#YesOn77
DC Council makes moves to overturn a wage increase for tipped workers; thousands continue to struggle in Puerto Rico one year after Hurricane Maria made landfall; and the news of the week ICYMI (with special guest Chad Bolt!)
This week on Off-Kilter, while Washington has been consumed by the debate over Trump’s controversial Supreme Court nominee, among other fights playing out in Congress, the D.C. restaurant industry spent the summer months quietly working to take down a voter-approved ballot measure that would raise wages for D.C.’s tipped workers. Initiative 77, as it was called, passed with 56% support at the ballot box in June’s primary election. But the restaurant lobby joined forces with D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson to introduce a bill that would overturn the will of the voters and repeal the initiative outright. And earlier this week, the debate returned to the public eye in a marathon hearing that started on the morning of Monday, September 17th and lasted until nearly 4am on Tuesday the 18th. In opposing the wage increase, representatives of the restaurant industry have raised a range of claims, suggesting that the measure will hurt city businesses — and even workers. So with Initiative 77 back in the spotlight, Rebecca sits down with Dave Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, and one of the policy experts who testified at the hearing.
One year after Hurricane Maria made landfall and began tearing its way through Puerto Rico, the death toll from the storm has now topped 3,000 — and thousands of families remain without electricity or safe drinking water. The storm inflicted an estimated $95 billion in damage, flooding entire cities and towns, destroying homes, schools and hospitals; and dismantling the island’s power grid. But as President Trump took to Twitter to contest the rising death toll figures, in perhaps one of his most inhumane and callous social media outings, experts have begun to take stock of the administration’s slipshod disaster response — and what it says about our leaders’ preparedness for extreme weather events, which are becoming only more frequent thanks to climate change, and which hit communities of color, low-income individuals, and people with disabilities hardest. To take a look at where we are a year out after Hurricane Maria — a tragic anniversary that coincided with the emergence of yet another hurricane, this time Florence —Rebecca isjoined by Rejane Frederick, an associate director of the Center for American Progress poverty program, and an expert on the impact of extreme weather events on economically vulnerable communities.
But first, Chad Bolt, associate policy director at Indivisible and a friend of the show, stands in for the vacationing Jeremy Slevin for In Case You Missed It this week, with the latest on Kavanaugh, the GOP’s Tax Scam 2.0 (and the latest effort to get Trump to release his tax returns), good news on the health care front and more.
This week’s guests:
- Dave Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute
- Rejane Frederick, associate director of the Center for American Progress’s Poverty to Prosperity program
- Chad Bolt, Associate Policy Director at Indivisible
For more on this week’s topics:
- Read Dave Cooper’s testimony before D.C. Council about Initiative 77 — and his report on why D.C. should implement the policy, rather than overturning the will of the voters
- Check out City Paper’s live blog recounting the marathon hearing
- Find out more about how moving to “one fair wage” in D.C. would reduce poverty — and how overturning the measure would hit people of color the hardest
- Learn more about what things look like in Puerto Rico one year after Hurricane Maria, despite the Trump admin’s boasting about their “great” cleanup
- Read more from Rejane Frederick on how extreme weather events hit communities of color, low-income folks & people with disabilities hardest
For more on this week’s ICYMI topics:
- Stay up to date on the Kavanaugh dumpster fire by subscribing to The Progress Report — and read Rebecca Traister on Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford
- Catch up on the GOP’s proposed Tax Scam 2.0, which would add more than $3.6 TRILLION to the deficit over the next two decades — and here’s the Trump White House reminding us how they want to pay for it all (spoiler: by cutting Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid)
- Get up to speed on the new lawsuit that could save Obamacare
- And learn more about what Indivisible is doing to bring on all the blue wave emojis this November at Indivisible.org
This week’s transcript:
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, with all eyes on SCOTUS the DC restaurant industry spent the summer quietly working to overturn Initiative 77, the ballot measure DC voters approved in June to raise tipped workers’ wages. Earlier this week Initiative 77 returned to the public eye when DC council held a marathon hearing and began considering legislation to repeal the wage increase for tipped workers, so I speak with Dave Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute who testified at the hearing. He shed some light about what’s at stake. Next this week marks one year since Hurricane Maria made landfall, a tragic anniversary that coincided with the emergence of yet another extreme weather event, this time by the name of Hurricane Florence. To take stock of where we are one year out after Hurricane Mari hit Puerto Rico’s shores and how the administration’s response measures up, I take with Rejane Frederick, an associate director of the Center for American Progress’s Poverty to Prosperity program and an expert on the impact on economically vulnerable communities. But first, who is that outside the radio, it’s not Jeremy Slevin, oh my God it’s Chad Bolt! Chad, come on in, are you here because you heard Jeremy was on vacation?
CHAD BOLT: Wait a minute, is this a taping of Off Kilter?
VALLAS: This is a taping of Off Kilter but Jeremy’s not here and we were just talking about who might be able to step into his shoes for ‘In Case You Missed It’?
BOLT: Well, I mean look, they would be very big shoes to fill.
VALLAS: Maybe not, I feel like Jeremy actual has pretty small feet.
BOLT: Oh great, I don’t even have to do my best. [LAUGHTER] It can just be like, kind of good.
VALLAS: Isn’t that weird that I noticed that actually? We’re going to move on because that got really awkward. Chad, it’s so good to see you!
BOLT: Good to see you, Rebecca.
VALLAS: Especially because a little birdy told me that today is a big day for you.
BOLT: Today is my four year anniversary with my incredible husband John.
VALLAS: Who is also one of my favorite humans, congratulations and happy anniversary.
BOLT: Thank you.
VALLAS: Four years.
BOLT: Four years, it’s hard to believe, man, 2014 was a different world.
VALLAS: Oh God, 2014, I remember that year.
BOLT: Yeah, left for a honeymoon without having to worry that certain doom might transpire while I was away.
VALLAS: Wait you’re going to have to give me some tips because people might have heard, I’m apparently getting married because I’m engaged now too, by the way.
BOLT: Yes, a big congrats to you!
VALLAS: Yeah, so that happened too. But you’re going to have to help me out and understand this marriage thing that I thought maybe I was never going to do but now apparently I’ve said I’m going to do.
BOLT: There’s nothing that I can be more excited for on this show than hearing that Rebecca Vallas is finally engaged.
VALLAS: I don’t know what the finally is.
BOLT: So excited to hear that.
VALLAS: Yeah, yeah, yeah alright, well and he’s great, I love you Phil. OK, let’s actually move to the news of the week and I will say, I don’t mean to diminish your anniversary. Chad Bolt’s anniversary, definitely news of the week but now that we’ve covered that we can move onto other things that maybe have slightly more to do with poverty and inequality and the things that they intersect with. we would be remiss in talking about the news of this week if we did not start with Kavanaugh.
