-
trees are people too
pushed back my body horizontal feet on tile sent the water back
slipped out you said i said we are all people
that grow out in rings shushed advice never stops coming
hand swish slowed reaching for manners not fit
unfit for service you rend norms withthis seething hole of sapped energy
and slowly we come together
and apart
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Social Policy Paper:
No fine print: Truth in Lending and Federal Student Loans
James
Graduate School of Social Work, Colorado State University
Social Welfare Policy and Advocacy
Dr. Elizabeth Kiehne
December 9, 2024
No fine print: Truth in Lending and Federal Student Loans
Neoliberalism has infiltrated and unduly influenced all American systems. From obvious institutions like banks and hedge funds to the nonprofit “third sector” (grants justified by data) and public education (cost per pupil), American life has become an exercise in individual monetization. Homo economicus, as Foucault put it. The responsibility for one’s economic stability and trajectory has been pushed into the personal realm.
Individual financial literacy has become a defining feature of success in these difficult economic times (to offer a loose definition of “success” for the vast majority of Americans: paying rent, owning a car, buying groceries, affording healthcare and managing debt). “Individuals and families, especially those with low incomes, face enormous obstacles in conducting their financial affairs. Many have insufficient understanding of their options in managing money, using credit, acquiring assets, choosing insurance, paying taxes, saving for emergencies, and planning for long-term financial security and development” (Lusardi, 2011, as quoted in Sherraden et al., 2015, p. 3). “From student loans to mortgages, credit cards, mutual funds, and annuities, the range of financial products people have to choose from is very different from what it was in the past, and decisions relating to these financial products have implications for individual well-being” (Lusardi, 2019, p. 1). Combine the knowledge required to make sound decisions in each of those areas alongside the proliferation and pervasiveness of technology, and now “fintech implies that consumers will need to have increasing financial sophistication to process financial information” (Morgan et al., 2015, p. 3). Income and wealth inequality is continuing unabated, and financial literacy is becoming more and more difficult. As the Grand Challenges for Social Work state, we must build financial capability for all (Sherraden et al., 2015, p. 1).
Systemic causes leading to gross disparity in financial education, literacy and assets are too numerous to fully explicate within the scope of this paper. To put it briefly, continued financial sector deregulation since the 1970’s, combined with continued divestment from public education, a racist and misogynistic federal and state level approach to policy and allocation, an increasing reliance on technology to soothe all economic woes (measured mainly through accounting window dressing and offshore shell games as opposed to productivity or quality of life), a focus on super-manager earnings, corporate stock buybacks, taxpayer corporate bailouts, the overall conservative movement to “cut taxes” (for the wealthy and corporations) has led to the greatest level of income inequality since before the Gilded Age. The evidence that income inequality in the United States has been growing for decades and is greater than in any other developed democracy is not much disputed (Lepore, 2015, p. 1). Financial literacy is tied to this disparity because policy-making institutions have reduced consumer protections and permitted the financialization of American life to an absurd degree.
While the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was opened in 2011 and the U.S. Financial Literacy and Education Commission has produced a “Strategy for Assuring Financial Empowerment” report in 2022, resulting in an understanding of “the importance of nurturing financial knowledge and skills”…and the creation of “a website interface that is robust, appealing, easy to use, and has strong search capabilities,” these paltry solutions are not nearly sufficient to bridge the financial and general education gap that exists, and certainly does not protect people from predatory lending, agreeing to extractionist student loan agreements, or accepting outsized balloon mortgages set to ruin a person’s life in a set number of days (U.S. Financial Literacy, 2022, p. 6). Conduit hypercapitalism has reached fever pitch, and the vast majority of American people, and especially those in the middle and lower classes, are worse off for it. The youngest are arguably at the bottom of the ladder, since “in 2022, when Gen Alpha was age 9 and younger, the [supplemental poverty measure] child pover¬ty rate jumped to 12% — more than twice the 2021 rate of 5%. This means that mil¬lions of kids, includ¬ing Gen Alpha kids, were liv¬ing in fam¬i¬lies that did not have enough resources to sat¬is¬fy basic needs, such as food, hous¬ing and utilities” (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2024). Protecting oneself from an avalanche of convoluted debt and variable APRs requires gaining financial literacy, and also putting protections in place to support the vulnerable, like young students.
