Housing Policy. Lax regulation of the mortgage lending industry allowed predatory lenders to ride roughshod in low-income communities and to do so with impunity. Nobody was targeted more aggressively by these lenders than communities of color.
The United States needs a balanced, comprehensive set of housing policies that not only protects low-income families from predatory lenders, but offers them access to credit under favorable terms, while also providing more low-income families with rental housing assistance.
Tax Policy. Government tax expenditures to promote financial security, such as for homeownership, starting a business, or saving for college, come to more than $400 billion per year; almost all of it goes to households that are already financially secure, while excluding those who need financial security the most.
With the expiration of large, regressive tax cuts enacted earlier in the decade, 2010 presents a compelling opportunity to establish more equitable tax policies, starting with improvements of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the Saver’s Credit and the Child and Dependent Care Credit.
Health Care Policy. Forty-seven million people lack health insurance, and 45,000 die each year due to lack of insurance. The United States pays more per capita for health care than any industrialized country and, according to UNICEF, ranks at the bottom of a survey of 21 industrialized countries on all measures of child health.
A public health insurance option akin to Medicare should be available to all Americans under 65. This is the optimal way to guarantee affordable, universal coverage and to hold down the growing costs of care at a sustainable level.
The additional competition from a public plan would lead to efficiencies in the health insurance market that would benefit everyone. The market currently tolerates an astonishing level of waste, estimated to run as high as $700 billion per year, a third of all U.S. spending on health care, which would be enough to cover every uninsured person several times over.
Education policy. High dropout rates in low-income communities are symptomatic of profound inequities in public education. Too many public schools are failing to provide for millions of students who grow up in these communities, leaving them unprepared to compete for jobs that pay much more than poverty-level wages.
The financing of K-12 should be restructured to correct the inequalities in educational opportunity, with priority given to schools in low-income communities. At every level—local, state, federal—policymakers give more to students who have more resources, and less to those who have less.
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