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The Era of Austerity Should Never Return [1]

['Stephen Pimpare', 'Daniel Finn', 'Grace Blakeley', 'Thomas Piketty', 'Clara Martínez-Toledano', 'Amory Gethin', 'Anton Jäger', 'Matt Karp', 'David Sirota', 'Julia Rock']

Date: 2023-04

Stephen Pimpare

A lot of it is taking what’s there, expanding it, and making it permanent. One of the things that, last year and this year, the expanded federal supplemental unemployment insurance benefits revealed is what an absolute, complete mess the US system of unemployment insurance is — and how much variation there is from state to state, and how many of those systems are explicitly designed not to offer assistance to people who are unemployed but, instead, to make it as difficult as possible for them to access benefits.

So I would enact a national unemployment insurance program funded at the national level, not at the state level, with relatively generous benefits and a transparent system with easy means of access. I’d also take the child tax credit expansion and make it a family allowance rather than a tax credit, which I think has a whole host of advantages. I would want to think through what the right amount for that is, but I would definitely make it permanent and turn it into a monthly payment, and also think about whether the Social Security Administration should manage it rather than the IRS.

This is an extraordinary, though short-term, infusion of money that will absolutely have dramatic effects on poverty that we will probably start to see once the $1,400 stimulus check goes out.

Absent the creation of a much more rational health care system, one of the things this bill does is it fully subsidizes COBRA expenses. Currently, if you’re laid off from your job and try to interact with COBRA, it will offer you your former employer’s health care insurance at the full cost, which is absurdly unaffordable. This bill fully subsidizes that, which strikes me as absolutely right. We should not be tying people’s access to health care to their employment, period.

If we are not yet prepared to move toward something like Medicare for All — and I don’t think that, politically, we are there yet — I think we could build on this bill by subsidizing COBRA and doing what the bill did in a more permanent way: radically expand subsidies for people who buy insurance through the ACA marketplace, expand Medicaid again, and fully federalize it so it’s no longer a shared federal state program. We’ve got enormous variation from state to state, and even within states, from county to county, when it comes to your ability to access health care. If you are low-income, that’s utterly incoherent as a policy matter, right? It makes absolutely no sense that where you live should determine your health or your children’s health or your access to benefits. So that should be nationalized and fully funded.

There’s also the question of food stamps. We could argue about whether we want to continue to keep the food stamp benefit or just turn that into an additional cash grant. But either way, the sum involved in that program has always been far too low. The bill knocks it up by 15 percent, which is still too low, and I’d raise it another 15 percent to start and, again, make it a broader benefit.

We’ve just expanded access to the Section 8 housing voucher program. But that program, as it currently stands, has a budget cap every year, which should be lifted. Even if we changed nothing else about that program, we could make access to Section 8 an entitlement to housing so that everyone who qualifies for rental assistance can get that assistance, no matter what it costs. That becomes a piece of the puzzle that reduces the number of people who wind up being homeless in the first place.

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[1] Url: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/03/stephen-pimpare-poverty-stimulus-covid-relief

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