In 1968, on the cusp of the neoliberal revolution, when consumer protection policies were still considered politically viable, the United States passed the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) “to promote honesty and clarity by requiring lenders to disclose terms and costs of consumer credit. The TILA standardized the process of how borrowing costs are calculated and disclosed, making it easier for consumers to compare loans and credit costs with various lenders (U.S. Office of Financial Readiness, p. 1). The TILA aims to protect consumers from unethical lending, promote business with standardized and clear lending practices by simplifying the ability to compare loans and credit with various lenders, and to disclose finance charges, fees and costs of credit before consumers take out credit and have a legal obligation to repay (U.S. Office of Financial Readiness, p. 1). Massachusetts passed the first act of a similar nature, and then it was taken up by the U.S. Congress to apply at a federal level.
The first federal price disclosure bill was introduced in 1960, and an “awesome array of opponents including the nation's automobile dealers, finance companies, mail order houses, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association, the American Bar Association, virtually all Congressional Republicans, and most of the Southern Democrats denounced the bill” (Peterson, 2003, p. 877). In Christopher Peterson’s wonderfully in-depth history of the TILA, he provides a quote from a commentator who “colorfully summarizes” the evolution of the federal price disclosure into the TILA:
Congress spent the eight years from 1960 to 1968 debating the Truth-in-Lending Act. According to the military metaphor that is almost obligatory in these cases, the process must be counted as an epic battle. Forces were rallied, maneuvers undertaken, salvoes exchanged, and casualties incurred. While the reality was political rather than military, it was no less intensely fought and, at some points, no less gruesome. (p. 877)
Once the bill made it through the debates, House Republicans supported the comparatively conservative Senate bill, with many of the substantive provisions, including the national usury limit, used as bargaining chips which House Democrats intended to trade away in order to strengthen the Senate bill (Peterson, 2003, p. 879). “Because the final bill went far beyond disclosure, it was renamed the Consumer Credit Protection Act. However, Congress retained the ‘Truth in Lending’ label for the disclosure provisions, which still made up the most important and influential bulk of the act” (Peterson, 2003, p. 880).
While the Truth in Lending Act provides protections for home, auto, and open- and closed-credit loans in terms of disclosure, it still requires an individual to read, understand and accept the terms. In 1968, when it was passed, it may have been more useful for people, prior to the over-financialization of services in daily life. In modern times, however, being expected to digest twenty pages of loan fine-print from an auto-lender does not disclose much of anything in a helpful manner.
A major weakness of the TILA – aside from the current and general financial environment - is that it does not require disclosure or protection for public student loans. The TILA has been amended many times, and in 2009 it was amended to include protections for private student loans following the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (CFPB, 2015, p. 2). This section of TILA “contains rules on disclosures (§1026.46), limitations on changes in terms after approval (§1026.48), the right to cancel the loan (§1026.47), and limitations on co-branding in the marketing of private education loans (§1026.48)” (CFPB, 2015, p. 5). That was a good addition to the TILA, as “borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households’ balance sheets is now student loan debt,” but it does not go far enough (Dettling et. al., 2022, p. 1). The vast majority of student loans are public, not private, lent through the federal government itself, with bachelor degree completers in 2015-2016 having borrowed an average of $45,300, as of 2020 (NCES, 2023). And that is the issue: allowing young, uninformed, not-financially-educated students to borrow tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer-funded federal loans, with no right to disclosure or an understanding of the implications is unethical.
