Kamala was impressive during the Q&A. 
Last edited:
2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races
- Thread starter mc_brew
- Start date
Robinson just murked Yang's whole shyt 
Harris proposal runs into the same exact problems Warren's does. It tries to fix a problem rooted in race and that was specifically targeted at a group, without mentioning race or that specific group. It sounds clever, but it doesn't hold up. Just like with affirmative action, the main beneficiaries will end up being white women, and by extension white families who weren't effected by redlining. There are some positives. The ten year min could help, although depending on how it's worded, you excluded those who were force out due to gentrification.
At the next debate there should be a lengthy discussion on housing policy. We need answers
At the next debate there should be a lengthy discussion on housing policy. We need answers
Harris proposal runs into the same exact problems Warren's does. It tries to fix a problem rooted in race and that was specifically targeted at a group, without mentioning race or that specific group. It sounds clever, but it doesn't hold up. Just like with affirmative action, the main beneficiaries will end up being white women, and by extension white families who weren't effected by redlining. There are some positives. The ten year min could help, although depending on how it's worded, you excluded those who were force out due to gentrification.
At the next debate there should be a lengthy discussion on housing policy. We need answers
Most definitely, I don’t wanna hear anymore “trumps a bully and I would smack him in the mouth” “we have a predator in the White House” talk. Yea that shyt sounds fly and all but I just wanna hear substantive talk about the actual policies now.
Kamala Harris proposes $100 billion plan for black homeownership
By DAVID SIDERS
07/06/2019
Kamala Harris, calling on the nation to “deal with the racial wealth gap,” on Saturday proposed a $100 billion federal program to help black people buy homes.
The California senator said the plan, which would provide down payment and closing cost assistance of up to $25,000 to people renting or living in historically red-lined communities, would help some 4 million home-buyers.
The plan’s release comes as Harris surges in Democratic presidential primary polls following a debate last week in which she chastised former Vice President Joe Biden for his past opposition to busing and former associations with segregationist senators. The controversy has continued in recent days, with Biden defending his record.
Black voters are a critical constituency in the Democratic primary, especially in the South.
Harris, speaking at the Essence Festival in New Orleans, said her program would “put homeownership within the reach” of millions of families.
“A typical black family has just $10 of wealth for every $100 held by a white family,” she said. “So we must right that wrong and, after generations of discrimination, give black families a real shot at homeownership — historically one of the most powerful drivers of wealth in our country."
Harris’ housing program would come in the form of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grants limited to families with incomes up to $100,000, or $125,000 in high-cost areas.
Democrats concerned about income and racial inequality in the United States have long pointed to the lasting effects of red-lining — and persistent gaps in the rates of black and white homeownership, a traditional means of building wealth.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a fellow 2020 contender, previously proposed providing down payment grants to first-time homebuyers in formerly red-lined, segregated and lower-income areas.
On Saturday, Harris also pledged to work to expand HUD’s fair housing program, strengthen anti-discrimination lending laws and amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act to require that credit scores include rent, phone and utility payments.
By DAVID SIDERS
07/06/2019
Kamala Harris, calling on the nation to “deal with the racial wealth gap,” on Saturday proposed a $100 billion federal program to help black people buy homes.
The California senator said the plan, which would provide down payment and closing cost assistance of up to $25,000 to people renting or living in historically red-lined communities, would help some 4 million home-buyers.
The plan’s release comes as Harris surges in Democratic presidential primary polls following a debate last week in which she chastised former Vice President Joe Biden for his past opposition to busing and former associations with segregationist senators. The controversy has continued in recent days, with Biden defending his record.
Black voters are a critical constituency in the Democratic primary, especially in the South.
Harris, speaking at the Essence Festival in New Orleans, said her program would “put homeownership within the reach” of millions of families.
“A typical black family has just $10 of wealth for every $100 held by a white family,” she said. “So we must right that wrong and, after generations of discrimination, give black families a real shot at homeownership — historically one of the most powerful drivers of wealth in our country."
