Ownership & Assets

On Tuesday, the Illinois Senate voted to become the eighth state to eliminate its TANF asset test—and the second state thus far in 2013. This development reflects a longstanding trend initiated by the states to reform their programs’ asset limits to better support families’ long-term financial stability—while saving time and money in the process. Yet in the current Farm Bill debate happening at the federal level, House Republicans are proposing changes that would completely undermine this wave of progress. Let’s take a look at some key lessons from Illinois about why asset limit reform makes so much sense.

On Wednesday, the Asset Building Program was pleased to host Gar Alperovitz for a conversation about his new book, “What then Must We Do? Democratizing Wealth and Building a Community-Sustaining Economy from the Ground Up.”. A recording of the event is available here.

Alperovitz is a political economist and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative, an organization based at the University of Maryland working to develop innovative community development policies that promote shared wealth ownership. As introduced by Asset Building Program director Reid Cramer, Aplerovitz is a “big thinker,” whose work on democratic access to wealth and capital has the potential to shift our thinking about economic equality and shared prosperity.

As any parent will tell you, mobility is a game-changer. Once junior can crawl, gone are the days of leaving him on his playmat while you step away, however briefly, and expect him to be in the same spot playing with the safe and developmentally appropriate toys you left him with. No, he'd rather be exploring the shoes you left in the corner of room with his mouth or in pursuit of the family cat. What worked before has to be reexamined to be successful once mobility enters the picture. 

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on New America's Early Education Initiative blog. Conor Williams recently joined the Early Education Initiative as a Senior Researcher. He's just completed a PhD in Government at Georgetown University, a degree he pursued after teaching first grade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Conor's research addresses the challenges immigrant families face in the American education system, educational equity as a means to increased social mobility, and the history of education in the United States.

In an era of Washington gridlock, there’s almost nothing quite as gratifying as seeing big policy changes that echo one’s recent arguments. Along those lines, Thursday was a great day for advocates of more and higher-quality child care in the United States. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new Obama administration proposal to raise the federal baseline for subsidized child care centers across the country. 

What if I told you that very poor people, living in the most expensive city in America in the aftermath of a massive economic collapse, were challenged to save $500 and not touch it for a year with the promise of a 50 percent bonus if they succeeded? Do you think that some of them would be able to do it? A few?

What would you think the impact of that small amount of money would be? Equally small? Would you think that sequestering those resources would make families more likely to go into debt? More likely to skip paying their bills?

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include inequality, retirement, the workforce, and financial services.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on New America's In The Tank blog.

The average childcare worker in the U.S. earns less than a janitor. Sure, some daycare centers pay well, but the average parent can’t afford those high-end centers that can cost as much as public university tuition.

Piling on to that: The daycare industry is largely unregulated with low standards on quality of care. At an event this week based off of a recent New Republic article, The Hell of American Daycare, panelists showed how that painful reality -- a broken system full of tales of toddler deaths and injuries – can also have dire consequences for our economy.

Update 5/22/13: The original version of this post incorrectly used the term "credit score" where "credit check" or "credit history" would have been more appropriate and accurate. The post has been edited to reflect that correction. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a piece that explains the process by which the credit reporting agencies deal with employee screening. Specifically, employers may request prospective employees' credit histories via a credit check, but these histories do not contain an actual credit score. Thank you to Greg Fisher at creditscoring.com for pointing out the error.

The use of credit checks to inform hiring decisions has been getting some much deserved scrutiny recently. Over the weekend, Charles Ellison for the Philadelphia Tribune and Gary Rivlin for the New York Times took a look at the practice of employers evaluating a job applicant's credit as part of the employment decision-making process. Ellison chronicles recent legislative efforts to curb the practice and points out that campaign finance data shows lawmakers are receiving sums of money from major credit reporting companies. Rivlin spoke with non-profit service providers and unemployed individuals who have experienced the negative effects of this phenomenon first hand.

On the surface, using credit checks as part of employment screening may seem like a simple, data-driven way for employers to ascertain a candidate's reliability. Upon closer inspection, however, using credit checks in this way is ineffective and exacerbates inequality.

Student loan debt has been in the news a lot these days. In the last week, a number of news outlets wrote about mounting student loan debt and the delaying of life events by their borrowers (see ABC News, the Chronicle of Higher Education, CNN Money, the NY Times [here and here], and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few). The article in the NY Times provides a great example of this, "Consider Shane Gill, a 33-year-old high-school teacher in New York City. He does not have a car. He does not own a home. He is not married. And he is no anomaly: like hundreds of thousands of others in his generation, he has put off such major purchases or decisions in part because of his debts."

The Asset Building Program is hosting an event Monday to feature Jonathan Cohn’s recent article for The New Republic "The Hell of American Day Care." A great panel will help us piece together the complicated picture of day care systems (or lack thereof) in America and offer ideas that address the issue from multiple angles. RSVP to come Monday at 12:15pm or tune in online to watch live.