Borrowing money to attend college is a time-honored American tradition. And now, in 2024, “Americans owe about $1.6 trillion in student loans as of June 2024 – 42% more than what they owed a decade earlier. The increase has come as greater shares of young U.S. adults go to college and as the cost of higher education increases” (Fry & Cilluffo, 2024). In effect, America is under-educating students via underfunded public elementary and high schools, then offering no true alternative to higher education (the trades are notorious for lacking health insurance, 401ks and other benefits), thereby forcing eighteen year-olds to sign on the dotted line for tens of thousands of dollars, which in turn further cements the caste system by churning out more and more indebted borrowers who must partake in capitalism by selling their labor, that then enriches corporations who line the pockets of the lobbyists who pressure policy on behalf of the financial industry. It is a long-con being played, and those who must borrow to attend college - the young, low-income students who require education for any economic mobility - are doomed to a life of debt and struggle, with not even the federal government being able to disclose terms on its own loans.
“Financial capability is a central concern for social work because lack of financial knowledge, ability, opportunity, and assets are key contributors to poverty and inequality” (Sherraden et al., 2015, p. 4). Social workers, as a profession, must learn more about finance, financial tools, fintech, predatory loans, compound interest, and other tricks of the Wall Street trade. The main implication for social workers due to the financialization of the modern American economy is that social workers are now ethically obligated to understand these topics, as knowledge is required at the micro, mezzo and macro levels in order to bring about positive change. Social workers can and should learn human-based and person-in-environment theory, while understanding that the water we all swim in is an oil slick of dollars and cents. Caring and empathy are key to working with people’s emotions and creating safety and lessening trauma; and math, calculations and the ability to grasp loan terms are key to reducing stress for people both now and in the future. Social work education should include courses on finance and accounting, and should teach about fintech and the economy. CSWE accredited schools should leapfrog the TILA and immediately begin to disclose loan terms that show the total cost of borrowing, the cost of defaulting, and what it means to pay interest versus principal over time.
There are needed and necessary financial education programs to teach the young, the impoverished, and everyone in between. The Truth in Lending Act must be amended to include public student loans. With the vast majority of lending for school originating from federal funds, an amendment would inform students, protect taxpayer funds, and reduce the amount of default. As borrowing costs increase, Generation Alpha and the next generation are being set up to fail, to spend most of their future monthly income on rent and paying back loans – a lifetime of debt before they turn 25 years old. It is time that the Truth in Lending Act acknowledged the trillions of dollars that students contribute to the economy by being upfront and honest about the true cost of borrowing. The student’s future - and to a degree the future of the American economy - depends on it.
References
Annie E. Casey Foundation. (2024, January 19). What is generation alpha?. https://www.aecf.org/blog/what-is-generation-alpha
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (2015, April). Laws and Regulations: Truth in Lending Act. 1-317. https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201503_cfpb_truth-in-lending-act.pdf
Dettling, Lisa, Sarena Goodman, and Sarah Reber (2022). “Saving and Wealth Accumulation among Student Loan Borrowers: Implications for Retirement Preparedness,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2022-019. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2022.019.
Fry, Richard & Cilluffo, Anthony. (2024, September 18). 5 Facts about student loans. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/18/facts-about-student-loans/#:~:text=Americans%20owe%20about%20%241.6%20trillion,they%20owed%20a%20decade%20earlier
Lepore, Jill. (2015, March 16). Richer and poorer. The New Yorker. https://ygiraud.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/texte-lepore-inegalitc3a9s.pdf
Lusardi, A. (2019). Financial literacy and the need for financial education: evidence and implications. Swiss journal of economics and statistics, 155(1), 1-8.
Morgan, P. J., Huang, B., & Trinh, L. Q. (2019). The need to promote digital financial literacy for the digital age. IN THE DIGITAL AGE.
National Center for Education Statistics. (2023). Loans for Undergraduate Students. Condition of Education. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved June 21, 2023, from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cub.
Peterson, C. L. (2003). Truth, understanding, and high-cost consumer credit: the
historical context of the truth in lending act. Florida Law Review, 55(3), 807-904.
Sherraden, Margaret S., Huang, Jin, Frey, Jodi Jacobson, Birkenmaier, Julie, Callahan, Christine, Clancy, Margaret M., & Sherraden, Michael. (2015). Financial capability and asset building for all (Working paper no. 13). American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.