Harris’ housing program would come in the form of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grants limited to families with incomes up to $100,000, or $125,000 in high-cost areas.
Democrats concerned about income and racial inequality in the United States have long pointed to the lasting effects of red-lining — and persistent gaps in the rates of black and white homeownership, a traditional means of building wealth.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a fellow 2020 contender, previously proposed providing down payment grants to first-time homebuyers in formerly red-lined, segregated and lower-income areas.
On Saturday, Harris also pledged to work to expand HUD’s fair housing program, strengthen anti-discrimination lending laws and amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act to require that credit scores include rent, phone and utility payments.
For comparison:
A First Step to Addressing the Black-White Wealth Gap
For decades, the federal government discriminated against Black families by denying them access to the same kind of federal housing subsidies that white families received to purchase a home — a practice known as “redlining.” The federal government officially ended that form of discrimination in the 1960s and passed the Fair Housing Act. Yet the gap between white homeownership rates and Black homeownership rates today is about 30% — bigger than it was in 1960 when housing discrimination was legal.
This enormous gap is a moral stain on our country. And because the government bears a big part of the blame for it, the government should take real steps to fix it.
My housing bill takes a first step by creating a first-of-its-kind down-payment assistance program. The people eligible for assistance must be first-time homebuyers who live in a formerly redlined neighborhoods or communities that were segregated by law and are still currently low-income. If they qualify, they are entitled to a substantial grant they can put towards a down payment on a home anywhere in the country. The program will provide thousands of families with a real chance to buy a home — the same opportunities the government denied to previous generations of residents of the area.
Professors Mehrsa Baradaran and Darrick Hamilton have said this proposal is the “first since the Fair Housing Act with the explicit intent of redressing the iterative effects of our nation’s sordid history of housing discrimination,” and that it “has the potential to make a substantive dent in closing our enormous and persistent racial wealth gap.”
Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing
My bill also removes unnecessary barriers that prevent people from finding affordable housing.
One existing barrier is discrimination. The Fair Housing Act bars certain forms of discrimination — and we must ensure that the Act is not weakened or diminished either by Congress or by regulators, and that it is fully and fairly enforced. But there are other forms of discrimination that are not currently covered by the Act. That’s why my bill prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, veteran status, and the source of one’s income, like a housing voucher. Landlords shouldn’t be able to reject tenants based on what they look like, how they identify, or who they love.
My bill removes another barrier: lack of access to credit for creditworthy borrowers looking to buy a home. In the 1970s, Congress passed a law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which required banks to make loans in communities where they took deposits. Before the law went into effect, banks often took deposits in minority neighborhoods, but only made mortgages and other loans in white communities.
The CRA rules are important, but they could be doing a better job of ensuring that financial institutions meet the credit needs of all the communities they serve. My bill extends the law to cover non-bank mortgage lenders, promotes more investment in activities that help low- and moderate-income communities, strengthens sanctions against institutions that fail to follow the rules, and imposes new requirements on banks that want to merge. These changes will make it easier for creditworthy borrowers to find an affordable mortgage, no matter where they live.
A final barrier is that many homeowners are still underwater on their mortgages since the 2008 financial crisis. Typically, these homeowners are in areas — often rural areas — where housing prices have not rebounded since the 2008 crisis. My bill invests $2 billion to support underwater borrowers in these areas so they can build more economic security.
Empowering Communities, Rather than Wall Street
I also want to empower communities to make decisions that protect their best interests.
For example, my bill reforms a government program that puts the interests of hedge funds and private equity firms ahead of the interests of borrowers and the communities they live in. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) have auctioned off thousands of delinquent mortgages. In the first few years of these auctions, nearly all of the mortgages sold were purchased by for-profit entities, mostly private equity and hedge funds. Rather than providing a second chance for families, the new Wall Street owners often foreclosed quickly and failed to maintain the properties.
I pushed FHA and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to improve its practices and the agencies did take some steps to improve the program. But we need to do more. That’s why my bill will put strict new requirements on the sale program, limiting the situations in which the agencies are allowed to sell mortgages and imposing requirements on buyers to make sure they protect distressed homeowners and the neighborhoods they live in. The changes will allow more people to stay in their homes and prevent private equity funds from scooping up properties and turning around to charge people exorbitant rents.