BOLT: Absolutely, so obviously the news this week, big allegations from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in high school. The latest on this is that Dr. Ford wants an FBI investigation before testifying before the Senate Judiciary committee. We at Indivisible, by the way Rebecca I don’t know if you actually did my intro.
VALLAS: Oh my God, I didn’t even tell anyone who you are Chad, but you know what it’s because you’re someone who needs no introduction. Chad Bolt as listeners will know because you come on this show all the time and are a friend of the show is the associate policy director at Indivisible, I usually call you other things but I just recently learned what your actual title is. So I’m going to use it.
BOLT: Perfect, you hit the nail on the head OK, so yes, Dr. Blasey Ford wants an FBI investigation before she testifies before the Senate Judicairy committee, we think that is an entirely appropriate request and we echo it but the bottom line here, what ultimately matters is whether or not the votes are there to confirm him. So our ask on this hasn’t changed. These allegations are serious and they affirm what we already knew. Brett Kavanaugh is not a good choice for the Supreme Court. But we need senators to say so and come out as firm no’s against Kavanaugh.
VALLAS: But before we get anymore into the machinations of the Senate and you looking in your crystal ball which I’m going to make you do because we’ve got a lot of potential fireworks coming next week on this, some of the debate around this has just been downright disgusting.
BOLT: Yes.
VALLAS: You’ve had Trump coming out and saying he doesn’t believe the allegations and that he stands by Kavanaugh no matter what effectively I’m paraphrasing but only loosely. You’ve had all kinds of folks on the right, I’m going to specifically name Erick Erickson, a loathsome individual who is not infrequent in his spouting of vitriolic comments, particularly to women, disbelieving, publicly disbelieving Christine Blasey Ford and a lot of folks on the other side of the debate coming forward and saying I stand with Christine Blasey Ford, I believe her and senators should as well, but the fact that we are actually having this conversation and that this level of airing publicly of disbelief of a survivor of pretty horrific when you read the details of these allegation. I mean he, Kavanaugh is alledged to have actually put his hand over her mouth to silence her from screaming when she was fighting back and she was trying to rape her, that is what happened here. The fact that we have this level of disbelief of a survivor under these circumstances by some of our nation’s leaders and that this is breaking down on party lines so far, almost entirely is frankly disgusting and I just wanted to say that before we get too much into the horse race element of the confirmation hearings.
BOLT: Absolutely, I mean there’s so much to be infuriated about just in the news that’s come out in the last couple of days on this but one of them is how disingenuous senate Republicans, particularly the men on the Judiciary committee are being about hearing from Dr. Ford. They say we’re giving her the opportunity to come testify. This is not a gift to Dr. Ford, especially because they expect her to sit at the same table next to Brett Kavanaugh. This is not a gift for her. The opportunity to testify is not something nice that they’re doing for her. She’s been heard and we believe her. Now it’s really up to what Republicans decide to do with this information, this credible information.
VALLAS: And I also feel and I want to get personal here just for a second because I think it’s important for those of us who feel comfortable doing this to do so. I identify as a survivor of sexual assault. I was actually almost the same age as Christine Blasey Ford. I was 14, she was 15 during the time of the party that she’s described now in really horrific detail in The Washington Post, which she came forward to when she shared her story when she went public and was no longer anonymous. And I wasn’t believed at the time either and that was a big part of why I didn’t want to go public with my story, one million-eth of the level of public that is her life, just to be very clear but there are a lot of women in this country who I think hoped that maybe in 2018 we as a society had moved to a better place on these issues than we were in the 1990s when Anita Hill came forward and famously made some significant and different but still sexual harassment related allegations about now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He was confirmed anyway, she was not believed and was painted by many leadrs in the Senate, some of whom are still on the Senate Judiciary committee, such as Senator Hatch for example.
BOLT: Yeah, Senator Hatch.
VALLAS: They openly disbelieved her at the time and I think a lot of folks had hoped that maybe America in 2018 had learned something and had become a better place for survivors. I think it’s fair to say that this turn of events has shown that that is not the case, it’s not remotely the case.
BOLT: I think you’re exactly right, Rebecca. And thank you, I’m sorry to hear that you are among so many women in this country who are survivors of sexual assault, sexual harassment but thank you for sharing your story and for those who are able that are also sharing their stories it’s so important and just underscores how disappointing it is that we are in a very similar place in 2018 as we were in 1991.
VALLAS: So with that, take us back to the, what this means for the confirmation process. A lot of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary committee quickly said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to halt these proceedings. There’s no way we can possibly rush this vote forward now with this news coming to light. What do we know so far?
BOLT: Well it doesn’t appear as if Republicans are going to slow the process down. Democrats are rightfully calling and understandably calling for a slow down in the process. It appears as if Republicans are moving full speed ahead anyway. So where we are is sort of where we were before all of this came about. We need senators. It sounds obvious but to state the obvious we need senators to come out as a firm no against Brett Kavanaugh and these allegations only underscore why there is so much urgency in them doing that. We think of it as a three phase thing, a three phase way to defeat his nomination and I’m going to start at the end and work backwards. So step three is getting obviously the requisite number of Republicans to oppose his nomination. So think Senator Collins, Senator Murkowski, that’s the end of defeating his nomination. Step two is getting all of the red, we can’t do step three without step two. Step two is getting all of the red state Democrats, so think folks like Joe Donnelly, Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, Jon Tester, getting them to come out as a no. but we can’t do step two unless we finish step one. And step one is getting all of the other Democrats to come out as a firm no against his nomination. And we’re keeping a tracker at Indivisible that you can find on our website that will tell you exactly where all of your senators stand.
So we did make some headway on that three-step process this week. We are almost, we almost have all of the blue, purple state senators out as firm no’s, Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto from Nevada earlier this week came out as a firm no. We started breaking into the red states fortunately, hopefully moving on to step two. Claire McCaskill came out as a firm no, those are all good signs. We won’t start flipping Republicans, if we do unless Democrats are in total unity, not giving any cover to Murkowski or Collins or others at all. So it was good to see Democrats stating their firm opposition to this nominee.
VALLAS: And for a lot of folks out there, I feel like this need to get said explicitly, there are a lot of people in this country right now and you can see a lot of this reflected in the social media conversation in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford coming forward and identifying as the person who had originally been the anonymous accuser of Brett Kavanaugh. A lot of folks saying, what’s the point? There’s no way we can actually defeat this nomination. He’s just going to get confirmed anyway. A lot of people I’m sure are listening right now feeling that way and wondering what’s the point. You’re actually outlining what you see and what Indivisible sees as a path to Brett Kavanaugh not being confirmed to be a justice on the Supreme Court and you, I’m going to make you look in your crystal ball here, what is it that you actually think could tip the scales here to get to that place? What do we need to see next week as Christine Blasey Ford potentially testifies before the Senate Judiciary committee as questions start to get asked and maybe the FBI does do some kind of investigation? What do you think needs to happen so that we can actually see those votes flip to no?