U.S. Financial Literacy and Education Commission. (2022). Annual Report to Congress: Strategy for Assuring Financial Empowerment (SAFE) Report. U.S. Treasury Department. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/231/FY2022-US-FLEC-Annual-Report-Congress.pdf
U.S. Office of Financial Readiness. Truth in Lending Act: Consumer Protection for Borrowing Money. https://finred.usalearning.gov/assets/downloads/FINRED-TruthLendingAct-FS.pdf
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of no value for a moment they tell me
bent notes
snare raindrops into pothole puddles.
i remember i'm supposed to be doing something else
probably earning money
wiggled feet at the couch end daytime sleep,
tossed judgment.
better frizzles the bassline fingered like a sheaf of paper,
no more door knocks or beat feeting,
beat feeling.
yellow hollow knock tube of tobacco,
here's smoke in your eyes, thankful
stop staring.
hear the sax cajole autumn in
one thin note held, sputters
not sure about it.
-
buzzing
leaning forward and waiting always
waiting against the
cold palms swaying up stagnant
heir to those marred by hard handles
and suddenly
forgetting to wait cause i was
i was before \
sweet girl upstairs tired tried to see
through her monitor out the window
if on an atv this carefree curly blonde boy
illegally forgot, just for an instant -
to care
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“If you were a better person, this wouldn’t have happened to you.”
Neoliberalism’s Structural Impact on Homelessness
James
Graduate School of Social Work, Colorado State University
2024, Principles and Philosophy of Social Work
April 21, 2024
Homelessness is at an all-time high (Ludden, 2023). In an era of unheard-of corporate profits, personal riches, luxury services and amassed inherited wealth, how is it that there are so many people experiencing homelessness? By neoliberal design.
Neoliberalism is a “theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade” (Onyx, 2016, p. 41). In other words, neoliberalism has created a new type of human according to Michel Foucault: “homo economicus,” a person driven by “atomized self-interest, one who spends time to gain freedom through individuated monetization” (Hamann, 2009, p. 37).
The recession of the 1980s resulted in a new fervor for neoliberalism, which “resulted in deep cuts to the HUD budget and led directly to reductions in the budget authority for housing assistance (from almost $19 billion in 1976 to about $11 billion in 1990) and in subsidized housing for poor Americans” (National Academies of Sciences), which has only continued to worsen as a percentage of federal investment relative to GDP (Rice, 2016). As the United States and western economies continue to adhere to neoliberal policies that result in heightened competition for capital and privatized wealth over public goods, economic disparity will continue to increase (Piketty, 2014, p. 348). The natural outcome of reduced public investment and government oversight is a tattered social safety net, one that leaves individuals to fend for themselves according to the rules of the “free market.”
How is it that neoliberalism hammers away at society’s supports, leading to structural homelessness that cascades from state cost-cutting, to difficulty in nonprofit advocacy, to a resentful acceptance of “personal failure” at the individual level?
Deficits of State: homelessness costs the taxpayer
On Tuesday, March 5th, 2024, I visited the Colorado State Capitol building in Denver for a “lobby day” sponsored by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless (CCH). The event was focused on Coalition employees, advocates and partners lobbying approaches and skills. What was supposed to be a lesson on influencing legislation ended up reflecting how much the market runs the state, and how the lives of our neighbors are viewed in terms of “cost” rather than their humanity. How “the imposition of market values has pushed towards the evisceration of any autonomy that may previously have existed among economic, political, legal, and moral discourses, institutions, and practices” (Hamann, 2009, p. 54). There were three bills available for potential lobbying efforts, two of which will be discussed below.
The first bill was HB24-1099: Defendant Filing Fees in Evictions. When a landlord files an eviction against a tenant, the “tenant may file a document called an answer,” which gives the tenant an opportunity to explain and dispute the lease violation (State of Colorado). The bill is to remove the $80 cost to file an answer, where “requesting the waiver can be stigmatizing” (State of Colorado). For tenants facing eviction, removing filing fees is undoubtedly a positive; however, it is the rationale of the argument that betrays the neoliberal, market-focused sensibilities that aim to persuade fiscally conservative members of the House. Only one point of the rationale is focused on the tenants, while four other points are focused on not “wasting” or “spending” funds on reviewing eviction answers from tenants, resulting in the cost of eliminating the answer filing fee as “minimal” (State of Colorado).