My administration will also take whatever legal steps it can to stop states from preempting local efforts to enact tenant protection laws. More than 30 states have passed laws that explicitly prohibit cities from adopting rent control. Efforts to repeal these state preemption laws have been met with fierce opposition from real estate and private equity giants, who have shelled out massive sums of money to block these proposals. Just last year, firms like New York-based private equity giant Blackstone Group contributed to a $65 million war chest to defeat a ballot initiative in California that would have repealed a state law making it harder for cities to control housing costs.
These state laws effectively permit Wall Street to decide what’s best for cities and towns instead of the residents of those places choosing for themselves. It’s wrong, and as President, I will do whatever I can to stop and reverse these industry-backed efforts to take power away from cities and towns.
My plan will lower rents, take a first step towards closing the racial wealth gap, and make it easier for Americans to access affordable housing. Enacting the plan will be a top priority of my administration — because every American deserves a safe, decent, and affordable place to live.
Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren Introduce Racial Equity Plans
By Maggie Astor
NY Times
July 6, 2019
It was a big day for plans, and Senator Elizabeth Warren rubbed her hands together almost gleefully as she said, “I’ve got a lot of them.”
But at the Essence Festival in New Orleans on Saturday, she was not the only one with a plan.
Ms. Warren and Senator Kamala Harris of California both used the occasion — the annual culture and music festival sponsored by Essence magazine, which caters to black women — to introduce major new proposals intended to address racial disparities, including in wealth and homeownership.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas also spoke at the event.
Ms. Harris announced a plan aimed at reducing the racial gap in homeownership, including $100 billion to help black families and individuals buy homes in historically redlined communities, where banks systematically denied them loans. The money would help cover down payments and closing costs for up to four million families or individuals, providing home buyers with up to $25,000 each.
Ms. Harris also called for stronger laws against housing discrimination; for more funding for financial literacy education; and for major changes in the calculation of credit scores, which lenders use to determine interest rates and eligibility for loans.
Currently, credit scores are based on payment history for things like credit cards, auto loans and mortgages, which many people of color don’t have. Ms. Harris’s plan would require credit reporting agencies to include rent, phone bill and utility payments in their calculations as well.
Her campaign projected that eliminating the homeownership gap would increase the median wealth of black households by about $32,000, and that of Latino households by about $29,000. Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts, had announced a similar plan.
“Join me as we right what is wrong and write the next chapter of history in our country,” Ms. Harris said. “The fight of black women has always been fueled and grounded in faith and in the belief of what is possible.”
Ms. Harris also said that if elected, she would seek to require the Justice Department to review the constitutionality of any abortion law passed by a state “that has a history of interfering with a woman’s access to choice” — a process, known as preclearance. The Voting Rights Act required similar review for voting-related laws until the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling in 2013.
Every year, the federal government awards $500 billion in contracts to companies that, altogether, employ about a quarter of the country’s workers. Ms. Warren’s plan, which she released on Friday and described to the audience on Saturday, calls for an executive order that would require the recipients of those contracts to diversify their workforces, and pay women and people of color equally.
“It’s up to the federal government to say what the terms of those contracts are,” Ms. Warren said. “It’s not enough to talk the talk about equal pay for equal work. It’s not enough to talk the talk about the diversity of your work force. You’ve got to walk the walk, or you’re not getting those federal contracts.”
Under her proposed executive order, contractors would be barred from asking about past salaries and criminal records, and from using forced arbitration and noncompete clauses. Another component of the plan is meant to diversify the federal government’s own work force.
Ms. Warren also called for a $7 billion federal fund to invest in businesses owned by people of color and women, noting — as Mr. Booker did, too — that it is far easier for white Americans to start a small business than for black Americans, who receive a tiny fraction of the country’s venture capital.
