U.S. House Appropriations Committee Voted to Cut Charter Schools Program Funding

by Buzz Brockway | Jul 27, 2021

U.S. House Appropriations Committee Voted to Cut Charter Schools Program Funding

Lawmakers Stifle Learning

The U.S. House Appropriations Committee recently voted to cut $40 million from the federal Charter Schools Program, in addition to placing new burdensome restrictions on how charter schools operate. In response, the Georgia Center for Opportunity has signed on to a letter—along with 70 other organizations—urging Congress to restore the funding.

The Value of Family

by Eda Beacham | Jul 27, 2021

The Value of Family

Importance of Family

At GCO, the impact area of Family, we always need volunteers. Since we devote much of our time and efforts to family, we enjoy hearing what about family inspires people to volunteer.

Eda Beacham is a current volunteer for GCO and we wanted to share her story with you. Let us know in the comments what strength and or similarities you have in common with Eda. We invite you to send in stories about your family, too.

Eda’s Inspiration

The makeup of my family has changed over time. Through marriage, divorce, birth and death, there has been an ever-changing clan at the Thanksgiving table. The birth of nieces, nephews and our own two sons added to the joy; and the passing of my mom and later, my husband, brought sorrow and some empty chairs. Then the grandchildren came, and they filled the empty spaces with laughter and love. The cycle continues today with this next generation, as it does in most families.

Families are always changing, but what holds them together? For me, it was my mother and her eternal optimism. Her life was not easy, but she always believed things would get better. With a limited education, she worked hard and put all her love and determination into raising a family. She came through the Great Depression and WWII, so she knew how to stretch a dollar and “make do.” She taught us values like hard work and sharing with others. She believed in God and made sure we went to church.

Our family will likely have the greatest impact on our lives and play a critical role as we grow throughout our lifetime.

Creating strong family bonds and healthy family relationships is key to family wellness, mental stability, and physical health.

Learn more about free tools and resources available in the community to strengthen your relationships.

Overcoming Circumstances

When my dad left after 27 years of marriage, Mom’s faith took on a new freshness and devotion; and she ventured out in search of where she could be of service. She decided to sell everything and move into a home as cook and housekeeper for a man who had survived a brain tumor, but was left with the mind of an eight-year old. After this gentleman passed away, my mom began to dream about a little piece of land in the country where she could put down new roots and serve. She found a small tumbledown house on two acres, so she went to work making it a home. While working full-time in the nearby little town, she hosted home Bible studies, planted big gardens every year, served scrumptious down-home meals to family, friends, or whoever came by, and took in few strays along the way. Even though my mother never made much money, she found a way to help people who were down on their luck – a friend or family member who was out of work and needed a place to live, a relative in prison who received encouragement and hope from her letters, families who needed food or money in a crisis. In what turned out to be my mom’s last year, just shy of 66 years old, she had taken in her first foster child, a young teenage girl. My mother never stopped dreaming; she never stopped giving. And Mom saw her dreams come to life.

Improve Your Life with a Growth Mindset

by Kristin Barker | Jul 20, 2021

Improve Your Life with a Growth Mindset

Learning keeps you growing

Most people agree that learning is important. I’m just not sure we understand how important it really is. I can still remember as a child believing that I needed to know everything or people wouldn’t think I was smart and capable. I hear kids today (and even adults) saying, “You don’t have to tell me. I know that.” Saying this often enough can make it an automatic response to receiving new information.

There seems to be an inherent desire–starting at a very young age–to already have the knowledge we need to understand the world. It can be even more difficult for children to see the value of learning when our educational system (and usually our parents) place the focus on grades as the most important thing they have to achieve. And learning isn’t only important for kids. While it may start when we’re young, it surely doesn’t end there. If we are wise, we will be learning until the end of our lives.

Learning new information will help us grow personally in a way that allows us to better handle life’s challenges we face every day. As we continue learning into adulthood, it can actually improve our memory and help us relate to new information positively. It may even reduce our chances of developing Alzheimer’s or dementia.

Learning can also help us adapt to new situations with less stress and anxiety. If you struggle to see change as good and prefer that things stay the same, this is a skill that will make your daily life more pleasant. It can also increase your value in the workplace because you’ll be able to easily “roll with the punches”. Learning even changes the way you think about the hard stuff. In short, it helps you embrace a growth mindset.

What is a growth mindset? This simply means you believe your abilities can be improved through dedication and hard work, and that your talents can be developed. It’s about more than just taking in feedback, learning from your experience, and coming up with strategies for improving. It’s also about knowing deep down in your gut that even when you fail at something, you will eventually succeed. In fact, it’s the knowledge that failing will only make you more likely to succeed the next time or the time after that! Every time you fail, your success muscle gets stronger.

Embracing this growth mindset will allow you to bounce back quickly from disappointment because you understand that every failure is an opportunity to learn something new and therefore a stepping stone toward your success. This helps us to be more resilient, and resiliency allows us to cope better with the hard things in life.

A BETTER life begins with BETTER WORK.

Learning equals confidence

In short, learning will make you more confident in yourself and in your future. Your perspective will change so you begin to see the journey of life differently. I encourage you to take the first step if you haven’t already. Find something new you want to learn today, and do it!

BETTER WORK communities have mentors who are available to walk alongside you during your journey. Visit betteropportunity.org to find out more.

A renewed reason to celebrate this Fourth of July

by Corey Burres | Jul 15, 2021

A renewed reason to celebrate this Fourth of July

This year we celebrated our country and one of its biggest values…family.