BOLT: Well I should start by saying we want to echo Dr. Ford’s request for an FBI investigation. We think that is an entirely appropriate request given everything that’s transpired and the kind of pressure that we, the kind of trial really that we expect Republicans to put her on if she were to come before the committee next week. So an FBI investigation before that to look into this matter is I think entirely appropriate and I think that’s the first thing we’d like to see. But again, to bring us back to the world of Kavanaugh before these allegations came to light, there is plenty of basis to oppose his nomination, totally setting these very serious allegations aside. He’s obviously was on a list of judges that was put together for Trump ahead of time comprised of folks who are hostile to Roe, would overturn Roe v. Wade. He’s hostile to LGBTQ rights; he has an opportunity to uphold the ACA when he was in his current position. He chose not to do that. And he’s actually particularly hostile to the CFPB in a way that would hurt consumers and borrowers. There’s reason to think that he believes that the CFPB is an unconstitutional body despite it returning $12 billion back to consumers who were wronged by predatory financial practices. So there’s evidence that he’s use his place on the bench to tilt the playing field even further in favor of the rich.
So senators have plenty to go off of to oppose his nomination no matter what happens next on the Dr. Ford front. And so we would continue asking Democratic senators who have not yet stated for the record that they’re a no to come out and say they are a firm no. We need a new nominee and that’s clear.
VALLAS: Now speaking of tilting the playing field further in favor of the rich, Chad, SCOTUS is what a lot of folks are focused on right now and rightly so and if you haven’t called your member of congress yet no is as good a time as any, I’ll remember folks, I can’t even speak English today Chad, I’ll remember, I’ll remind folks of that phone number, it’s 202–224–3121, that’s the number you always have to have top of mind if you want congress to know what you’re thinking about and what you think they should be doing to better represent you as their constituent.
BOLT: Save it in your phone, best practice.
VALLAS: Oo, yeah, 202–224–3121 on speed dial in Chad’s phone, everyone. And it should be in yours too. But speaking of tilting the playing field further in favor of the rich, I was going to say SCOTUS is not the only thing congress is up to right now, there’s actually a lot going on on the tax front.
BOLT: That’s right. So Republicans, obviously we remember, your listeners of this show especially will remember the GOP tax scam that passed last fall, the new tax law that gives the overwhelming majority of its benefits to the wealthy and corporations. Republicans apparently did not get enough, they are back with the GOP tax scam 2.0, there was a committee vote on this last week. Surprise, 2.0 looks a lot like 1.0. it locks in the features of 1.0 that made it so heavily skewed to the rich in the first place. The top 1% under this bill would get a tax cut that as a percentage of income is almost 10 times as big as the tax cut for the bottom 60%. They’re up to their old tricks in another way too, it adds over $600 billion to the deficit, that’s on top of the original $1.5 trillion from the first law and remember this is part of a three part Republican dance. Number one, explode the deficit to give tax cuts to the rich, number two complain about how big the deficit has gotten, oh my goodness, we’ve got to do something. step three, use the deficit to justify deep cuts to the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, so we’ve seen this from Republicans before and they are just up to their old tricks again. But — go ahead.
VALLAS: I want to just get into that dance because that actually became, very real again this week. I’m pulling up the quote that I want to read here but Larry Kudlow who is one of the White House economic advisors who is building out these kinds of tax scam proposals was one of the folks this week who put in neon lights yet another reminder of how connected these continued efforts to funnel tax cuts to the wealthy are to the GOP agenda when it comes to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and food assistance and housing assistance and everything else that helps people make ends meet when they either fall on hard times, have wages that don’t pay enough to pay the bills. Get old and need to retire as we all will at some point, someday. And so Larry Kudlow started to actually paint the picture of how they want to pay for tax scam 1.0 and tax scam 2.0 in pretty concrete terms for the first time that we’ve seen in a while from this White House. So what you’re talking about in terms of this three-step dance, not theoretical. Not us saying this might happen, here is Larry Kudlow telling us it’s exactly what’s going to happen. He said the White House will probably be looking at quote, “larger entitlement reform” next year. Of course we know what ‘entitlement reform’ is code for, it’s cuts to all of those kinds of programs that I just walked through. But I want to also call him out for a particular quote in this piece, which was that quote, “we have to be tougher on spending,” he added, “government spending is the reason for the wider budget deficits that the nation is facing,” not he Republican led tax cuts activated this year. How many Pinocchio’s do you think, Chad, Larry Kudlow deserves for that one?
BOLT: How many, what is the limit on Pinocchio’s? [LAUGHTER] 100% of the Pinocchio’s available is what that comment deserves. I mean, in fact, Trump’s own budget officials have testified to the contrary on that. There was a hearing before the House Budget committee earlier this year where the top Democrat on that committee, Congressman John Yarmouth asked Mick Mulvaney the head of OMB about why the deficit was so much larger in the FY19 proposed budget and Mick Mulvaney said as much that it was related to the tax cuts put in place by the tax law that Republicans passed last fall.
VALLAS: And related is kind of a charitable word there.
BOLT: Yes, correlated is probably more like it. So this is, it just underscores the urgency in building the blue wave and electing Democrats to congress this November. It was not an accident that Republicans passed a tax law that made no expansion to the Earned Income Tax Credit, no meaningful changes to the tax code that would really help working families and the middle class get ahead. Those were choices that they made. We need to send officials to congress, members of congress to DC that will make different choices.
VALLAS: Now on tax scam 2.0, this is something that Republicans in the house in particular are actively trying to move forward whether or not they can get it done before the midterms, there’s a lot of questions about whether there’s enough time on the calendar but they certainly are serious enough about it that there was actually a markup that happened last week and you were watching it so we didn’t have to.
BOLT: Yes, that’s exactly right. So unsurprisingly the House Ways and Means committee voted on a party line to advance tax scam 2.0 to the house floor. But I want to quickly raise something that didn’t get a lot of attention from that markup and it’s an amendment offered by Lloyd Doggett, a senior Democrat on the Ways and Means committee from Texas. He offered an amendment to subpoena Donald Trump’s tax returns.
VALLAS: My God, what an idea! Do you mean we have a president in the White House who still hasn’t released his tax returns, Chad? Is that what you’re saying?