The second bill, HB24-1322, which also had a committee hearing that day, further underscored the market approach to housing. HB24-1322: Medicaid Coverage Housing & Nutrition Services, proposes to use Medicaid coverage for housing and nutrition, based on a Federal 1115 waiver, adding flexibility to how Medicaid can be used by the state. While the bill could lead to more long-term housing stability and homelessness prevention, the first step is to undertake a “feasibility study” — a business-based approach to policy. If the focus was on housing for all, and the government has the method (the waiver) and the funds (the waiver assumes funding is present), why is a feasibility study required?
The reason is that the neoliberal approach requires market justification, cost containment, and a focus on deficit neutrality in order to be “feasible.” HB24-1322 is based on rationale that is focused on “62% reduction in inpatient care costs,” “1.6 million avoided hospital visits,” and “$14 billion in savings for our health care systems nationwide” — the language of the market related to cutting costs and saving taxpayer dollars is prioritized over the good the bill could do for people (State of Colorado). During the committee hearing, there were representatives from various nonprofits, including Project Angel Heart, Healthier Colorado, Denver Health and others, testifying that this bill will be a positive change for many Coloradans.
The most vociferous and neoliberal-driven comments against the HB24-1322 came from Representative Brandi Bradley, Republican from District 39, whose arguments highlighted why the sponsors of the bill had to lead with market-focused rationales. Rep. Bradley asked if there was “any stipulation for the waiver” to ensure housing applicants were “actively seeking treatment or employment.” The emphasis on employment shows how the value of the bill is only in relation to its ability to make an individual a market contributor. A question of Rep. Bradley’s was “Why do we have to grow government? Why can’t the community do it?” On its face, this could be interpreted as a progressive, community-oriented concern. Dig a little deeper and it is obvious that Rep. Bradley is saying “why can’t the market” handle the housing and nutrition services, as it is a known “problem that the market ethic of neoliberal ideology does not recognize or privilege a collective good” (Alexander, 2020, p. 377). The nonprofit leaders offered rebuttals that were market-based, staying within the realm of neoliberal language centered on cost reduction and other statistics focused on housing and nutrition as levers to create productive citizens. The bill passed 8-4, and is now on its way to the Appropriations Committee.
If the government is wading through the mire of neoliberal ideology, how are nonprofits, the third sector, picking up the slack?
Homeless in the right way: nonprofits and neoliberalism
Nonprofits are entangled with the market. The “third sector,” as nonprofits are known, is caught between government and for-profit business, susceptible to the regulations of the former and the dominant position of the latter, left to navigate a perilous funding schema reliant on the whims of private philanthropy.
To understand how neoliberal thought impacts nonprofits, I interviewed three nonprofit housing professionals: a C-Suite executive, a middle manager, and a client-facing worker. The underlying theme of each interview is that the market impacts the ability of the nonprofit to advocate for structural change.
“For many years we’ve been hearing that ‘nonprofits should be run like a business,’” said a C-Suite executive at a Colorado-based housing nonprofit, who wished to remain anonymous (the request for anonymity shows anxiety about funder retribution). The need to sustain funding streams and organizational survival has resulted in “soft advocacy” and a reluctance to be confrontational, particularly when engaging funders (Alexander, 2020, pp. 374-375), and at the same time nonprofits must accept their complicity in the market, making their advocacy models “inherently conservative in that the intention is to work with elites to influence policy from the inside” (Alexander, 2020, p. 371). The same executive stated that “we make sure we do not say we are interfering with the market. For example, we make sure our houses are not used as comps in real estate transactions. We’ve also had at least one foundation not fund us because they think we are interfering in the free market.” There is nothing more neoliberal than a funder not supporting a housing project because of the illusion of potential impact on the “free market.” If advocacy is constrained, then are the services unabated and unrestricted?
