's new initiative to completely cover childcare costs for most residents of the state for a year (free link to Washington Post). I can be a sap that way. I'm also the guy who tears up when Tom Joad tells his mother he'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready.
Starting May 1 and running through June 2023, the state will cover child care for families earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which ought to cover most New Mexico families. It's easily the broadest state child care benefit in the USA, and the first state benefit to cover such a wide range of incomes. It'll be available to a family of four making up to $110,000 annually, as the Washington Post 'splains:
The state recently expanded a federal child-care subsidy to middle-class families. On Thursday, Lujan Grisham said it would eliminate co-pays for them, too. Officials estimate both changes will make child care free for a total of 30,000 families.
This is pretty freaking wonderful; Lujan Grisham announced the expanded benefit yesterday on her website and at a child care center in Albuquerque, and the video is worth skimming through, if only for the occasional shots of a tiny little girl doing her level best to show interest in all these grownups talking about policy.
With the workforce still recovering from pandemic chaos — not that life for working families was a picnic beforehand! — the expanded childcare benefits will give a lot of workers the option of going back to work, or even starting small businesses themselves because they'll have more flexibility. This isn't just good news for families; it'll also be a boost for businesses that have had a hard time filling positions in the unsettled pandemic economy.
Mario Cardona, the chief of policy and practice for Child Care Aware of America, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable child care, called the announcement “the type of thing that we should be seeing across the country.”
Though other states, including Georgia, Virginia and Kansas, have expanded eligibility and made child care more affordable during the pandemic, none have gone as far as New Mexico, which has committed a historic and unusual amount of resources to the sector, Cardona said. Other states have largely relied on federal relief from the Cares Act and the American Rescue Plan to pay for child-care improvements, but the last of those dollars expires in 2024 and lawmakers may be hesitant, Cardona said, to roll out new programs using temporary money.
But with the federal bennies starting to run out in a couple years, how on earth will New Mexico pay for all this outrageous socialism? Easy peasy: It's not just using the federal pandemic funds. This has been a priority for the state for a while now:
New Mexico, by contrast, has created permanent pots of money. In early 2020, the state spent $300 million to create its Early Childhood Education and Care Fund. The endowment, which draws on taxes from oil and natural gas production, is projected to be worth $4.3 billion by 2025.
That endowment is especially important to Lujan Grisham's next goal, which is to make the expanded child care benefit permanent, by using some $127 million a year from another source, New Mexico's Land Grant Permanent Fund — but to allow the state to tap those funds, voters will need to pass an initiative in the November election.
On top of the expanded benefits for a year, Lujan Grisham also announced the state would use $10 million in discretionary funds from the American Rescue Plan to offer grants to new or expanded daycare centers, to make sure there's enough quality child care to meet the increased demand.
In addition, the state will beef up the child care workforce with a new stipend program that will pay up to $2000 per semester for early childhood professionals enrolled in state universities or community colleges; that's on top of an existing scholarship program to get more people enrolled in the field.
The new benefits will start helping a lot of working and middle-class families right away, as the Post explains:
Melissa Martinez, a single mother of a 3-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter, said the news came as a great relief after the pandemic. Martinez said she has experienced tremendous financial setbacks over the last two years and has found herself unable to afford child care at times. The co-pay waiver will save her $120 a month.
“Unfortunately, $120 does go really far in a single-income household,” Martinez said. “That goes to pretty much all of our necessities, basic necessities like shampoo. You would be surprised how many bottles of soap I’ve been through because my little guys love to play in the bath.”
Why yes, when you're raising kiddos and you don't have a great big pile of birthday stock holdings from your rich dad, $120 extra a month can mean a hell of a lot. Martinez, who volunteers with a nonprofit that advocates for early childhood education and is therefore probably awfully biased in favor of children, told the Post that
she has met dozens of low-income families who have long been afraid to earn more money because they worried they would no longer qualify for the federal child-care subsidies states give low-income parents. By expanding the eligibility for the program, Martinez said she and other parents will feel empowered to look for better paying jobs.
This is a big heckin' deal, and it's been a central goal for Lujan Grisham, who campaigned on improving New Mexico's previously abysmal rankings for children's well-being. In addition to ramping up opportunities for child care, New Mexico this year also became one of the very few states to start providing a state child tax credit, too.