BOLT: That is exactly what I’m saying. It’s almost as if he’s violated 40 years of our electoral norms in never having released his tax returns in the interest of transparency so that Americans could see just exactly what was going on in his financial orbit. So why is this important? there’s a lot that we could learn from seeing his tax returns. Most obvious we could find out just how much Donald Trump personally stands to benefit from the tax law that he helped push through congress, but we could also find out if he’s paid, for example, what he lawfully owes in taxes. It has bigger implications too. We could find out whether and where he has foreign bank accounts, if he’s paid foreign taxes, we could further explore the Trump Organization’s foreign entanglements and better understand if they pose conflicts of interest. We could see if those foreign business engagements actually violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution. All very important things to know but Republicans don’t want to do that. They’ve stood with Trump every step of the way to keep his tax returns a secret. In fact, this vote in the committee last week was the sixth time Republicans have voted against subpoenaing his tax returns. And it just shows how committed Republicans are to rubberstamping Trump’s agenda and shielding him from the scrutiny that he deserves. And again, it just underscores how important it is to elect Democrats to congress in November. This should be a day one priority. There’s so much at stake and so much to learn. It’s something that Democrats really need to get done should they take back the house in November.
VALLAS: Now our time is waning but you came thankfully with at least one piece of good news. So in the last minute or so that we have Chad, what is that good news? It’s on the healthcare front.
BOLT: There’s usually so much bad news on this front so I did want to make sure everyone knew, below the headlines there was a new lawsuit filed this week by patient advocates to stop Trump’s sabotage of the ACA. We know that he’s wanted to decimate the ACA from day one, he said it during the campaign. Republicans tried to obviously repeal the Affordable Care Act, we know how that turned out thanks to massive public opposition and organizing in support of the ACA. But now Trump’s trying to use the agency rule making process to further sabotage it by expanding the definition of what are called ‘short term plans’. Under current law, they’re only allowed to last for three months and they don’t cover routine services and people with preexisting conditions can be denied from them. Well Trump wants to expand short term plans to last a year and say that they can be renewed for up to three years. These are junk plans that don’t cover what people in many cases actually need. And so he wants to be able to proliferate the market with these junk plans just to further sabotage our health care markets and the ACA for his own political gain. But this new lawsuit actually stands to challenge that and stop him in his tracks. So it was just filed a lot more to come, may not be news on this for a little bit but I didn’t want everyone to know there was some good news.
VALLAS: And more on that lawsuit and what it brings in terms of challenges to these junk plans being allowed by the Trump administration as part of their backdoor sabotage ACA efforts on our nerdy syllabus page if you want to dig in and wonk out a little bit with it. Chad thank you so much for standing in for the Slevantor when he is off gallivanting somewhere and for doing it on your anniversary, happy anniversary, tell that to John for me too.
BOLT: Thank you, on the nerdy syllabus can we also include indivisible.org, it’s where you can go if you want to find your nearest Indivisible group and help us build the big blue wave, it’s not going to build itself. We need you to vote in November but we also need you to be out there knocking on doors, text banking, phone banking, bringing friends, check it out and find out how you can help us.
VALLAS: Chad Bolt is the associate director of blue wave emojis at Indivisible. [LAUGHTER] He’s actually the associate policy director and guru of many other things. Chad thank you so much for coming back on the show, standing in for Jeremy and I hope to have you back soon.
BOLT: It’s good to be back, thanks Rebecca.
VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, talking to Dave Cooper at the Economic Policy Institute about the latest in the restaurant lobby’s efforts to overturn Initiative 77, the measure that would increase wages for DC’s tipped workers.
[MUSIC]
You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. While Washington was consumed by the debate over Trump’s Trump’s controversial Supreme Court nominee, among other fights playing out in Congress, the D.C. restaurant industry spent the summer months quietly working to take down a voter-approved ballot measure that would raise wages for D.C.’s tipped workers. Initiative 77, as it was called, passed with 56% support at the ballot box in June’s primary election. But the restaurant lobby joined forces with D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson to introduce a bill that would overturn the will of the voters and repeal the initiative outright. And earlier this week, the debate returned to the public eye in a marathon hearing that started on the morning of Monday, September 17th and lasted until nearly 4am the next day. In opposing the wage increase, representatives of the restaurant industry have raised a range of claims, suggesting that the measure will hurt city businesses — and even tipped workers themselves. So with this issue back in the spotlight, I’m pleased to welcome Dave Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute here in DC and one of the policy experts who testified at the hearing back on the show. Dave, thanks for coming back on the show.
DAVE COOPER: Thanks for having me, great to be here.
VALLAS: So before we get into the nitty gritty and also what that hearing was like because you were there and testified, remind us what would Initiative 77 do, how would it work?
COOPER: Sure, so right now under current law in the District of Columbia any worker that regularly receives tips as part of their job, so think restaurant servers, bartenders but also nail salon workers, parking lot attendants, barbers, hairstylists, their employer only has to pay them a base wage of $3.89 per hour under the assumption that what they’re receiving in tips is going to bring them up to the regular minimum wage, which in the District of Columbia right now is $13.25. Now, what Initiative 77 would do is it would raise that base wage, that $3.89 slowly over a period of 8 years, the increases would be able $1.50 a year until that base wage for tipped workers is equal to the regular minimum wage. So in other words, after 2026, anyone who’s a tipped worker in the district would get the regular minimum wage just like everybody else and when they still get tips, those tips would be on top of that solid base pay. And that’s the way it is in a number of other states already, that’s the way it’s been for decades in seven states in the country. And so this would be moving DC closer to a lot of other progressive areas in the country in the way that it treats its tipped workforce.
VALLAS: And that was actually going to be my next question. This is not a new idea, this is something we’re watching happen in other places which ends up actually being pretty important because it gives us an evidence base for what happens when you do this. And we’re going to get into that for a second because that’s a big part of what your testimony at this hearing delved into but first I raise that this was a marathon hearing, I can’t remember a DC council hearing that went this long. You were there and you were there for a lot of it. What was it like? Set the stage a little bit for us for those of us who didn’t get to see it.
COOPER: Sure, so I was there for about 8 and a half hours of it and it was probably the craziest city council hearing, state level policy hearing I’ve ever been to and I’ve testified in a bunch of different places. This one, just the tenor of the event was just so mean spirited, so viritolic, the campaign folks who were trying to advocate for raising the minimum wage for tipped workers, the pro-Initiative 77 folks were just getting attack left and right with these really personal attacks. One thing that I was just shocked to see. At one point one of the campaign folks for raising the tipped minimum wage gave her testimony, she talked about her time being a tipped worker here in DC, I think she said she lived in DC for about 5 years working in the restaurant industry and she described some pretty challenging circumstances. And the attitude of particularly council chairmember Mendelson was just totally dismissive of her claims. It was like a cross examination, it was really rough.
So she gave her testimony, they were doing panels of four witnesses at a time, she gave her testimony, about an hour later and I’ve never seen this happen before, he called her back, he said, is so-and-so still in the room? And she came back by herself and he said to her so miss so-and-so I see, you testified earlier that you live currently in Takoma Park, Maryland, which is a town right next to DC, it’s just on the border. And he said I see you said earlier you live in Takoma Park but on your Facebook profile it says that you live in the District of Columbia and your LinkedIn profile says that you live in the Bay Area and she had mentioned she had moved to the Bay Area not too long ago. And I just couldn’t believe that he was basically trying to undermine this woman’s credibility based upon the fact that she hasn’t updated her Facebook page in a while. And that just goes to show the level of animosity that was on display throughout this hearing. Anyone who was trying to present a story that didn’t fit with the narrative of the opponents of Initiative 77 was just immediately dismissed outright.