“A lot of our assistance is problematic because it comes with such barriers and shame. The system is not set up to create agency, it’s set up to manage the system and keep people in it,” said Rah Marreel-Alley, program manager at CCH. As “funding became increasingly constrained by contract for specific services within competition policy,” it relegates the people in the wider housing system to operate as data points in funder reports, to justify the existence of the nonprofit itself (Onyx, 2016, p. 46). Riya Bunker, a client-facing Housing Navigator at CCH said that people “have to be ‘homeless in the correct way. Some vouchers require ‘literal and chronic homelessness’…if someone is in jail for more than 90 days, they are considered housed, or a motel for more than 7 days they are housed, and recuperative care stays means they are not chronically homeless.” In other words, the neoliberal model forces “enhanced exclusionary practices [that] can be seen in issues of admittance to the small number of social service community programs aimed at ‘alleviating’ homelessness” (Rothe, 2016, p. 11).
As funding systems constrain the nonprofit’s ability to advocate and provide services oriented toward an individual’s exit from the system, the nonprofit as a result becomes more internally focused, more professionalized, to continue to justify its services as an efficient provider that can meet or exceed market expectations. Professionalization is double-edged, as “operational efficiency actually means that there is more funding to do more work,” the C-Suite executive said. However, professionalization can also lead to a navel-gazing focus on internal operations, such as when I attended a recent local nonprofit’s staff meeting. Out of an hour-long staff meeting, only the first ten minutes were devoted to programmatic goals. The rest of the meeting was focused on an audit, a celebration, DEI, and a Human Resources initiative: all internal projects focused on the nonprofit itself, not the community.
Keep in line and produce
We have people that are homeless that are convinced that a “normal life” is not possible, and that they “don’t deserve it,” that “you’re not a hard worker, you don’t know how to manage your money,” that “if you were a better person this wouldn’t have happened to you.” - Riya Bunker, Housing Navigator
Neoliberalism is supposed to free individuals through the effective monetization of themselves. If the state is focused on cost cutting, and nonprofits are scaling back on advocacy while aiming for further professionalization, then the logic of such a system would be that individuals are given more opportunity to pursue the material gains available in modern American society. However, while neoliberalism frees the market from constraints, its “approach to dealing with growing poverty, unemployment, and homelessness is not simply to ignore it, but to impose punitive judgments through the moralizing effects of its political rationality” (Hamann, 2009, p. 45). Or, as Rah Marreel-Alley put it, people are trapped “into debt, then they go into eviction, then they go into one system or another.” Individuals are unjustly blamed for larger systemic failings, then held accountable for not operating successfully within those dysfunctional systems.
Neoliberalism pushes against the state when it comes to regulating the market, and then leans on it to make and enforce laws to punish those who are inefficient market operators, leading to a structural bias against those who are experiencing homelessness. If someone is not a productive member of the market, and does not accept and thrive under the status of homo economicus, then one has no value. “The main job I have is to humanize my clients, because the world has so radically dehumanized them that they feel completely incapable of moving forward,” Riya Bunker said. Notice how Riya, who works at a homeless sheltering and advocacy organization, considers “humanizing” the main service they provide — not housing.
“Neoliberal reform of tax and welfare systems has resulted in less progressive tax systems and less generous social security systems, increasing the inequality of the distribution of post-tax income. Neoliberal reforms have also contributed to labour market inequality by rewarding managers with very high salaries, while removing interventions that protected the interests of lower-skilled workers, thus reducing their wages” (Onyx, 2016, p. 42). It is expected that individuals operate in this structurally rigged market, to succeed with little to no resources while continuing to salvage their own humanity.
How is such injustice allowed to continue? Who is leading the charge? What can be done?
