Media

What makes a good ‘public?’ And what kinds of policy tools can we employ to ensure more equitable and inclusive access to these goods?

From the day he launched his campaign with dire warnings about border-crossing “bad hombres,” Donald Trump has preyed on some Americans’ worst biases around immigration. Trump has since exhorted Congress to allocate tens of billions of dollars for a border wall, stepped up arrests of immigrants, separated Latino children from their parents, and pushed to expedite deportations. [...]

And all this inequality in wages, both now and stretching far back into the past, helps create one of the most gaping racial divides of all: the wealth divide. The median wealth for a white two-parent household with children was $161,300 as of 2013 — 8.5 times as big as that of the median Hispanic household and 10 times as big as that of the median black household, as the left-leaning think tank Demos reported earlier this year.

Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, described the propensity of elite institutions to admit wealthy students or those with a familial connection as “the affirmative action we just don’t talk about.”

On August 31, Federal District Judge Amos Mazzant of Texas issued a ruling striking down the U.S. Department of Labor’s update to federal rules on overtime pay. Demos Associate Director of Policy and Research Amy Traub released the following statement:

The Missouri legislature keeps stomping on working people.

A point that climate change reports often fail to note is climate change will disproportionately harm people of color. People of color are overrepresented in the southern states, in the poorest counties, and among outdoor workers.

“The dog whistle metaphor suggests that the dogs — the intended audience — hear the message clearly. That’s wrong. The code is designed to hide the actual dynamics from the target audience itself,” Ian Haney-López, author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, told me.

“If we care about getting more people to and through college, we can’t do it on the cheap,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “We’re not going to get the outcomes we want, unless we put in the public investment necessary to do so.” [...]