And that’s actually the way it was for me too. I was trying to just provide data, trying to provide some facts, interject some facts into this debate that was really just rhetoric being tossed around. And the response I got was the data doesn’t matter, the facts don’t matter. I actually had to, I sat there during the Q and A portion and Councilmember Jack Evans basically told me that statistics don’t mean anything, that dad doesn’t mean anything because they can be manipulated to show whatever you want. And I admit that people who are not genuine people who are not being honest can manipulate statistics but it’s really, it really presents, the really reflects the sad state of our politics today when you have elected officials saying that the facts don’t matter. You know honestly it sounded like something you’d hear out of the Trump administration, not out of a city council that is ostensibly Democrats.
VALLAS: It also reflects that this hearing appears not to have been convened to try to shed light on the issues or to elevate evidence that could be helpful to council as they consider whether they should actually advance this bill that would repeal this measure to raise tipped workers wages but rather that there was an agenda that Mendelson and some of his colleagues appear to have had in setting up this hearing, which was to only elevate one perspective, that against Initiative 77 and to try to diminish, as you said, the credibility of those brave enough to come forward and to say I’m a tipped worker and this is how this would help me.
COOPER: Yeah and that actually speaks to a great point. Because they kept questioning folks, saying well how come we’re not hearing more from tipped workers who support this initiative? How come more people aren’t stepping forward? And the problem is that this is an environment where you have a lot of workers that are people of color, that are women and that what you’re basically asking them to do is to step forward and say the current system is not treating me well even if my employer may generally be a good employer the structure of the system creates incentives that are damaging for me and if those folks step forward there’s nothing to prevent their employers from retaliating, from saying you know what, your shifts, we’re going to reduce your schedule or we’re going to give you all the bad sections in the restaurant or we’re only going to give you the small tables. Which is going to immediate impact their income and so to expect those folks to just willingly come out in droves to talk about how they’re being cheated, I just don’t think is realistic.
VALLAS: And to expect them to come out in droves when they’re then going to sit there and get cross-examined by their council members for sharing their stories and voicing what apparently is an unpopular perspective when it comes to certain members on council also adding another layer to this. To your point about some of the fear that folks have experienced and that has kept many in the shadows in this debate where the restaurant industry has funneled millions of dollars into the effort to kill the measure and has actually been astroturfing, trying to misinform workers to make it look like it’s a worker led movement. Listeners of the show will be familiar with the campaign in opposition being called “Save our tips” to make it sound like it’s actually worker led when it reality it’s funded by the restaurant lobby. Earlier this year I actually had a woman, a tipped worker from a DC bar on this show talking about how she believes she lost her job, she was fired from a DC bar because she had been quoted in The Washington Post in favor of Initiative 77 so very real fear for very good reasons. But I want to get a little bit into the facts here and the evidence because they do matter.
COOPER: I sure hope so.
VALLAS: And they certainly matter on this show and to me and so given that this appears to be one of the few platforms that still believes that statistics and evidence and data matter, Dave, let’s get into some of that. So some of the claims raised by opponents of Initiative 77 and I want to walk through these actually in turn were exactly what your testimony took on. And these are the claims that in particular have been mounted by the restaurant lobby. So to be clear, this is who is opposing this bill, this is who is raising these claims. Claim number one that they have lobbed and that was certainly in full force at this hearing was that Initiative 77 raising the wages of tipped workers will be catastrophic to DC’s businesses and particularly to the restaurant industry, they’ve painted a picture of closures and layoffs that look post-apocalyptic. What do we know about whether this claim holds any water?
COOPER: Sure, so you may, this claim may be familiar to you because it’s the same one we hear anytime any sort of minimum wage increase is proposed anywhere in the country. This is the same claim that’s been made for the last hundred years by businesses in opposition to raising minimum wages, that it’s going to lead to this calamity that the sky will fall. Well we have decades of research, at least on the regular minimum wage showing that at least moderate increase in minimum wages and when I say moderate I mean of the scale that we’ve done in the past, have never led to any measurable impact on employment. That it never led to the massive closures that opponents often claim. Now the research on the tipped minimum wage is a little bit thinner but there is at least one published study that was done by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, it was published in the Journal of Industrial Relations that looked at changes in tipped minimum wages and what the impact was on restaurant employment. And what they found was raising the tipped minimum wage tended to do exactly what we expect it to do, it raised the wages of tipped workers with no measurable impact on their employment. And that certainly creates, gives us some confidence that we could raise the tipped minimum wage here in DC without destroying the industry.
The other point I would make is that as we said earlier this has been the law of the land in seven other states for decades. Hawai’i just joined that group a few years ago so now it’s 8 states that have this policy where tipped workers get the regular minimum wage before tips. And in those places the restaurant industry is thriving. Tipped occupations still exist, and the industry continues to grow. In my paper, we’ve had that research for years now, we’ve known that tipped workers are better off in those states. One of the claims of the opposition was that well, DC is a city, it’s not a state so all that existing research doesn’t apply, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but OK, fair enough, I’ll respond to that direct. And so we did this paper looking at the tipped workforce in DC and compared the tipped workers here and economic outcomes for those workers in the restaurant industry here in DC to tipped workers in the restaurant industry in San Francisco and Seattle, which are two cities that are so-called one fair wage cities, in other words tipped workers get the regular minimum wage and they also have high minimum wages like DC. San Francisco is already at $15 an hour, Seattle’s on its way there. And in those places, the restaurant industry is continuing to grow, not quite as fast as DC because DC’s had a huge restaurant boom in recent years but pretty close and importantly tipped occupations there are still a huge part of the economy. In fact, the tipped workforce in Seattle and San Francisco is a larger share of the overall workforce than it is here in DC. And it’s about the same share of the private sector workforce. So clearly this has not led to the elimination of tipped jobs in those cities. Tipped workers still exist, restaurants still exist and as far as I can tell and I was in California earlier this year, people still tip when they go out to eat. This does not eliminate tipping.
VALLAS: So move over Cormac McCarthy, not quite the post-apocalyptic world that the restaurant lobby is painting for us. Another claim that they have raised, it’s almost like they looked at your research and then they said wait we’ve got to find every way to poke holes in it, right so and then you’ve responded in turn. They have said ah, you know, but these comparisons don’t work because DC is different. DC is special, we can’t look at San Francisco or other cities, we need to say DC is different and big part of what they have said in claiming that DC is different and so all of these analytics don’t apply here is well DC has a much larger share of small independently owned businesses and that means we shouldn’t just rest easy knowing what’s happened in these other places. Does that claim hold any water?
