A Rising Tide

 My recent travels have freed me from having to read some of Yglesias's tired contrarianism every day, but he takes on an interesting topic today: wealth inequality.

In particular, he takes aim at the idea of economic transfers based on historical racial injustice - something like reparations, though he doesn't mention them by name - and focuses instead on the fact that America needs a broad based attack on poverty.

He rightly notes that America isn't THAT poor, the way Rose Twitters assume it is when they can't understand why their podcast isn't making them enough money to live comfortably in Brooklyn. What's more, there are more poor White people than poor Black people, even though the rate of poverty among Black people is disproportionately high. Historical legacies of racism have disadvantaged Black people and many Hispanics for centuries. While that it true, crafting a program that narrowly improves their lives at the exclusion of poor Whites is a political loser.

Yglesias has been beating the drum for something like Mitt Romney's child allowance. The idea would be to address childhood poverty by simply giving families money if they have kids. Kids are incredible cash sinkholes, with day care alone being a major, major expense. Food, clothing, additional rooms in your home...kids cost a lot. If we directly subsidize child rearing, we are able to address so many other issues. A lot of the negative educational outcomes are a byproduct of poverty. Remove the worst deprivations of poverty and you give school kids (as opposed to the institutions of the school) the resources to succeed.

It would be great if this could be a byproduct of Democratic midterm gains. Maybe the rank embrace of Putin by so many GQP media stars, some level of Trump fatigue or the way that Republicans have embraced ideas like overturning Roe or even Griswold will create enough momentum to get us to 53-55 Senators and retaining the House so we can pass this. Aside from climate change legislation, it could be the most important bill Congress would pass since ACA.