“We start to close the gap,” she said, “by using the power that the president herself will have.” At the word “herself,” the audience broke into applause.
Mr. Booker, too, addressed the racial wealth gap, calling for “the largest pool of capital for nontraditional entrepreneurs in our country’s history” and highlighting his proposal to create savings accounts for every child born in the United States.
The accounts, which Mr. Booker calls “baby bonds,” would start with $1,000 for each child, and families below a certain income threshold would receive additional contributions of up to $2,000 a year.
“A paycheck will help you get by, but wealth in America is what lets you get ahead,” he said.
Mr. Booker also emphasized his proposals on gun violence, an issue in which he has gone further than some other candidates. Perhaps the most ambitious of his plans is a national gun licensing program. And, pressed on what he would do for black women, he reiterated a pledge he made in the spring to create an “office of reproductive freedom” within the White House.
The office would oversee policymaking on issues like abortion, contraception access and maternal mortality, he said.
In a question-and-answer session after his speech, Mr. O’Rourke outlined the wide-ranging education plan his campaign released on Friday.
Among other things, Mr. O’Rourke is proposing forgiving public school teachers’ student loan debt, providing more funding for historically black colleges and universities, and creating a $500 billion fund for school districts where a majority of students are people of color.
But in his main address on Saturday, he did not focus on policies. He spent much of his time evoking African-American history, name-checking Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy and recounting a strike led by black women at the Medical University of South Carolina 50 years ago.
“African-American women are the heart and soul of the Democratic Party,” he said. “It is on your hard work, your votes, your belief, your power of helping others to believe in what is possible, that we have not only elected the candidates that we want to see in office but have allowed them to pursue the policies we want to see to make this a better country.”
Two lower-polling presidential candidates — Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York — also delivered brief remarks.
By Maggie Astor
NY Times
July 6, 2019
It was a big day for plans, and Senator Elizabeth Warren rubbed her hands together almost gleefully as she said, “I’ve got a lot of them.”
But at the Essence Festival in New Orleans on Saturday, she was not the only one with a plan.
Ms. Warren and Senator Kamala Harris of California both used the occasion — the annual culture and music festival sponsored by Essence magazine, which caters to black women — to introduce major new proposals intended to address racial disparities, including in wealth and homeownership.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas also spoke at the event.
Kamala Harris: $100 billion for homeownership
Ms. Harris announced a plan aimed at reducing the racial gap in homeownership, including $100 billion to help black families and individuals buy homes in historically redlined communities, where banks systematically denied them loans. The money would help cover down payments and closing costs for up to four million families or individuals, providing home buyers with up to $25,000 each.
Ms. Harris also called for stronger laws against housing discrimination; for more funding for financial literacy education; and for major changes in the calculation of credit scores, which lenders use to determine interest rates and eligibility for loans.
Currently, credit scores are based on payment history for things like credit cards, auto loans and mortgages, which many people of color don’t have. Ms. Harris’s plan would require credit reporting agencies to include rent, phone bill and utility payments in their calculations as well.
Her campaign projected that eliminating the homeownership gap would increase the median wealth of black households by about $32,000, and that of Latino households by about $29,000. Ms. Warren, of Massachusetts, had announced a similar plan.
“Join me as we right what is wrong and write the next chapter of history in our country,” Ms. Harris said. “The fight of black women has always been fueled and grounded in faith and in the belief of what is possible.”
Ms. Harris also said that if elected, she would seek to require the Justice Department to review the constitutionality of any abortion law passed by a state “that has a history of interfering with a woman’s access to choice” — a process, known as preclearance. The Voting Rights Act required similar review for voting-related laws until the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling in 2013.
Elizabeth Warren: New Rules for Federal Contractors
Every year, the federal government awards $500 billion in contracts to companies that, altogether, employ about a quarter of the country’s workers. Ms. Warren’s plan, which she released on Friday and described to the audience on Saturday, calls for an executive order that would require the recipients of those contracts to diversify their workforces, and pay women and people of color equally.
