Let’s use surplus as springboard to economic mobility

In California we have historic need and a historic opportunity.

Many of our neighbors have suffered tremendously during the pandemic and struggled to meet basic needs, like rent and food. At the same time, our innovation economy, California companies and their employees have benefited tremendously. With their success, they powered our state budget from a projected $50 billion deficit to a $75 billion surplus.

This provides a historic opportunity to come together and use our surplus to meet these needs. We should use it not only to immediately aid those who have been suffering, but also to create a springboard to economic mobility that will bridge the gaps that have caused the growing economic inequality in our country.

I’ve been proud of our efforts in the Legislature to meet the immediate needs of people in our community and across the state: keeping people in their homes with $2.6 billion to help renters and landlords, more than $2 billion to help our small businesses keep their doors open, and direct stimulus payments to Californians. I hear from residents how much these programs are helping them.

As we respond to this crucial moment, let’s also be visionary. Let’s use this opportunity to lay the foundation for more Californians to become higher wageearners permanently and to increase their own financial security through hard work and determination, just as the American Dream has always promised.

We should make higher education available without the massive student loan debt that holds graduates back from thriving in the middle class. The current surplus gives us the opportunity to dramatically expand Cal Grants and the Middle Class Scholarship to help community college students and ensure CSU and UC students can graduate without being burdened by debt. Yet another step to reduce income inequality.

We should also use the surplus to prepare our youth for jobs of the future and pay for rapid reskilling of the workforce, including retraining for green jobs. I’m authoring legislation to help our community colleges, support innovative workforce models for the 21st century, and boost education funding and advocacy for programs like MESA to increase pathways and apprenticeships in STEM fields. These changes will open the door for more low-income Californians to have a place in the booming tech economy.

Lastly, we should invest heavily in our children, early childhood education and child care to build our kids a foundation for future success and enable working parents to support their families.

Let’s start with infants. A Baby Bond would put money into a publicly funded trust account for every child at birth — with more for lower-income families. An analysis by Naomi Zewde at CUNY shows this proposal can dramatically reduce wealth disparities. It’s exciting to see Gov. Gavin Newsom propose a version of this in his revised budget.

Early childhood education is proven to promote success in school and moving up the economic ladder. Other states like Oklahoma have stepped up to provide universal preschool. California should do the same to create lasting benefits for individuals, families and our state.

Affordable, reliable child care is another key to success. A paper I co-authored with experts from Stanford showed that $1 invested in child care funding rapidly generates almost $2 in economic growth in local and regional businesses. As the pandemic has shown, the lack of child care creates its own burdens, most of them falling heavily on working moms. They have fallen out of the workforce at unprecedented rates, resulting in 160,000 fewer women in the workforce in December 2020 alone. As women have struggled to work while managing children in remote learning, they’ve made huge sacrifices in their economic stability to care for their kids in the absence of affordable child care.

This pandemic has reminded us that we are all connected. Let’s use our surplus to help hardworking Californians striving to make their American dreams a reality and create an “everyone economy.” If we do, we all will reap the rewards of reduced poverty and increased economic vitality.