We could do this as a nation. It was in the Build Back Better bill, which would have provided child care and expanded the child tax credit that measurably reduced child poverty. The idea strikes me as far preferable to an agenda of attacking gay kids, censoring school books, and just generally making life crappier for America's children. But as I say, I'll take optimism where I find it. We could be so much better. Maybe we're all just part of one big soul, and we could act like it.
[WaPo (free link) / Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham]
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Thank God America's Richest Investors Did OK During The Pandemic!
$1.5 trillion in additional wealth is 'OK,' isn't it?
The pandemic, we're told, was just a terrible time for US businesses, especially small businesses like restaurants and places that depended on tourism. Airlines certainly took a hit, for a time. But quite a few of America's biggest corporations actually made out quite well, with huge benefits for their investors, a new Brookings study fnds. The study looked at 22 big American corporations that did reasonably well during the pandemic, like Amazon, Disney, FedEx, Home Depot, McDonald’s, and Target, among others.
Turns out that the 22 corporations studied generated a whopping $1.5 trillion in additional wealth for their shareholders, which must also have been welcome news to the companies' employees, too, because as we all know, when corporations do well, their workers do, too! That's just basic eco ... oh, wait, maybe that might have been true in olden times, but in reality, most employees saw very little improvement in their pay, although many did at least get the additional risk of working during the pandemic and getting yelled at by customers who refused to wear masks.
The Brookings executive summary summarizes who needs to be executed (with votes):
In general, worker pay is still far too low, compared to either a living wage or company financial performance; shareholders reaped tremendous rewards while workers shared only minimally in company success; and executives and shareholders were mostly insulated from losses that workers bore.
Here's a fun little table, noting that shareholder earnings increased 57 times as much as the gains made by the workers who made those fabulous profits possible:
Clearly, the smart move during the pandemic would have been to quit your job, become a member of the investor class, and watch the profits roll in. We wonder why so few minimum-wage workers chose that option.
As Judd Legum explains in his Popular Information newsletter,
Those 22 corporations employ about 7 million workers. Those workers collectively received $27 billion in additional pay during the first seven quarters of the pandemic. That sounds like a lot, but it amounts to about $3700 per worker or a less than $1 per hour increase for a full-time employee.
Contrast that with the benefits to the richest five percent of US households, the six million families who hold most of the stock in the USA: They each saw, on average, an increase of $140,000 per household, which is rather a lot more than the increased wages. Like, nearly six times the median wage of the workers at those 22 companies. Not the median increase in earnings, but their actual median annual wage.
And if you want to really stoke some class resentment — and boy howdy, do we ever! — Brookings points out that the CEOs of the 22 companies raked in nearly half a billion dollars in compensation in 2020 alone.
On average, CEO pay topped $22 million, while the median employee earned, on average, less than $25,000. Across all 22 companies, the average ratio of CEO pay to median employee pay was 904 to 1.
We should note here that the median income for workers in the 22 companies is also significantly lower than the 2019 US national median income of just under $54,500, which makes sense because not a lot of doctors and lawyers and stock analysts are stocking shelves at Walmart.
Also too, the study narrows in on a dozen big companies that "won" the pandemic, Legum says:
Albertsons, Amazon, Costco, CVS, Dollar General, FedEx, Home Depot, Kroger, Lowe's, Target, UPS, and Walmart. These are all businesses that benefited from the shift to eating at home and shopping online. As the pandemic wanes, these companies are poised to continue to benefit from permanent shifts in consumer behavior.
From January 2020 to November 2021, these 12 companies saw their profits increase "$56.1 billion, or 45%, compared to the previous seven quarters." Very little of this extra cash made its way to workers.
At two of the dozen Pandemic Champs, UPS and Dollar General, workers got no pandemic/"hazard pay" increases during the worst months of the outbreaks. Other companies did raise salaries temporarily; Home Depot was actually fairly generous, with a $3500 bonus for full-time workers. That was a 13 percent pay hike. On average, though, temporary pandemic pay went up only about six percent.
Also too, the tight labor market helped out most workers a little, as employers increased wages to hold on to employees. Only Lowes and Dollar General, out of the winning dozen companies, saw no pay increases at all. But damn it, much of those wage increases got et up by inflation, resulting in real wage hikes of only a percent or two. (And never mind the "Joe Biden did inflation" narrative from Republicans: Inflation increased worldwide, mostly due to increased demand and whacked-out supply chains, as well as just plain corporate grasping.)