COOPER: You know it’s interesting, I had no prior when I started examining that question. I didn’t really know what to think. And unfortunately there’s no public available data on ownership so I couldn’t address the question specifically of ownership but just purely looking at business size. I looked at data from the county business patterns data which is data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and what it shows is DC actually has a smaller share of quote, unquote “small business restaurants” than a lot of other places in the country. In fact, it’s smaller than the US average. In DC fewer than half of restaurants have less than 20 employees and about 78% of restaurants have fewer than 50 employees. Well if we look at say Seattle, in Seattle 91% of restaurants have fewer than 50 employees and two-thirds have less than 10 employees. In San Francisco it’s the same, about 90% fewer than 50, about 70% have fewer than 20 employees. So this is really fascinating, DC’s restaurants tend to be much larger establishments, much larger businesses than full service restaurants throughout most of the rest of the country. So to answer your question, no, DC does not have, it doesn’t appear to have a larger share of these small, boutique restaurants as the industry’s claiming.
VALLAS: DC’s special but in other ways. So then lastly another claim that the restaurant lobby has raised and that they raised also again at this hearing is tipped workers are somehow going to be worse off if this kind of policy goes into effect. And I’ll say on its face a lot of people might be listening right now going OK, that one really boggles the mind because we’re talking about raising their wages how is that going to make them worse off. But bear with me here, what is it that the restaurant lobby is claiming and does that last claim carry any water?
COOPER: Yeah so this one always frustrates me. The notion is that somehow if you raise tipped workers base pay, so in other words you start giving them a solid paycheck, because right now most of them don’t get a paycheck, whatever they’ve received as a base wage just goes to taxes and they get a paycheck that says ‘void’ on it. Somehow if you start giving them a paycheck that actually is worth anything, that’s going to lead to customers tipping less as if the average customer knows what the tipped worker is getting as a base wage, which again I think is ridiculous. If you cross the border from one state to another do you honestly have a conception of how the tipped minimum wage is changing and adjust your tipping accordingly? I don’t think so. Anyway, I looked at the numbers on this and when you look at tipped workers in Seattle and San Francisco, servers and bartenders then tend to have take home pay that is 20% higher than it is for servers and bartenders in the District of Columbia. That’s San Francisco, in Seattle it’s about 17% so still a pretty substantial different and that’s data just looking at the city. But it’s perfectly consistent with the existing research that looks at tipped workers in states that are one fair wage states compared to tipped workers in states where they get the low tipped minimum wages. That research has similarly shown that tipped workers make about 17% to 20% more per hour when they get the regular minimum wage as a base wage. So the idea that this is going to lead to tipped workers taking home less money just does not hold up empirically whatsoever.
VALLAS: And you’ve talked a little bit about in that last bit there about how certain workers are going to be helped and in any conversation about what this kind of a policy means for tipped workers it’s really important to get into the racial breakdown of who these workers are and how that plays into it. There are gender dynamics as well. But let’s start with race, we know that Black workers are especially harmed and we know this in part from your research and others by the status quo policy. What do we know about what they stand to benefit from in terms of this policy change.
COOPER: Sure so when I looked at the demographics of the tipped workforce in DC what I found is that about 70% of tipped workers in the District of Columbia are people of color, which is disproportionate. Only about 55% of the overall workforce in DC is people of color. When you look at the wages for tipped workers in DC, what you find is that Black tipped workers tend to make 23% less per hour and annually than their white counterparts, Hispanic tipped workers make 18% less than their white counterparts so people of color represent a large share of this workforce and they’re the ones who this current system is not serving well. And this is, as you mentioned, this isn’t just my research. There’s a great researcher at Cornell, Michael Lynn who studies tipped phenomena and what he’s found is that tipping is often discriminatory, that black workers who have the same reported quality of service undeniably get tipped less than their white counterparts and there’s no evidence to understand why that is other than these racial dynamics.
VALLAS: And I mentioned gender as well. The DC tipped workforce actually is not one that’s overwhelmingly women, it’s about 50/50 as you and I were talking about before we started taping. But there are some pretty significant and pretty important gender dynamics at play here as well. What are those?
COOPER: So women tipped workers in the District of Columbia typically make 8% less per hour in total pay than their male counterparts, that’s per hour. On an annual basis, women tipped workers take home 20% less than their male counterparts in the District of Columbia and a big reason for that is that women tend to work fewer hours per week. And we can speculate that probably those lower hours, probably some portion of that is involuntary, in other words, they’d like to work more but they can’t either because they have additional responsibilities that prevent them from doing so, we know a lot of folks can’t afford childcare, that’s probably a big piece of this. The other thing is they may simply not be able to get the hours, to get the schedule that they want because supervisors are just giving preference to the male staff. And this is a big issue in the tipped workforce. Because when you’re a tipped worker you’re not really negotiating for your wage, you’re negotiating for your schedule and we know that women face systematic disadvantages in negotiation particularly around pay. We can assume that similar disadvantages exist when negotiating for schedule. So women are just not able to get the best shifts, the best sections in the restaurant. The things that would allow them to earn wages more similar to their male counterparts.
VALLAS: Hearing this I think back to my days waiting tables and I didn’t do it well but I did it for a long time in high school, in college, a little bit in law school. And I had such memories of fighting with my bosses trying to get the good shifts. You wanted the shifts when you knew there were going to be a lot of tables and people were going to tip and it was going to be bigger meals and people were going to be ordering alcohol. You knew what went into a good shift that was going to result in good tips. And the bad shifts, you could sit around and have two tables all night and you’d be sitting there making the tipped minimum wage of $3 an hour and walking away with $12 from 7 hours of work because you just didn’t get any tables and they only tipped you a couple of bucks. That’s the kind of thing that you’re talking about here when it comes to negotiating for shifts, which becomes a negotiation effectively for your pay.
COOPER: Yeah that’s absolutely right and the other thing that people don’t realize is when you get those slow shifts even if you had a great night the night before, even if you walked home with a bunch of money all it takes is one slow shift to see your wages for the week suddenly become minimum wage because the nature of the tipped system is so long as you’re getting minimum wage and we know that that doesn’t always happen because we know that there’s a lot of wage theft in the restaurant industry, the loss is as long as you’re getting minimum wage over the course of a week then it’s all good. So slow shift don’t mean anything basically, you’re basically, you may have a great Friday night but if you’re stuck working a Tuesday lunch as well then you instantly become a minimum wage worker, you may instantly become a minimum wage worker and I think if that’s the system that existed in any other industry I don’t think people would tolerate it. The example I give is what if cars salesman operated the same way? That as soon as you sold a car and got a commission, that commission came out of your base salary. I don’t think the industry would tolerate that, I don’t think car salesmen would tolerate that. I think it’s only because this is the tipped workforce which has historically been disproportionately women and disproportionately people of color that we’ve allowed this system to persist for so long.
