Congressâs Most Family-Friendly Member
Rosa DeLauro has spent 30 years in the House fighting for an adequate Child Tax Credit and paid family leave. Sheâs finally getting someplace.
Elizabeth Warren first met Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro two decades ago, long before she became a senator from Massachusetts. DeLauro is famous among D.C. politicos for hosting twice-monthly dinner parties to which she invites academics, policy experts, and journalists to talk to members of Congress. âSheâs always driving the debate with an intellectual energy thatâs uncommon around here,â Sen. Sherrod Brown, a frequent guest, told me.
This particular evening, Warren, then a Harvard professor who had just co-authored a book about why so many American families were mired in debt, was the star of the show. âShe invited me to come to dinner and she said sheâd have a few people over,â Warren recalls. Instead, she found DeLauroâs living roomâp
COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA MOTHERâS TRUST
Cajania Brown, a Black single mother from Jackson, Mississippi, receives $1,000 per month as part of a cash assistance program called the Magnolia Motherâs Trust.
Undoing Welfare Reform
If Congress makes the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent, simple, and universal, it could have reverberations across the entire welfare state.
Cheri Honkala has been a welfare rights activist since the 1980s. Itâs been decades of frustratingly slow work, ensuring that poor mothers like herself could access the benefits they needed to survive. These days, the bulk of her time is spent occupying empty houses for people with no alternative shelter. Combined with the pandemic, there is a housing crisis in Philadelphia, where Honkala lives.
Andrew Yangâs Discomfiting Vision for New York City
It infuses Silicon Valleyâstyle ideas and private philanthropy into an eroding safety net, and calls for no sacrifice from the wealthy.
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Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang visits Muslim-owned businesses on the first day of Ramadan, April 13, 2021, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, New York.
New York City mayoral front-runner Andrew Yang is the archetype of a new political phenomenon known as the âtechno-populist.â The âtechnoâ does not refer to technology (though Yang is a big proponent), but âtechnocracy,â the belief that elite expertise and a kind of Henry Ford-ian faith in scientific progress can solve all ills of society, unmoored from conventional politics, coalition-building, or movements. More than anything, techno-populists like Yang like to boast about a universal, objective truth beyond the right-left ideological divide. His appeal to those