Brookings points out that a lot of the disparities were due to conscious choices by the 22 companies. Rather than sharing their increased profits with employees, the companies handed the extra cash to shareholders, in the form of dividends and in stock buybacks, which increase share values for stockholders. All told, the 22 companies devoted five times as much of their increased profits to enriching shareholders as they did on additional employee pay of all kinds (including temporary pandemic bonus pay).
Had the companies devoted the cash they spent on stock buybacks to their workers instead (Ha! Ha!), the average wage increase would have amounted to around 40 percent. We suppose that might have caused inflation, though, so thank goodness the already-rich investor class got the benefits instead.
The report points out that this arrangement, where workers' pay remains static while investors make out like bandits, didn't used to be the case in pre-Reaganomics times, either:
Workers, at least white men, used to share in company success through higher wages. In the three decades after World War II, the economy divided gains more equitably between workers and shareholders; worker pay and the S&P 500 grew at roughly the same rate. But in the late 1970s, economic productivity and worker pay diverged dramatically. In the subsequent three decades, productivity has risen more than three times as much as compensation. Instead of boosting pay for the average worker, increased productivity drove greater compensation for highly paid corporate employees, higher company profits, and higher shareholder returns.
Well sure, but you also have to keep in mind that greed is good, and that with a more diverse workforce, devoting a greater share of profits to employee pay wouldn't only benefit white men anymore, and is that the kind of America we even want? (It totally is.)
In conclusion, next time there's a pandemic or other shock to the economy, make sure you're already well off so you can come out of the downturn in better shape.
[Brookings Metro / Popular Information]
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Texas Gov Gets Very Own Blockade By Pissed Off Mexican Truckers, Good Job Well Done
A tit for a tat.
Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a number of measures that are absolutely vital to keep his name in the news with the primary coming up, and also ostensibly to protect Texas from Joe Biden's allegedly open borders. In addition to a stunt that would involve busing and flying asylum seekers to to dump them in Washington DC so Biden can have them (ha! ha!), Abbott ordered Texas state police to start performing "safety inspections" on every single commercial truck entering the US from Mexico.
When he announced the harsher "safety" inspections, Abbott said he knew they would "dramatically slow" cross-border traffic, but by golly it was worth it to keep Texas "safe." This week, it turns out that Abbott was more right than he knew: The inspections have led to hours-long delays for trucks entering Texas, and have sparked blockades of official border crossings by Mexican truckers angry at Abbott's policy.
The Texas Tribune reports that at the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge near McAllen, Texas — normally one of the busiest ports of entry — no commercial vehicles crossed the border at all Monday or Tuesday because Mexican truckers had blocked both north and southbound lanes of the the highway on the Mexico side, in protest of Abbott's inspection order.
Crossings have also slowed to a fraction of normal in El Paso and at other ports of entry, and the New York Times reports that delays of up to 14 hours have led some truck drivers to skip Texas altogether, and to take the longer drive to cross the border in New Mexico or Arizona.
No big deal, it's only around $12 million a day in produce alone that's being held up. If the slowdowns continue, that's certain to lead to higher prices and possible shortages in grocery stores across the US, which of course will be blamed on Joe Biden and Democrats regardless of the fact that Abbott caused them.
Mind you, Abbott's enhanced inspections come after the trucks have already made it through the regular border inspections done by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Under US law, searches for narcotics or undocumented immigrants at the border are entirely a matter of federal responsibility. After the trucks are screened by CBP, they're perfectly legal to travel on into the US. On a typical day, one trucker told the Texas Tribune, the process of getting through the El Paso port of entry only takes about a half hour. Tuesday, he said, the traffic backups and extra inspections delayed him six hours on his trip to pick up office supplies in El Paso, bound for Juárez.
Texas's Department of Public Safety (DPS) does have the authority to check commercial trucks for compliance with safety laws. Normally, such safety checks are performed randomly on a few of the thousands of trucks crossing into Texas daily. But Abbott ordered that all trucks be inspected, to save Texans from that Biden policy that hasn't gone into effect yet. In his press release announcing the crackdown, Abbott insisted he would "use any and all lawful powers to curtail the flow of drugs, human traffickers, illegal immigrants, weapons, and other contraband into Texas."