“It’s up to the federal government to say what the terms of those contracts are,” Ms. Warren said. “It’s not enough to talk the talk about equal pay for equal work. It’s not enough to talk the talk about the diversity of your work force. You’ve got to walk the walk, or you’re not getting those federal contracts.”
Under her proposed executive order, contractors would be barred from asking about past salaries and criminal records, and from using forced arbitration and noncompete clauses. Another component of the plan is meant to diversify the federal government’s own work force.
Ms. Warren also called for a $7 billion federal fund to invest in businesses owned by people of color and women, noting — as Mr. Booker did, too — that it is far easier for white Americans to start a small business than for black Americans, who receive a tiny fraction of the country’s venture capital.
“We start to close the gap,” she said, “by using the power that the president herself will have.” At the word “herself,” the audience broke into applause.
Cory Booker: ‘Baby bonds’ and reproductive rights
Mr. Booker, too, addressed the racial wealth gap, calling for “the largest pool of capital for nontraditional entrepreneurs in our country’s history” and highlighting his proposal to create savings accounts for every child born in the United States.
The accounts, which Mr. Booker calls “baby bonds,” would start with $1,000 for each child, and families below a certain income threshold would receive additional contributions of up to $2,000 a year.
“A paycheck will help you get by, but wealth in America is what lets you get ahead,” he said.
Mr. Booker also emphasized his proposals on gun violence, an issue in which he has gone further than some other candidates. Perhaps the most ambitious of his plans is a national gun licensing program. And, pressed on what he would do for black women, he reiterated a pledge he made in the spring to create an “office of reproductive freedom” within the White House.
The office would oversee policymaking on issues like abortion, contraception access and maternal mortality, he said.
Beto O’Rourke: Debt forgiveness for teachers
In a question-and-answer session after his speech, Mr. O’Rourke outlined the wide-ranging education plan his campaign released on Friday.
Among other things, Mr. O’Rourke is proposing forgiving public school teachers’ student loan debt, providing more funding for historically black colleges and universities, and creating a $500 billion fund for school districts where a majority of students are people of color.
But in his main address on Saturday, he did not focus on policies. He spent much of his time evoking African-American history, name-checking Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy and recounting a strike led by black women at the Medical University of South Carolina 50 years ago.
“African-American women are the heart and soul of the Democratic Party,” he said. “It is on your hard work, your votes, your belief, your power of helping others to believe in what is possible, that we have not only elected the candidates that we want to see in office but have allowed them to pursue the policies we want to see to make this a better country.”
Two lower-polling presidential candidates — Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York — also delivered brief remarks.
Study: Cory Booker’s baby bonds nearly close the racial wealth gap for young adults
Right now, white young people have 16 times the wealth of black young people.
By Dylan Matthews@dylanmattdylan@vox.com
Feb 1, 2019
I.
Baby bonds, a proposal embraced by newly announced presidential candidate Cory Booker, would give newborns savings accounts that would be worth tens of thousands of dollars by age 18. It’s an ambitious plan — and, according to a new study, it would almost entirely close the wealth gap between black and white young people.
Booker’s plan would offer all newborns $1,000, and then add up to $2,000 annually for children in low-income households. By age 18, that could add up to serious money; Booker’s team estimates that for kids from lowest-income families, the nest egg would average some $46,000.
The new analysis by Columbia postdoctoral researcher Naomi Zewde looks at what kind of effect such a nest egg would have on our racial wealth gap. It’s a pretty stark divide: Zewde estimates that in 2015, the median white person aged 18 to 25 had a net worth of $46,000. The median black person, by contrast, had a median net worth of $2,900. That’s a ratio of 15.9: White young people were nearly 16 times richer than their black counterparts.
Zewde looked back and estimated what those 18- to 25-year-olds would have as net worth had a baby bonds policy been law at their birth. In part because her research began before Booker unveiled his specific proposal, the proposal she models is not identical to Booker’s, but both arrive at similar bond values for children depending on their economic background. Because the bond values are similar, the results are a good approximation of what Booker’s bill would do.
