On Income Inequality & Poverty
$15 Minimum Wage
I am proud to stand by workers across the nation and proclaim that no person who works a forty hour workweek should not live in poverty, and parents should not be in the position of being forced to work two or three jobs in order to provide a basic standard of living for themselves and their families. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 is a starvation wage - no one can live off such a low wage without either an unreasonably low standard of living or additional government assistance. And through the federal Earned Income Tax Credit, we the people implicitly subsidize large and very profitable corporations for giving out low-paying and often less-than-full-time positions. It is time for this corporate welfare to come to an end, and require that businesses have to give back to the community by paying their workers a living wage. At the same time, I recognize that Pima County is one of the poorest counties in the nation, and there will be sizable disequilibrium adjustment costs associated with a sudden increase in the minimum wage. Therefore, I propose to implement this wage increase over a six year period, to give businesses a chance to adjust to their own cost increases, as well as the effects on local demand resulting from more money being in the hands of consumers.
A $15 minimum wage isn't just a moral issue - it is an economic one. Our current levels of income and wealth inequality are detrimental to our society and our economy in a number of ways. High levels of income and wealth inequality hurt our base of consumption - as the rich get richer, they have more money with which they can invest, but without enough demand to generate physical capital investment and innovation in new technologies, financial capital instead languishes in non-productive financial securities, enhancing paper wealth for some individuals, but not actually contributing to real economic growth. Coupled with the policy of the Federal Reserve, we are caught in a financial savings glut, where, despite negative real interest rates for overnight loans between banks and near-zero interest rates on many other loans, there is little incentive for businesses and individuals to expand their companies, hire new workers, or otherwise contribute to real economic growth. Further, as outlined above, having more people with enough income to spend money not just on the bare essentials, but also having discretionary income, is critical in order to attract consumer-related businesses to the city. A full two-thirds of the nation's economy is based on consumer spending, and revenues generated by businesses come from consumers willing and able to spend money to buy goods and services from those companies. A large reason why we have trouble bringing jobs to Tucson isn't because of high taxes, but rather is because people in town are too poor in order to be able to spend money at various establishments. When consumer incomes stagnate, and more and more money is being spent paying student loans, rents, health insurance premiums, and other expenses, there is less discretionary income with which consumers can spend stimulating the local economy by purchasing from local businesses. It is time to reverse this trend, because we know that a strong middle-class with the ability to spend money and invest in the future is the best long-term path to prosperity.
While I continue to support a living wage of $15 phased in over the next six years, I will endorse and vote for the proposed statute by Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families to raise the minimum wage to $12 per hour by 2020. I don't believe this measure goes far enough to address rampant poverty, income inequality, homelessness, food insecurity, and other needed reforms to ensure that the Arizonan and American economies work for all its people, but I believe this is a good start and a definite step in the right direction. I will continue to fight if elected to push forward beyond the state ballot initiative to ensure that all people have a right to a living wage of $15 per hour.
Banking Access
One of the major systemic challenges facing the poor in this country is the expense associated with accessing the financial system. While middle-class residents and the wealthy have access to low-cost checking accounts and other banking services, many of the poorest residents in this country are either unbanked or underbanked, and must instead pay substantial fees to access their money, either through pre-paid debit cards with large fees, check-cashing services, or other costly services. And while middle-class households have access to credit cards, savings, or family in order to come up with needed money to cover an unforeseen shortfall, for many lower-class families living paycheck to paycheck, the only option is to seek short-term Payday and 'Title' loans, with usurious rates often exceeding 400% annualized. It is time for the federal government to reinstate a basic system of postal banking to provide low-cost financial services for underserved households, and as state legislator, I will explore all potential options regarding what can be implemented at the state level.
Medicare for All
While the ACA did some good things, such as eliminating the abomination that is pre-existing conditions, and helped ensure that people who have the money to purchase insurance coverage on the individual market have a right to do so, the legislation was inadequate at ensuring universal access to healthcare, and at working to bend the cost curve downward. We pay 50% more than any other nation for health care, and yet, on average, we do not see substantially better healthcare outcomes than those seen in other countries. We continue to pay by far the highest costs in the world for prescription drugs, due to provisions lobbied for by the pharmaceutical lobby to disallow Medicare from negotiating drug prices, and import-export restrictions baked into trade deals such as NAFTA and the TPP which disallow the importation of cheap prescription drugs from Canada and other nations. Our doctors are often 200,000, 300,000 and 400,000 in student loan debt when they graduate from medical school due to our inadequate funding for higher education, which leads to higher prices paid for medical services in order to make the medical profession a viable decision economically. And we must move to reform our system of fee-for-service payments that incentivize overprescription and overtesting, toward a system which rewards preventative care, holistic treatment, and health outcomes.