VALLAS: So in the weeks ahead we are hearing that council may actually try to advance this legislation to repeal Initiative 77 effectively overturning the wishes of the voters who said yes we do want to give DC’s tipped workers a well-deserved and much needed raise so stay tuned for more updates on this show and if you’re inclined and if you’re a DC resident I’d say your member of council could benefit to hear from you particularly if you’re a tipped worker ever have been one, know one, love one, live with one like I do, light up those phones, council needs to hear from you because this measure is at very real risk of being overturned despite the fact that it was the will of the voters. Dave Cooper is a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, someone I always love having on this show and someone who’s been writing prolifically and tweeting prolifically about Initiative 77, Dave, where can folks find you on twitter?
COOPER: They can find me @metacoop.
VALLAS: And we’ll have you back soon.
COOPER: Thanks so much, great to be here.
VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.
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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. One year after Hurricane Maria made landfall and began tearing its way through Puerto Rico, the death toll from the storm has now topped 3,000 — and thousands of families remain without electricity or safe drinking water. The storm inflicted an estimated $95 billion in damage, flooding entire cities and towns, destroying homes, schools and hospitals; and dismantling the island’s power grid. But as President Trump took to Twitter to contest the rising death toll figures, in perhaps one of his most inhumane and callous social media outings to date, experts have begun to take stock of the administration’s slipshod disaster response — and what it says about our leaders’ preparedness for extreme weather events. Extreme weather events of course are becoming only more frequent thanks to climate change, and they hit communities of color, low-income individuals, and people with disabilities hardest. To take a look at where we are a year out after Hurricane Maria — a tragic anniversary that coincided with the emergence of yet another hurricane, this time Hurricane Florence, I’m joined by Rejane Frederick, an associate director of the Center for American Progress’s poverty to prosperity program. Rejane, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
REJANE FREDERICK: Thanks for having me on this quite a somber day.
VALLAS: It really is and we’re actually taping on the day of the anniversary which is fitting. Trump’s horrific denial of the rising death toll in that tweet and I have to say I was one of the people feeling like could he hit a new low? I think it’s without question this was a new low even for him. It actually came as he was diverting money from FEMA to his deportation force as Hurricane Florence was projected to start to hit the Carolinas, it’s a reminder that it’s not even just the rhetoric coming from this administration, it’s also their policies and that’s a lot of what I’m really eager to get into with you Rejane. So a quick reminder of some of how Trump has spoken about the storm not just this tweet, it’s a lot more. Well I think people can remember that Trump and his White House team were incredibly slow to focus on the scale of the devastation.
They committed a lot less in resources in Puerto Rico than they did to contemporaneous hurricane relief efforts in Texas and in Florida so just to look at equity there but folks may remember the President went on a four day golf outing to his New Jersey club right after Maria hit. He made no statements, no substantive statements about the crisis until six days after Hurricane Maria made landfall and he made clear once he did start to finally talk about the storm that he didn’t appear to know that Puerto Ricans are US citizens. He didn’t even visit the island until two weeks after the hurricane hit and people may remember him throwing rolls of paper towels into the crowd something that has become a symbol of his shall we say callous approach to, or glib maybe is the right word, approach to the misery that he was encountering there on the island. That was the public facing trappings but help me understand where are things now, a year out, now that the cameras have left, what is the state of recovery in Puerto Rico a year after the storm made landfall?
FREDERICK: Yeah, thanks for that wonderfully depressing overview Rebecca. I think to sum it up I’m going to quote our incredible colleague Enrique Fernandez Toledo who runs CAP’s Puerto Rico project. It’s Donald Trump’s disaster racism, that really sums up what we witnessed in terms of the response to Puerto Rico to the victims of Hurricane Maria, which includes the U.S. Virgin Islands to American territories, all American citizens predominately people of color. There’s just no other way to get around it. To go deeper into the policies and where things stand I think the outlook is really grim. The sheer amount of trauma that we are witnessing in Puerto Rico, in the U.S. Virgin Islands is a lifetime. Already we’re calling the families and the individuals that were impacted by Hurricane Maria the Maria generation because we are already seeing not just an exacerbation or a worsening of the disabilities that Puerto Ricans already had and again, I’ll remind listeners, Puerto Rico, 21% of Puerto Ricans have a disability. One in four Americans now have a disability. So we’re not even talking, this 21% was in 2016, so we’re not even talking, this was before Hurricane Maria hit. And so often the conversation doesn’t highlight the fact that disabilities are acquired in the aftermath of a hurricane.
The sheer trauma that is really reverberating again, it lasts a lifetime and right now we are really seeing not just the death toll right but the unfolding devastation. Each time we visit Puerto Rico there’s a new development, whether it’s the short supply of water or the reality that FEMA had tons of water left on a runway, water that when Puerto Ricans received it tasted funny, it didn’t look right. A 2018 US Government Accountability Office report was really damning. It found that despite FEMA’s efforts in Puerto and I quote “being the largest and longest single response in the agency’s history more than half of the agency’s staff did not hold the title of ‘qualified’ based on FEMA’s qualification standards,” meaning they were not qualified for the jobs that they were assigned, I mean sit with that for a moment. So what does this mean? According to the GAO which also highlights the fact that FEMA’s own officials admitted that its staff shortages and a lack of trained personnel with program expertise led to complications in its’ response efforts particularly in Hurricane Maria. Again, this is not a coincidence when you parallel that or compare it to the tweets and the utter disregard that Donald J. Trump had towards American citizens in Puerto Rico.
VALLAS: Now the administration’s position makes it sound as though, and some of their public statements make it sound as though oh everything’s over, everything’s fine we handled Puerto Rico.
FREDERICK: It was an unsung success, right.
VALLAS: Right, it’s the mission accomplished moment for this administration although they’ve had others as well this is one of those. They’re saying everything’s good there, that’s not what actually being lived as the experience of Puerto Ricans right now many of whom the picture you’ve painted is quite bleak as they’ve struggled to recover. What do we know about how much longer it’s going to take and what it’s going to take to get Puerto Rico back on its’ feet as this recovery continues to progress but quite sluggishly?
FREDERICK: That is billions if not trillions of dollars worth of a question Rebecca that I think many of us are still struggling to answer. What we do know is that disasters, particularly hurricanes magnify existing inequities and financially strap people rarely and I want to emphasize this, rarely if ever recover fully. If anything their odds of sliding deeper into poverty increases in the aftermath of an extreme weather event. As a study published actually last year in the National Bureau of Economic Research found, researchers analyzed 90 years, almost a century of disaster data and observed that inequality worsened in disaster prone areas like Puerto Rico as residents with the economic means to flee did leaving behind already financially insecure community members to reside in a place that’s chronically at risk of more severe events. So this really gets at the root of it, it gets a theme that has resonated within our nation for a quite a while which is the widening inequality between the haves and the have-nots.