The baby bonds’ effect is striking. In a baby bonds scenario, the median white young person would have had a net worth of $79,159. The median black young person would have had a net worth of $57,845. A gap remains, but the ratio has been reduced to 1.4.
In other words, Booker’s proposal comes close to eliminating the racial wealth gap entirely for young adults.
How Booker’s bill works
To understand why baby bonds — a proposal that is facially race-neutral — has this dramatic an effect on the racial wealth gap, you have to know a bit more about how it’s formally structured.As Vox’s Sarah Kliff explained in October when Booker unveiled the proposal, every newborn would start out with $1,000 in a low-risk savings account managed by the Treasury Department. Booker’s team assumes in their analysis (as does Zewde) a 3 percent rate of return.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13312269/Program.jpg)
But depending on parental income, kids would get up to $2,000 added to their account every year. A kid in a family of four earning over $126,000 would get nothing, but everyone under that would get an annual contribution of up to $2,000 (with the highest amount reserved for families below the poverty line).
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13312275/Income.jpg)
Booker’s team anticipated this in designing the proposal. When they unveiled the bill, they provided estimates to Kliff showing that the average white child would wind up with an account worth $15,790 upon reaching 18. But the average black child would end up with $29,038, and the average Latinx child would end up with $27,337.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13302011/race.jpg)
II.
Baby bonds as a kind of reparations
The baby bonds idea isn’t new. British Prime Minister Tony Blair made the proposal a centerpiece of the Labour Party’s 2001 campaign, and his Chancellor Gordon Brown began implementing the plan in 2003, only to have the Conservatives cancel the accounts upon taking power in 2010. Hillary Clinton proposed a $5,000-at-birth baby bond in fall 2007 as part of her 2008 presidential bid, before abandoning the plan as the primaries dragged on.But it’s been revived in recent years by economists Darrick Hamilton and Sandy Darity, who have argued for baby bonds explicitly as a race-neutral way to close the racial wealth gap. Their proposal differed from Booker’s in important ways (it would base eligibility on parental wealth, not parental income, for one thing) but they have been extremely vocal backers of the Booker plan, with Hamilton telling Slate’s Jordan Weissmann, “The most parsimonious way to address racial wealth inequality is a system of reparations. But if we’re not at the political moment for reparations, then baby bonds are a very good mechanism.”
Zewde’s estimates — which use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a survey that has tracked a representative set of American families and their economic outcomes for over 50 years — show that for young adults, a baby bonds plan would nearly achieve a key goal of many reparations proposals: closing the racial wealth gap. That, on its own, will not eliminate economic inequalities grounded in race. While a good share of the wealth gap can be explained by white people having richer parents and bigger inheritances, the gap also tends to increase as people age — that is, the wealth gap between white and black elderly people is greater than between the young adults Booker’s plan targets.
Black families experience more downward mobility when it comes to wealth over their lifespan, whereas white families are likelier to experience upward mobility. So while baby bonds nearly close the young adult wealth gap, they probably won’t do as much to close the overall wealth gap.
The wealth gap also grows due to the persistent gaps in earnings and educational attainment between black and white Americans. A significant fraction of your wealth, after all, comes from portions of your income that you’ve saved in the form of home equity, pension and investment account contributions, Social Security taxes, etc.
And when black incomes are systematically lower (in part because black people get access to fewer years of education), that income differential eventually accumulates into a wealth gap. Once you control for income (as poorer people can’t save as much), there’s no difference in black and white savings rates — but when income isn’t equal, that means black people wind up with less savings.
But nearly closing the black-white wealth gap for young adults is a tremendous achievement for a policy, and could, if passed, help remedy gaps in income by giving black families resources to invest more in education, to start businesses, earn investment income, etc. That in turn could reduce the growth in the gap we currently see as people age.
And the proposal does all this at a quite low cost: Zewde estimates it as costing roughly $82 billion a year. “It would cost less than the tax expenditure on excluding pension contributions from taxable incomes,” she writes, “or the tax expenditure on the preferential tax rates given to income from capital gains and dividends.”
