There are a lot of easy and popular public policy wins we could go after right now
But we are all too hung up on hating the other side and the horse race to force our elected officials to do anything about it
Want examples? A small UBI, mental health care access, educational access including early childhood and before and after school care, shoring up social security, medicare, and medicaid, expansion of medicare to cover everyone who wants it,
immigration reform with guest worker programs and a path to citizenship, adoption reform to make adoption way easier and without sacrificing safety, ending mass incarceration, beefing up gun safety protections, police reform,
infrastructure investment in traditional infrastructure like highways and bridges and emerging like high speed trains, robotics and AI
I got a list 10 times this long and I think about it way more than I think about any person regardless of the position that person holds. At some point, we all need to look in the mirror and stop blaming someone else
If we aren't asking for these things -- demanding them -- loud and on the regular, aren't we part of the problem?
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Amazon cutting more employees in the next few weeks bringing total layoffs to over 18,000, more than any other tech company. Its CEO was paid $221 million in 2021. Amazon recently made record revenue & profit. Amazon is worth $868 billion. Founder Bezos net worth is $107 billion.
Amazon pays its workers so little that they often qualify for food stamps. It is among the top 3 employers (along with Walmart and McDonald's) whose employees are on public assistance in virtually every state
Context:
Amazon full-time warehouse employees make $31,200 a year. Jeff Bezos makes that every 12 seconds.
Cost to give warehouse workers 2 weeks paid sick leave + pay bumps so they don't qualify for food stamps = 0.9% of Bezos' fortune
1. Amazon workers in Staten Island just won a vote to unionize. During the union drive, the company held 20 mandatory anti-union meetings per day and had pro-union workers arrested. nytimes.com/2022/03/24/bus…
2. Amazon paid a 6% tax rate last year, which is up from 0% a few years prior.
So one of the richest companies in the world pays a lower tax rate than their warehouse workers making $31k a year.
Compared to white people:
*Black-owned homes are devalued by 23%
*Black-owned homes' property taxes are 13% higher
*Bank fees are 2x higher for Black people
*Black people w/ no criminal record earn $10k less than white people w/ a criminal record
That's just the beginning ...
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*Black college grads have 50% less wealth than white high school dropouts
*The 10 counties most audited by the IRS are 79% people of color
*The Black-white homeowner gap is bigger now than it was in the year 1900
*In the pandemic, Black-owned businesses closed at twice the rate
*All Black Americans combined have half the wealth of the nation's richest 400 people
*The average inheritance for white families is 3x that of Black families
*Relatedly, Black families have $166,000 less wealth than white families, a bigger gap than before Civil Rights