I would see the state of Arizona follow Colorado's lead and move to create a single-payer healthcare system within the state of Arizona, as is provided for by provisions contained within the ACA. While it is true that, for those with the ability to pay, the United States has the best healthcare system in the world, far too many people are locked out of access to treatment for financial reasons - they can't afford their insurance, or, if they have insurance, cannot afford the copayments and deductibles required to actually use it. This is generally more costly in the long run for all of us, as untreated illnesses often linger and develop into serious medical conditions that require hospitalization, something that cannot be denied if it is a life-threatening condition. This leads hospitals to raise prices for the rest of us in order to recoup the costs of treating people who could have been treated far more cheaply via preventative mainenance and care. It is unacceptable that 62% of all bankruptcies in the United States are at least in part due to medical bills, and of these, over 70% of the people involved had at least some form of health insurances. Medicare for All will help cut down on administrative overhead, and does not require the generation of a profit the way our for-profit insurance companies do. Both of these provisions will help lower costs, freeing up more money for taxpayers, and retaining more money to spend on actual care.
Finally, a robust system of Medicare for All not tied to employment status will help to encourage additional entrepreneurship and small business creation. Because access to insurance coverage at affordable rates is largely tied to participation in an employer-sponsored insurance coverage program, individuals who seek to reate their own business risk losing insurance coverage, and either must pay high prices for insurance on the individual market, or pay increased taxes as a consequence of going without, on account of the individual mandate. This phenomenon of job-lock enriches established businesses, especially large health insurers, while damaging the economy's ability to grow and adapt in the long run, due to the high costs associated with doing so. It is time to eliminate these barriers to new business startups - I believe that our economy and political system can grow only when we have a system where individuals can start and grow businesses in a fair economy not rigged by tax breaks and regulatory capture, and not be dependent on large corporations for work and financial security.
Expanded Childcare Assistance
The high cost of childcare places enormous burdens on lower and lower-middle class households from starting families, and being able to both work and provide for their children. I am proud to support Sen. Sanders's push for the United States to join every other developed economy on Earth and guarantee a minimum of 12 weeks of paid family leave for the birth of a new child, a system to ensure that workers have the ability to take time off to care for sick relatives, and other policies I suppose such as expanded early childhood education initiatives, expanded healthcare access, and poverty reduction programs will help to create a system that will not subject the next generation to, and will in fact reverse, the many systemic disadvantages that lower-class households in this generation face in providing for themselves and their families.
Food Security
18% of Arizonans, and 28% of our children, deal with food insecurity. And yet, 40% of all food grown in America is thrown away. We don't suffer from food scarcity in this country - we suffer from an economic system which allows us to grow abundant amounts of nutritious food and yet deny its bounty based on inability to pay. I would set up a joint task force including the State, farmers, grocers, restaurants, and both community and faith-based food banks to work to increase food availability for needy families by working to reduce food waste, rather than relying solely on taxpayer-funded programs such as SNAP. Reducing even a quarter of food waste in Arizona would go a substantial way toward ending food insecurity in Arizona, and that will provide enormous positive benefits to our economy. Good nutrition is tied to lower use of healthcare resources, higher productivity, better educational outcomes for our children, and more, and investing in making sure no child goes hungry is a very wise decision that will pay innumerable benefits to our economy in future years.
Infrastructure Investment
Our roads, bridges, and highways are decrepit, and our buildings are often outdated and inefficient. It is time for a second New Deal modeled on FDR's program of putting millions of people to work rebuilding our infrastructure, including our roads laden with potholes, our buildings in disrepair and in need of efficiency upgrades, an electricity grid designed around polluting fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, and woefully inadequate schools, hospitals, and other essential public services. By investing in our infrastructure, we can provide people with good-paying jobs in the short run, a critical stimulus needed when our labor force participation rate is at the lowest point in the last generation, as more and more people drop out of the official labor force metrics because they have given up on looking for work in this tepid economy. In the long run, we will achieve large amounts of cost savings in the form of having more well-educated workers participating in the economy, earning money to purchase goods and services within our local and state economy, and generating tax revenues down the line. We will be able to have well-funded public school to educate the next generation, which will work to eliminate our school-to-prison pipeline, allowing us to reallocate funding from having fewer people incarcerated toward either other infrastructure or community investments, and toward lowering tax rates in the long run. We can work to rebuild and strengthen our economy in the long run to everyone's benefit, but in order to do so, the state and the various counties must be prepared to make short term sacrifices - we know that in the long run, critical infrastructure investments will pay back the community and the taxpayers many times over.