We know that people with disabilities and particularly those living in disaster vulnerable low-income communities endure a disproportionate burden and harm of which they never really recover from. It’s a new normal and folks, I want to underscore the fact that folks in Puerto Rico, folks in the U.S. Virgin Islands, folks in Texas and Florida, they are incredible at their resilience. To live in areas that by all measures radical and rapid climate change is going to make them even more chronically prone to hurricanes and other extreme weather events. They are resilient, it is time that we fortify our existing infrastructure and resources and supports to ensure that those folks are not just able to be resilient but they’re able to thrive, either in these areas or elsewhere.
VALLAS: You started to mention some of the cataloging that government agencies have done, looking at how this administration handled the response to Hurricane Maria and its aftermath. I want to add a few additional data points because the more that people continue to focus only on the death toll and not on what contributed to the fact that the response to this storm was so slipshod, I feel like the policy often is missing from these conversations so I’m going to inject a few points from some of these findings. You mentioned the GAO report, there’s also a FEMA report that it published itself in July taking itself somewhat to task for poor disaster planning and for a less than desirably positive response to this storm, less than competent response to this storm. So it came to light that FEMA had awarded a Florida startup that had no track record whatsoever with disaster response, a multi-million dollar contract to provide half a million tarps that were for temporary roofs on homes. Those tarps were never delivered the contract was ultimately canceled. Another one that has come to light, an Atlanta entrepreneur who had no expertise whatsoever that anyone can find in disaster relief got a FEMA contract to provide 30 million meals to Puerto Ricans in the wake of the storm, only 50,000 of those 20 million meals had been delivered by the time that FEMA finally realized they should cancel that contract. And the perhaps most recently a large supply of bottled water that FEMA was supposed to distribute was actually found abandoned on an airport runway, the water had never been delivered while people had no access to safe drinking water and no other options, just a few of the highlights or rather lowlights of some of what happened in the aftermath of this storm that’s come to light.
But I want to flip this coin on its head and put the question to you, Rejane, how can we do better? It’s important to catalog these kinds of policy and practice failures especially given the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and we’re having this conversation now in the wake of Florence and as people have conversations about recovery efforts there although that storm was a lot less devastating in the destruction that it wreaked compared to Hurricane Maria obviously. But what is it that policymakers should be doing when it comes to preparing for storms like this and then in response and recovery both just to do a better job, not to screw up like we’re understanding FEMA did under President Trump but also to ensure greater equity and to protect the vulnerable communities that you just mentioned like low-income folks, people of color and people with disabilities?
FREDERICK: And if I may, Rebecca I just wanted to add to your laundry list —
VALLAS: Please do.
FREDERICK: Of where there were gaps and failures in the approach, particularly of Trump’s administration, Trump’s FEMA in particular. In addition to calling this an unsung success what we have now seen is that FEMA’s own administration Brock Long has discussed in multiple outlets the desire to want to turn the agency into a block granting agency. So what we’re talking about is fundamentally pushing more of the burden of response onto states and localities and really abdicating the responsibility and the key role that the federal government plays in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.
VALLAS: And you mentioned Brock Long, FEMA’s administrator, he’s currently under investigation for misuse of government vehicles, may actually be in danger of losing his job according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal so not exactly somebody who is the face of an unsung hero.
FREDERICK: Exactly, and so to answer your question in terms of what is it that we need to do this is something that has been known long before Hurricane Maria but particularly in light of this administration really, really requires just a fundamental reimagining of our nation’s preparedness, response and recovery framework and the current infrastructure. People with disabilities and other marginalized communities that you referenced. People of color, low income and resourced communities cannot and I emphasize cannot be an afterthought but rather must be the first thought when planning how to prepare and respond because they are at the greatest risk of being exposed against to extreme weather events and so what does this look like? Fundamentally again we have to prioritize to unmet needs of our most vulnerable and tackle the inequity that is widening inequality in this nation. We need to recognize that resilience to extreme weather climate change helps communities become safe, remain safe and is a more cost effective strategy to addressing these disasters and strategies that solely focus on recovery. So it’s the preparedness, it’s the response and the recovery. We need to recognize that access to secure, quality and affordable housing is a key preparedness factor. We need to boldly implement and bolster approaches that permanently stabilize financially insecure people and help them build a sound wealth and health building foundation for both themselves and their families.
So what does that look like? It’s the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program fortifying that, maintaining the program, ensuring the availabilities particularly during disasters of disaster SNAP, increasing unemployment insurance in disaster unemployment assistance, extending the benefits period which we know have long been woefully too short and inadequate. Maintaining and increasing investments in low-income housing tax credits that helps to finance the construction and rehabilitation of low-income affordable rental housing which is a big problem currently in Puerto Rico as one study has highlighted that more than 50% of the housing structure that was in place before the hurricane was not adequate, was not sufficient and was not safe for Puerto Ricans to be living in. it’s aspects like these, programs that have be tried and true that have been really shown to permanently stabilize financially insecure people and we need to make them better.
VALLAS: And in the last minute or so that I have with you actually you have just put out a piece looking at in particular the impact of these kinds of extreme weather events on people with disabilities and what we can do better when it comes preparation and response and recovery, those three buckets you’ve outlined to make sure that people with disabilities aren’t left behind in these kinds of storms, what’s a quick summary of what people need to know about making sure that our recover to these kinds of extreme weather events isn’t inadvertently ableist?
FREDERICK: Thank you for lifting up our report, I encourage, our issue brief I should say, I encourage everyone to read it. I mean fundamentally at the core of our recommendation is again centering the needs of people with disabilities. The disability community is wide and diverse. It’s one of the most inclusive communities. Rebecca Cokely who is our director of disability justice project here at CAP always says that anyone along their lifetime will become a member of the disability community. So fundamentally prioritizing and centering people with disabilities centers us all, and so within that issue brief we have a litany of recommendations that is in many ways is informed by Portlight Strategies, which is an incredible disability justice organization. And again it really is asking for a fundamentally reworking of programs in the current infrastructure when it comes to disaster response and the programming that we receive from early age to when we’re aging into services as aging adults. So I really encourage people to look at the specific recommendations and again, we just need to do better nad we need to take bolder, more innovative steps and now is the time.
VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Rejane Frederick, she’s an associate director at the Center for American Progress’s poverty to prosperity program, something that people know I love and a voice you will remember having heard on this show before Rejane thank you so much for your work on this and at some point I will need to have you on the show for a happier anniversary than the one that we’re commemorating today. Thank you so much for coming back.
FREDERICK: Thanks Rebecca.
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.
