Corporate and billionaire giving helps their image more than it helps us January 19, 2019 By Matthew CaruchetReprinted from Economic Opportunity Institute Microsoft announced this week that it will spend $500 million to offset the lack of affordable housing and combat homelessness around Lake Washington. The money will be dispensed through loans and grants to…
By Melanie Mazza at EOI Online Two cities struggle to fund homelessness relief. One succeeds. San Francisco just did something Seattle couldn’t manage: on Election Day, they voted to tax big business to fund homelessness relief. Like Seattle, San Francisco is a tech city whose rising costs have pushed people out of the area and out…
by Matthew Caruchet Karl Marx-inspired credit ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service issued a report this month saying that Amazon’s bullying tactics over Seattle’s newly-passed employee hours tax show it has too much influence over our city. The tax would require businesses with more than $20 million in annual revenue to pay about $275 per full-time…
Last June, Gov. Jay Inslee made headlines when he signed a state budget totaling $43.4 billion in spending for 2017-19. Which of the following statements about that budget is true? A. State spending will grow 15.3% by 2019. B. State spending will grow 6.1% by 2019. C. State spending will grow 3.2% by 2019. D….
The next time you hear a Very Serious Person’s pronouncement about Social Security’s supposedly impending doom, remember: an individual’s interest in seeing Social Security thrive is usually a) inversely proportional to their wealth but b) directly proportional to their empathy for others. How else to explain the effort by the Trump administration and certain members of Congress to pull the economic rug out from under a…
When we talk about “getting us out of the recessionâ€, who are we really talking about? A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute reveals that the top 1% has captured the lion’s share of economic growth since 1979, even shrugging off the Great Recession with a 13.1% income gain. But with gains concentrated at…
One evening in 2010, Monica’s baby had a seizure. After a frantic call to 911, a terrifying rush to the hospital, and a night spent by her son’s side, Monica had to get to her 7 am shift at a local Safeway. She hated to leave her son but she couldn’t afford to lose a…
Too often, policies are blind to the true impact they have on low-income and communities of color. Well-intended hopes can result in disastrous outcomes when the voices of those most affected are not included or considered. Here at EOI, we believe in the power of everyone coming to the table to have a stronger collective…
By Stan Sorscher, EOI Board Member, and Labor Representative at the Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace I saw the movie Inequality for All, where Robert Reich explains the depth and meaning of inequality in America. He paints a compelling picture. Reich sets up the movie with a teaser: “Something happened in the mid-’70s.†Indeed “something did happen in…
A column criticizing Pay It Forward in the Chronicle of Higher Education misses the mark – by a wide margin. \In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article (subscription required), staff reporter Eric Kelderman writes that enthusiasm for Oregon’s Pay It Forward* debt-free degree plan “reveals either naïveté or willful ignorance†about the “risks and rewards…not to mention…