We have the ability to produce enormous amounts of energy from solar power. Rather than letting this energy go to waste in the form of heat, and then expending energy to cool our homes and other buildings, I want Arizona to be a global leader in the production of clean and renewable energy from solar power. There are certainly hurdles in order to reach a goal of transitioning to a 100% renewable-energy economy by the year 2050, but I am prepared to lead this state to fight to achieve it. This will involve working with the private sector and our research universities to fund critical research in the production of energy storage technologies that can be implemented on a commercial scale, one of the biggest hurdles that we face to replacing fossil fuels wholescale. In the long run, this will save the state and the nation billions of dollars per year in the production, refining, and importation of fossil fuels, as well as similar numbers of implicit costs associated with carbon and other pollution emissions, in the form of healthcare costs, lost productivity and wages, and environmental degredation.
Support for Unions
Unions and the right of workers to collectively bargain for higher wages and more benefits have been a critical tool that the working and middle class have used over the past two centuries to demand fair compensation for their labor. Things that we had previously taken for granted, such as a five-day workweek and an eight-hour workday, we hard-fought and won only because of the work that unions have done. Unfortunately, open shop laws, under the guise of empowering workers, have gutted unions and many of those same things that we once took for granted have been clawed back in recent years. The minimum wage has stagnated, decent-paying union jobs in manufacturing are being replaced with lower-paying, nonunion jobs in the service sector, the forty-hour workweek is increasingly a relic of a bygone past, replaced with either sixty hour weeks or thirty-four hour, 'part-time' positions that do not provide benefits. Pensions are being gutted in the private and public sectors alike in the name of 'financial exigency' and increased corporate profits, with municipalities, states, and companies alike declaring bankruptcy as a way to offload their pension obligations to their workers and to the taxpayers and increase profits for their executives and shareholders alike. Traditional benefits such as paid time off are becoming increasingly restricted, and steady predictable hours are being replaced by scheduling algorithms which require employees to be available on call with little notice - something which detracts from a person's ability to make other plans, including plans to seek additional education or skills training. I believe that it is time to stand against the wanton cutting of union rights and work to give ordinary workers the right to bargain with their employers for higher wages and better benefits, in the private and public sectors alike.
Welfare Expansion
The welfare system needs to be expanded and reformed, not gutted the way so many politicians, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle, propose. At the same time, I recognize the criticisms that are leveled by politicians on both sides of the aisle regarding our current welfare programs. We should not have a welfare program riddled with asset caps and maximum wage requirements, which inhibit the ability of people requiring government assitance, or who have disabilities which limit their ability to work, from being able to do so. Thanks to the phaseout of government assistance programs at or just above the federal poverty line, people who are of low income and who require prolonged government assistance due to chronic disability are often trapped in a cycle of perpetual poverty with little to no opportunity to better themselves. If they try to work, they risk losing disability benefits, and it can require years to reacquire them if they are unable to maintain that level of work. If they choose to save and invest in themselves or their future, asset caps claw back those savings, limiting their ability to save for their children's education, to purchase appliances and other durable goods, or seek job training and assistance programs. Because so many government services, such as food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid eligibility, and housing assistance phase out at similar levels of income, we end up in a situation where people who make incomes slightly below the poverty line have an active disincentive to seeking career advancement and higher-skilled (and paying) jobs, due to the threat of losing o their welfare assistance and being made worse off. I would lobby and work with the federal government to help restructure welfare provisions such that they no longer disincentivize individuals from seeking work, or for saving and investing in themselves or their families. In doing so, we can spread out the phaseout portion of welfare programs in such a way as to allow lower-income families the opportunity to gain a foothold into the middle-class without the government ripping out their safety net as soon as they do.
I would also be working with the federal government to investigate the possibility of creating a system of universal basic income at the federal level. As technology continues to advance and more and more jobs can be automated, the amount of labor required to run our economy continues to decline each year. Thus far, thanks to cycles of creation and destruction of new businesses, industries, and technologies, the economy has been able adjust, and new jobs have opened up where others were displaced and rendered obsolete. However, in the 21st century, the means of production are increasingly not worker-operated machines and equipment, but are instead software programs, trade secrets, and other intellectual property, which is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a very small number of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals. Robotics and software algorithms allow for greater productivity, but also greater degrees of automation - jobs making up to $20 per hour are expected to be widely automated by the middle of the century. We should be preparing for an economy where labor is no longer a scarce component of the productive process in relation to the size of the potential labor force, rather than subsidizing businesses hiring low-skill workers which are no longer necessary to carry out day-to-day tasks.