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 postal banking, the safety net, inequality, and education.
Postal Banking
Pew hosted a day-long conference in Washington this week exploring the options for expanding financial services at the Post Office. The speakers and panelists represented diverse viewpoints on the issue, which led to a lively debate and serious consideration of the issue. Sheldon Garon, who has previously spoken at New America on the topic of banking at the Post Office, was among the panelists along with Members of Congress and regulatory officials with oversight over the Post Office’s potential expansion of its financial services offerings. David Williams, the inspector general of the U.S. Postal Service and the author of the white paper earlier this year that reignited widespread interest in postal banking, was also a speaker. Our reactions to the white paper and the possibilities for postal banking were published earlier this year in the Weekly Wonk. David Dayen for Salon offered his reactions to the Pew conference this week.
Safety Net
After hearing of a news report about the arrest of a single mom who let her daughter play alone in a park, Jonathan Chait offered a compelling interpretation of the media reaction as being indicative of society’s broadly hypocritical perspectives on low-income families. “The social safety net makes it difficult for low-wage single mothers to obtain adequate child care,” and yet it wants single moms to go to work, even for minimum wage. This leads to an inevitable catch-22: “America has decided to punish [the mom] if she fails to acquire full-time employment; her employment does not provide her with adequate child care; and the community punishes her for failing to live up to unobtainable middle-class child-care standards.” Yet even if a low-income working family has access to child care, roadblocks still stand in the way of achieving fully effective care. As Alysia Cox wrote for Talk Poverty, virtually all organizations that assist families in low-income communities face a similar predicament: “They do not have enough diapers.” And this is no small matter: “Because diapers are required by most child care facilities, lack of diapers can reduce access to work and poor diapering can facilitate the spread of disease in public spaces.”
Marine Cole for The Fiscal Times introduced us this week to “the haves and have nots of food inequality.” While access to food for low-income Americans is being cut short in some areas, high-end supermarkets are having struggles of a different kind selling to middle-income families. She describes an unintended consequence of supermarkets becoming more efficient at cutting down on food waste: they make less donations of fresh produce to food banks. While Cole highlights the problem in Washington State, Josh Jarman for The Columbus Dispatch reported on how the commissioners of Franklin County, Ohio will likely approve a measure to help low-income residents buy fresh produce at local farmers’ markets.
Inequality
Tamara Keith delivered a short radio essay on NPR’s Weekend Edition reflecting on Darlena Cunha’s widely circulated essay in the Washington Post last week on her experience falling from the middle class into poverty. “For Cunha and her husband, being poor was temporary…. Truly, Cunha is one of the lucky ones,” Keith concluded.
Miriam Zoila Pérez for Colorlines wrote about a new strategy to fight racial disparities in health outcomes. Instead of “cultural competency training,” which “can actually serve to reinforce racial stereotyping by making providers believe they are the experts on a certain community,” Pérez suggests that training medical students in structural competency may be more effective. This approach would broaden the focus from the individual patient to a more holistic perspective on “the organization of institutions and policies, as well as of neighborhoods and cities” in which the patient lives.
Ann Brown for MadameNoire summarized the findings of a new study showing that “poor whites fare better than blacks in similar situations.”
Craig Harrington for Media Matters drew attention to the “minimum wage mobility fantasy” that is permeating much of the political discussion recently. In fact, “prospects for upward mobility among minimum wage workers remain grim.”
Education
There’s a lot of contradictory advice out there about college, higher education, and debt, according to The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. There’s uncertainty about whether the school name matters, whether a student’s major matters, and whether some college debt is ok. But one thing is sure: “Going into debt to attend college and then dropping out is a really risky move.” The implicit advice seems to be: yes, go to college and even go into a little debt to do it; but if you choose to go to college, make sure you commit for the long-haul until graduation. Research shows that going to college increases career prospects, but the Millennial generation in particular is having a hard time making things work after graduation. Luke Severn sums up this situation succinctly: “Millennials: Educated but Underemployed.”
Libby Nelson changed the frame of the long-running debate over summer vacation and the length of the school year in her article for Vox this week. Sure, kids forget some things during the long summer break, but this is relatively unavoidable. What really matters is the quality of the activities during the summer, and for this, kids from wealthier families do much better. So, Nelson concludes, “What America needs might not be less summer vacation. It's more equal summer vacation.”
Quick Hits
The Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies released a new report this week on Millennials’ saving habits and their views on retirement. The title of the report is “Millennial Workers: An Emerging Generation of Super Savers.”
CFPB is creating a new database to publically collect consumer complaints about consumer financial products and services. Ashlee Kieler reported on this for Consumerist.
