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Commentary
We live in a nation of plenty: Stocks on Wall Street keep rising in value and Americans produced $20 trillion in goods last year. But many working Ohioans and families in our state aren’t sharing in the abundance, and haven’t been for a long, long time.
Ohio’s job growth was 0.5% in 2019, about a third of the national growth rate, already slowing even before the pandemic caused the recession. Six of 10 of Ohio’s biggest occupation groups pay so little that a small family would need food aid to put dinner on the table.
Because much of Ohio’s job growth has been in low-wage, consumer-driven sectors such as retail and food service, the COVID-19 induced recession hit hard. Nearly a year into the crisis, unemployed workers are scraping by to feed their families and pay their bills. In January, 586,000 Ohio families were behind on rent and risked facing homelessness.
Congress provided some relief, but not enough. By passing a COVID relief package in December, federal leaders provided an urgently needed down payment. Yet they left critical needs unmet, like allowing some unemployment benefits to expire in mid-March, before the crisis will end.
The greatest risk right now is doing too little, not too much. Millions are still out of work and doing all they can to cover basic expenses, such as food, rent or mortgage, car payments, and medical costs. The pandemic has caused widespread financial pain for Americans of all races.
But from the beginning, policies and practices oppressed, exploited and excluded Black, brown and Indigenous people, who still face obstacles to good jobs, housing, educational opportunities and health care. These groups have bet hit hardest by the recession and have gotten sickest from the virus, which is not yet under control.
In past recessions, federal policymakers didn’t act boldly enough. Economic recovery was slow and painful or nonexistent, especially for people of color. We cannot afford for our elected leaders to repeat the mistakes of the Great Recession by refusing to deploy enough resources or by cutting back on aid too soon. Those mistakes led to a deeper, longer recession, and undermined the strength of our economy in the years that followed.
The bill moving through Congress now would help families stay afloat and get our nation on track for an economic recovery by:
The Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker — cited by Governor DeWine in his budget proposal — highlights that while employment rates have rebounded to pre-COVID-19 levels for high-wage workers, they remain significantly lower for low-wage workers. Congress needs to act now to help those who struggle the most and lay the foundation for the quickest possible recovery.
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Wendy Patton