Which, again, ain't his job.
As of yet, the escalated inspections don't seem to have netted any huge caches of drugs or disrupted any cartel human trafficking operations, the Tribune reports; for that matter, it's not even clear what exactly the long, slow DPS inspections are even looking at. (They're looking at staying in the governor's good graces.)
The Tribune notes that the normal CBP screening process is anything but lax, with agents performing detailed, even invasive searches of commercial vehicles, to the degree that the ACLU complains that the ports of entry are effectively "a Constitution-free zone," according to former CBP commissioner Gil Kerlikowske, who headed the agency from 2014 to 2017.
“The number of K-9 [dogs] they have to look for drugs, the X-ray machines, they got really good at this — you’ll see them be able to tap the sides of cars, panels of vehicles and locate whether there’s a false panel or something’s been concealed,” Kerlikowske added.
There's little reason to think that CBP really need's Texas DPS to help with any of that, but of course, if Abbott can create some chaos at the border, he can scream about "chaos at the border" and blame Joe Biden without much chance of suffering electoral consequences. After all, any fool knows that Republicans are all about enforcing the laws, so any chaos can't be their fault.
Texas truckers and businesses, however, are starting to hurt because of Abbott's policy, and they don't seem to have any trouble seeing who's fucking around with their profits, as the New York Times reports:
“This has national ramifications,” said John D. Esparza, the chief executive of the Texas Trucking Association. “This is trade going to Ford Motor Company. This is trade going to Minnesota. It’s not just about the city of Laredo trying to get stuff to their local H-E-B,” he said, referring to the Texas grocery chain.
The association endorsed Mr. Abbott for re-election in February, and Mr. Esparza said he immediately got in touch with the governor’s office after the order to express his concerns. “I haven’t had a response, quite frankly,” he said.
Mexico is the state’s largest trading partner, with more than $100 billion in imports in 2019, according to a report from the Texas Department of Transportation. At one of the busiest crossings, in Laredo, 16,000 trucks ordinarily pass through on a given day, Mr. Esparza said.
CBP has noticed too, and says that in just the first week, Abbott's inspections have resulted in a 60 percent drop in commercial traffic across the Texas-Mexico border. In a written statement, CBP said,
The longer than average wait times – and the subsequent supply chain disruptions – are unrelated to CBP screening activities and are due to additional and unnecessary inspections being conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) at the order of the Governor of Texas.
As the Texas Tribune also points out, it's not just Mexican truckers who are being harmed by those "unnecessary" inspections, since most Mexican truckers make several runs a day across the border, bringing Mexican goods and produce to US border cities, where American trucks and drivers haul the loads out to the rest of Texas and beyond.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican first elected to that office in 2014, also had harsh criticism for what Abbott is doing to Texas bidniss, saying that Abbott should “cease his truck inspection project,” and that Abbott's “inspection program is turning a crisis into a catastrophe.” In an open letter to Abbott, Miller called the inspections "political theater" and warned that it could result in "untold losses" for businesses across the state.
“Your inspection protocol is not stopping illegal immigration,” Miller said in his letter. “It is stopping food from getting to grocery store shelves and in many cases causing food to rot in trucks — many of which are owned by Texas and other American companies. … The people of Texas deserve better!”
Miller is among the first Republicans to call for Abbott to knock this the hell off, noting that CBP agents already "conduct extensive inspections of commercial vehicles" and that the state should use law enforcement resources where illegal border crossings actually take place, "not to create a crisis where they do not," which we'd just point out is still CBP's job, not Texas DPS's.
Mind you, Miller's criticism isn't merely a call for good government; he's also a rightwing ally of Donald Trump seeking a third term as Ag Commissioner, so he has plenty of reason to poke at Abbott. Isn't democracy a fun game?
[Texas Tribune / NYT / Texas Tribune / Image: KHOU-TV]
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LIVE: President Biden Talkin' Trucks
Today on WonkTV!
Unfortunately this will not be the president going VROOM around a track while he test drives a truck. Instead, according to the White House, it is Biden talking about "Remarks on Progress Made on his Administration’s Trucking Action Plan to Strengthen Our Nation’s Supply Chains." So that sounds nice!
We think Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is going to be there too.
Watch here live:
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