Given that those are savings programs that primarily help higher-income people, there would be a certain poetry in using them to finance a proposal that finally closes the black-white income gap for young people.
UPDATE: Matt Bruenig has a useful piece arguing against using medians and median-to-median ratios for evaluating the effects of proposals meant to mitigate the wealth gap; it’s a worthwhile complement to Zewde’s analysis, if you’re interested in this topic.
Berniewood Hogan
IT'S BERNIE SANDERS WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
Jay Inslee talks to Harry Smith about his big idea for defeating the climate crisis.
Tulsi Gabbard tells Harry Smith about her idea to end U.S. overseas efforts at regime change.
Pete Buttigieg shares his plans to “strengthen American democracy” by implementing same-day voter registration nationwide, granting statehood to Puerto Rico and doing away with the Electoral College.
Steve Bullock wants to end dark money spending in American elections.
Beto O’Rourke tells our Harry Smith about his Big Idea to “fix our democracy,” a new Voting Rights Act.
Andrew Yang is a 44-year-old business entrepreneur who advocates a universal basic income for every American starting at age 18, a program he says will help the large number of Americans whose jobs are at risk of being eliminated in the next 12 years by new technology.
John Hickenlooper tells Harry Smith about his plan for skills training and how it could prepare Americans for the jobs of the future.
Elizabeth Warren tells our Harry Smith about her idea “to cancel about 95 percent of student loan debt and to make college, technical school, two-year, four-year, all fee-free and tuition-free.”
Cory Booker tells our Harry Smith about his big idea for “baby bonds”—giving every child born in America a $1,000 savings account to which the government would add money each year depending on each family’s income level.
Julián Castro tells Harry Smith about his big idea: universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
Kamala Harris lays out her plan to raise pay for America’s teachers.
Kirsten Gillibrand on paid family leave, something many American corporations do not offer.
Bernie Sanders on Medicare For All.
Amy Klobuchar tells Harry Smith about her “big idea” to improve mental health care and addiction treatment — and how the issue has impacted her personally.
Tulsi Gabbard tells Harry Smith about her idea to end U.S. overseas efforts at regime change.
Pete Buttigieg shares his plans to “strengthen American democracy” by implementing same-day voter registration nationwide, granting statehood to Puerto Rico and doing away with the Electoral College.
Steve Bullock wants to end dark money spending in American elections.
Beto O’Rourke tells our Harry Smith about his Big Idea to “fix our democracy,” a new Voting Rights Act.
Andrew Yang is a 44-year-old business entrepreneur who advocates a universal basic income for every American starting at age 18, a program he says will help the large number of Americans whose jobs are at risk of being eliminated in the next 12 years by new technology.
John Hickenlooper tells Harry Smith about his plan for skills training and how it could prepare Americans for the jobs of the future.
Elizabeth Warren tells our Harry Smith about her idea “to cancel about 95 percent of student loan debt and to make college, technical school, two-year, four-year, all fee-free and tuition-free.”
Cory Booker tells our Harry Smith about his big idea for “baby bonds”—giving every child born in America a $1,000 savings account to which the government would add money each year depending on each family’s income level.
Julián Castro tells Harry Smith about his big idea: universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
Kamala Harris lays out her plan to raise pay for America’s teachers.
Kirsten Gillibrand on paid family leave, something many American corporations do not offer.
Bernie Sanders on Medicare For All.
Amy Klobuchar tells Harry Smith about her “big idea” to improve mental health care and addiction treatment — and how the issue has impacted her personally.
Me either.
Harris proposal runs into the same exact problems Warren's does. It tries to fix a problem rooted in race and that was specifically targeted at a group, without mentioning race or that specific group. It sounds clever, but it doesn't hold up. Just like with affirmative action, the main beneficiaries will end up being white women, and by extension white families who weren't effected by redlining. There are some positives. The ten year min could help, although depending on how it's worded, you excluded those who were force out due to gentrification.
At the next debate there should be a lengthy discussion on housing policy. We need answers
That's what I was looking for. Whether it specifies black families or not. And it doesn't.
