My Mexican family has much to be thankful for in NC this year, except this one thing

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Taking stock this Thanksgiving

Every year, my Mexican family smothers a roasted turkey in mole sauce, a famous Puebla-style dish adapted for our American Thanksgiving. We pile around our dinner table, giving thanks for our livelihood, the food on our table, and for some, the resilient immune systems that trudge along under the weight of chronic health issues and meager healthcare.

Many of my family members have been frontline workers during the pandemic, most of them eating the financial losses of unpaid sick days when they contracted COVID-19. Federal and state pandemic relief provided a brief respite, but the bonus pays and other temporary supports have almost entirely faded.

Like thousands of North Carolinians, they’re left with the structural problems that were always there: a health insurance coverage gap that swallows them whole and harmful working conditions now aggravated by disrupted supply chains.

What they need — what we all need — is bold, transformative public policy that upends our broken systems and delivers affordable, quality healthcare and safe working conditions with adequate work supports like paid family leave and universal child care.

Some of these proposals are wrapped up in federal negotiations. After months of back and forth, the Build Back Better plan, which promises once-in-a-generation investments in early childhood education and more, finally passed in the U.S. House — not 24 hours after our governor signed into law the first comprehensive state budget in three years.

There are plenty of milestones to be thankful for this year, but there are also plenty of losses to grieve. The heaviest loss for us, it seems, is the failure of our policymakers to expand our state Medicaid program to serve thousands more low-income residents who bear the scars of prolonged unemployment and underemployment, and decades of unmet health needs. The consequences have likely shortened their lives.

We’re a decade into this fight for affordable healthcare for those who desperately need it, and we’re not giving up. In a few days, I’ll be holding my loved ones’ hands as we go around the table and talk about what we’re grateful for. I’m grateful for a lot of things, but I’m mostly grateful for the fact that they’re still here. They’re still with us, and so I keep going.

Victoria Crouse, Raleigh

Project director, NC Kids Count

Time to reexamine the US wealth gap

There’s much talk these days of people not wanting to work, and some blame unemployment benefits. In 2010, Charles Wheelan speculated in “Naked Economics” that ”ethics aside” the downside of a huge wealth gap might be that it stops motivating us to work.

Here we are, roughly a decade later, where the wealth gap is even greater, watching the “billionaire boys” take off into space, wondering why low-skilled workers don’t want to take jobs that do not offer enough to live on. And wondering why N.C. schools can’t find enough staff.

Are we finally at the point where the wealth gap no longer incentivizes Americans to believe that anyone can fulfill the fantasy of fabulous wealth? Instead, might the wealth gap make essential work feel futile?

For a stunning summary of the growth of inequality since the pandemic, see N.C. Policy Watch Director Rob Schofield’s Nov. 15 “Monday Numbers.”

For a visual of how bad it already was in January of 2020, watch the video of Tony Dokoupil of CBS challenging Americans to divide up a pie to demonstrate the distribution of wealth. Spoiler alert: The top 20% gets nine of 10 pieces. Dokoupil’s experiment shows that Americans vastly underestimate the disparities, though the lack of enthusiasm for low-wage work suggests that it is felt.

Let’s not put “ethics aside.” For a long time now, wealth redistribution has served as the bugbear of the anti-social-spending movement. It’s time to challenge the myth that the wealthy get rich on their own. In fact, there is a deep well of human capital that our billionaire boys have nearly tax-free access to, and they should pay their fair share for that.

It is both wise and fair to rethink how wealth is distributed in our society and what we can do about it.

Amy Marschall, Raleigh

This story was originally published November 23, 2021 at 12:00 PM.