Conclusion: the power of the market… and of the collective
Neoliberalism was championed by Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman: two wealthy, white economists operating in two different eras with a singular goal: to unlock the power of the market. What this means is strengthening corporate interests and “weakening…unions and awards [which] has affected lower-skilled workers more severely than higher-skilled workers” (Onyx, 2016, p. 42). The vested interests have successfully held a decades-long public relations campaign to convince the American populace that “freedom” is the most important value – conservative voters regularly vote against their own economic well-being in favor of “values.” This leads to significant issues as these voters aim to reduce the role of the state and reduce taxes, which leads to a lack of funding for public projects like road maintenance, ensuring quality public education, investing in future-leaning projects like clean energy transformation and job training (neoliberal focus there, too), which then leads to worse educational outcomes, fewer job prospects, and more homelessness. The same elite voices — at the IMF, the World Bank, at Davos, G20 — call for the same market-based reforms to solve the issues that the market itself created; the arsonists cannot put out the fire (Giridharadas, 2020, pp. 129-153).
There are a few positive trends toward reducing the homelessness crisis based on “socialist” motions: universal basic income, a progressive tax on billionaires, and an increase in unions that directly fight against corporate power, to name a few. At CCH, Rah Marreel-Alley and Riya Bunker are forming a union for livable wages, as “the structures in place prevent us caring for ourselves, which leads to massive turnover and high case-loads,” Riya said. The irony of CCH employees being on the same housing voucher programs as their clients is a direct result of neoliberal politics that push down wages and focus on cost-cutting.
Amnesiac Americans forget that after WWII, public investment stemming from unfathomably high corporate and individual tax rates was what funded the GI Bill, the housing explosion, freeways, establishing widespread public education, and more. We need that way of operating to surface again; a “Keynesian 2.0” to prop up the dignity of the individual, to reduce the need for homo economicus to exist as a market denomination. Macro projects could be funded by taxing the billionaires, but then, because of such low trust in government, be allocated to a new “fourth sector” that is not-nonprofit, not-government, not-corporation. Almost like a “B Corp” but completely removed from the market. In some ways it could be a new WPA, modernized and focused on undertaking a similarly long-term and influential public relations campaign that directly fights against neoliberalism and its deleterious impacts on modern life.
The tides are already turning and we must empower new voices and wash away the old guard established during the “greed is good” regime of the 1980s. We to fight against these purposefully structural injustices. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it:
I believe that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live…no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policies to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States (Wagner, 2018).
References
Alexander, Jennifer & Fernandez, Kandyce. (2020). The impact of neoliberalism on civil society and nonprofit advocacy. Nonprofit Policy Forum. 2021, 12(2), pp. 367-394. https://doi.org/10.1515/npf-2020-0016
Giridharadas, Anand. (2020). Winners take all. Penguin Books.
Hamann, Trent. (2009). Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics. Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59, February 2009. https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/2471/2469
Hennigan, Brian. (2017). House broken: homelessness, housing first, and neoliberal policy governance. Urban Geography. 38:9, 1418-1440. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1254496
Ludden, Jennifer. (2023, December 15). Homelessness in the U.S. hit a record high last year as pandemic aid ran out. NPR. All Things Considered. https://www.npr.org/homelessness-affordable-housing-crisis-rent-assistance#:~:text=Homelessness%20in%20the%20U.S.%20hit%20a%20record%20high%20last%20year%20%3A%20NPR&text=All%20Things%20Considered-,Homelessness%20in%20the%20U.S.%20hit%20a%20record%20high%20last%20year,housing%20for%20the%20first%20time.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice; Policy and Global Affairs; Science and Technology for Sustainability Program; Committee on an Evaluation of Permanent Supportive Housing Programs for Homeless Individuals. Permanent Supportive Housing: Evaluating the Evidence for Improving Health Outcomes Among People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2018 Jul 11. Appendix B, The History of Homelessness in the United States. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519584/
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soft love
Soft love cradled small like an acorn before being pushed by a thumb in the dirt
Soft love like a French braid and your thin waist toward me in a castle
Soft love like thick warm night bundled in a flannel on a long car ride
Soft love places that always change
Soft love a palace under maple trees chopped leeks stewing in a silver pot
Soft love over time blurry on the edges and sharp in the middle
Cleaving to time as it grows brittle and soft