It Was Never a Strong Economy For the Working Poor. Now’s the Time to Change That. – FlaglerLive.com

We are living in an intense time a time when major public policy failures and social inequality are revealing themselves after being hidden by a seemingly strong economy.

Over the last few years, record low levels of unemployment and a booming stock market helped conceal the still weak levels of household wealth, public infrastructure, and overall socio-economic fragility of most Americans. The coronavirus crisis is now laying those failures bare.

Many analysts failed to recognize that though the economy had been in recovery for nearly 10 years, most Americans have less wealth now than they did before the Great Recession. From 2007 to2016, median white families lost over $11,000. Black and Latino families lost abouthalf of their total net worth.

The coronavirus crisis is also showing that the problem goes beyond individual assets. Our weak public health, education, child care, and unemployment benefits, among other things, left the nation one crisis away from bringing down the entire economy.

That crisis has arrived.

Take the example of school closures. Since March 12, local and state governments have been closing school districts to limit the spread and speed of Covid-19. There are now nearly40 million public schoolstudentswho are home from school.

School closures were an essential and vital public health decision. Still, theyve shown that schools were an underappreciated foundation for our economy and peoples daily lives.

For workers with children, shutting down public schools with little to no other public support to replace this loss means at best a radical change of trying to work from home, teach from home, and provide child care all at the same time. At worst, it means sacrificing pay and possibly your job to care for your children as the country heads into recession.

Its important we realize how this virus hasnt just created new problems, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently explained, but poured gasoline on the crises weve long had. Its okay if you didnt see the extreme urgency of these crises before, she added. But I hope you dont unsee them later.

The old saying of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is more relevant than ever as the country prepares to spend trillions on the coronavirus crisis. Now is the time to recognize well never beat a global pandemic and recession without strong mechanisms to deal with social inequality and the public good.

Now is the time to invest the trillions that have been made available by this crisis into a new 21st-century public infrastructure. The need for this investment has long been recognized from Franklin D. Roosevelts call for anEconomic Bill of Rightsto the civil rights movements1967 Freedom Budget but never realized.

One way or another, the United States will withstand the coronavirus. But the public in the wealthiest nation in the world cannot continue to be one crisis away from economic collapse.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is the chief of Race, Wealth, and Community at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). Anneliese Lederer is the director of Fair Lending and Consumer Protection at NCRC.