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Postal Banking
Pew hosted a day-long conference in Washington this week exploring the options for expanding financial services at the Post Office. The speakers and panelists represented diverse viewpoints on the issue, which led to a lively debate and serious consideration of the issue. Sheldon Garon, who has previously spoken at New America on the topic of banking at the Post Office, was among the panelists along with Members of Congress and regulatory officials with oversight over the Post Office’s potential expansion of its financial services offerings. David Williams, the inspector general of the U.S. Postal Service and the author of the white paper earlier this year that reignited widespread interest in postal banking, was also a speaker. Our reactions to the white paper and the possibilities for postal banking were published earlier this year in the Weekly Wonk. David Dayen for Salon offered his reactions to the Pew conference this week.
Safety Net
After hearing of a news report about the arrest of a single mom who let her daughter play alone in a park, Jonathan Chait offered a compelling interpretation of the media reaction as being indicative of society’s broadly hypocritical perspectives on low-income families. “The social safety net makes it difficult for low-wage single mothers to obtain adequate child care,” and yet it wants single moms to go to work, even for minimum wage. This leads to an inevitable catch-22: “America has decided to punish [the mom] if she fails to acquire full-time employment; her employment does not provide her with adequate child care; and the community punishes her for failing to live up to unobtainable middle-class child-care standards.” Yet even if a low-income working family has access to child care, roadblocks still stand in the way of achieving fully effective care. As Alysia Cox wrote for Talk Poverty, virtually all organizations that assist families in low-income communities face a similar predicament: “They do not have enough diapers.” And this is no small matter: “Because diapers are required by most child care facilities, lack of diapers can reduce access to work and poor diapering can facilitate the spread of disease in public spaces.”
Marine Cole for The Fiscal Times introduced us this week to “the haves and have nots of food inequality.” While access to food for low-income Americans is being cut short in some areas, high-end supermarkets are having struggles of a different kind selling to middle-income families. She describes an unintended consequence of supermarkets becoming more efficient at cutting down on food waste: they make less donations of fresh produce to food banks. While Cole highlights the problem in Washington State, Josh Jarman for The Columbus Dispatch reported on how the commissioners of Franklin County, Ohio will likely approve a measure to help low-income residents buy fresh produce at local farmers’ markets.
Inequality
Tamara Keith delivered a short radio essay on NPR’s Weekend Edition reflecting on Darlena Cunha’s widely circulated essay in the Washington Post last week on her experience falling from the middle class into poverty. “For Cunha and her husband, being poor was temporary…. Truly, Cunha is one of the lucky ones,” Keith concluded.
Miriam Zoila Pérez for Colorlines wrote about a new strategy to fight racial disparities in health outcomes. Instead of “cultural competency training,” which “can actually serve to reinforce racial stereotyping by making providers believe they are the experts on a certain community,” Pérez suggests that training medical students in structural competency may be more effective. This approach would broaden the focus from the individual patient to a more holistic perspective on “the organization of institutions and policies, as well as of neighborhoods and cities” in which the patient lives.
Ann Brown for MadameNoire summarized the findings of a new study showing that “poor whites fare better than blacks in similar situations.”
Craig Harrington for Media Matters drew attention to the “minimum wage mobility fantasy” that is permeating much of the political discussion recently. In fact, “prospects for upward mobility among minimum wage workers remain grim.”
Education
There’s a lot of contradictory advice out there about college, higher education, and debt, according to The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. There’s uncertainty about whether the school name matters, whether a student’s major matters, and whether some college debt is ok. But one thing is sure: “Going into debt to attend college and then dropping out is a really risky move.” The implicit advice seems to be: yes, go to college and even go into a little debt to do it; but if you choose to go to college, make sure you commit for the long-haul until graduation. Research shows that going to college increases career prospects, but the Millennial generation in particular is having a hard time making things work after graduation. Luke Severn sums up this situation succinctly: “Millennials: Educated but Underemployed.”
Libby Nelson changed the frame of the long-running debate over summer vacation and the length of the school year in her article for Vox this week. Sure, kids forget some things during the long summer break, but this is relatively unavoidable. What really matters is the quality of the activities during the summer, and for this, kids from wealthier families do much better. So, Nelson concludes, “What America needs might not be less summer vacation. It's more equal summer vacation.”
Quick Hits
The Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies released a new report this week on Millennials’ saving habits and their views on retirement. The title of the report is “Millennial Workers: An Emerging Generation of Super Savers.”
CFPB is creating a new database to publically collect consumer complaints about consumer financial products and services. Ashlee Kieler reported on this for Consumerist.
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