For many the Fourth of July is more than just a celebration of our country’s birth—it is an opportunity to gather with family. An opportunity to connect and celebrate together. It feels like this past year, more than most, this was true as we came out of a period of social distancing and separation.

While many areas of our state refrained from large gatherings, most people returned to having small gatherings of family and friends. Picnics and backyard get-togethers returned and with them came improved social, mental, and relational health for many of our families and neighbors.

As we have discovered over the past 12-14 months, these previously mundane gatherings with family are much more important to our community and personal mental health than we may have realized. We have taken for granted the value and the connections we need to sustain our lives. And we have had a reawakening to the requisite relationships that ground us and support us through hard times.

It is why family is one of the pillars of the success sequence which models the tangible ways that we can make strides in addressing poverty. It is a recognition of the importance of the role family has in creating stability and support. It is why we must continue to value it and why, I believe, it is directly connected to our national identity.

The Success Sequence provides an outline of how to reverse the cycle of poverty in our communities.

But celebrating family happens outside of a single holiday (or even a nation). As the summer continues many of us will jubilantly gather and connect. It is as if the past year or so has reset our expectations and even our need to be with those we love.

I have seen many people recently post realizations of how much they missed being together and hugging someone. When it was part of our day-to-day, we just expected it. But since it was deprived from us for so long, we understand the importance of it.

Let us not forget the power of coming together. The strength we gain by being with one another and supporting each other. The power that comes out of family and relationships.

GCO Testifies Before U.S. House On Benefits Cliffs

by Corey Burres | Jul 13, 2021

GCO Testifies Before U.S. House On Benefits Cliffs

Examining the SNAP Benefit Cliff

On July 12, 2021, Eric Randolph, GCO’s Director of Research, testified before the U.S. House Agriculture Subcommittee on Nutrition, Oversight, and Department Operations about how welfare programs often hurt the very people they are supposed to help.

In this video, you will see how benefits cliffs are complicated and often have unintended consequences that harm families, inhibit upward mobility, and dehumanize people trapped in generational poverty. And you will learn more about GCO’s Benefits Cliff Model helps hard-working individuals improve their circumstances with better opportunities to thrive and become productive members of their communities.

On July 12, 2021, GCO’s Director of Research, Erik Randolph, joined 3 others in providing testimony and answering questions on Benefit Cliffs.

Promote Purchasing Power—Not the Minimum Wage

by Erik Randolph | Jul 13, 2021

Promote Purchasing Power—Not the Minimum Wage

How to help working families the most

During a focus group session on working class families we recently conducted at the Georgia Center for Opportunity, Jazmine* made an observation more perceptive than most experts.

Our focus group consisted of working-class African-Americans who did not have a college degree and who were not employed in a managerial position nor on track to become a manager.

Knowing financial stress up close, Jazmine essentially said that either the minimum wage should be increased or the cost of living should be lowered.

Her observation is a perfect segue from my prior blogs on:

the empirical economic evidence against the minimum wage,
why the minimum wage is bad news for small business and the overall economy, and
alternative strategies to the minimum wage that help everyone, instead of just some workers at the expense of others.

The Success Sequence provides an outline of how to reverse the cycle of poverty in our communities. GCO uses this as a framework for much of our work.

Promoting Purchasing Power

The Employment Act of 1946 declared it is the policy and responsibility of the federal government to:

“promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.”

Promoting purchasing power means lowering the cost of living, as Jazmine suggested.

Solidified in the 1951 Accord with the Treasury Department, the responsibility ultimately fell to the Federal Reserve to conduct monetary policy as we know it today.

How well has the Fed done with promoting purchasing power? Horribly, quite frankly.

Since 1951, prices have increased 3.4% annually on average, as measured by the geometric mean. In other words, the price level was tenfold higher in 2020 than in 1951. Prices doubled each generation.

It is widely accepted that the poor suffer most from inflation because they spend a higher portion of their income on necessities, and their income growth typically lags others.

For example, according to the most recent mid-year consumer expenditure report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, consumers in the lowest income quintile spend 82.2 percent of their income on housing, transportation, food, and healthcare, compared to 64.4 percent for the highest quintile. A five percent inflation rate would cost those in the lowest quintile an additional $1,156 for these items on a budget that is already tight, averaging $28,141. A 10% inflation rate would double those costs to $2,312.

Worse, those in the lowest quintile are unable to save for their future, and inflation erodes away the value of the little savings they do have. Consider that on average, those in the lowest quintile purchased only $563 in personal insurance or toward their pensions, compared to $19,736 for those in the highest quintile. This disparity guarantees the poor will be inadequately prepared for retirement or unforeseen loss or tragedy.

Prior to the federal government taking on the responsibility of promoting purchasing power, prices not only remained fairly stable but actually decreased during times of relative peace. Typically, they only increased dramatically during times of war.

This pattern can be seen visually in the accompanying chart using the Consumer Price Index and related data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. For example, the price level increased 24% due to the War of 1812 but then deflated 57% over 47 years until the start of the Civil War, even after accounting for a slight bump up due to the Mexican War.

The pattern was similar for the remainder of the century. Prices increased 74% during the Civil War but then deflated 47% to its pre-Civil War level until the start of the 20th Century.* Although the price level rose somewhat during the progressive era, it was still 30% lower at the start of World War I than at the close of the Civil War.

America’s inflationary policy

Unfortunately, a 1978 law changed promoting purchasing power to become the lame “reasonable price stability,” which is not the same thing.

Over the years, the Fed has allowed inflation as a matter of policy. In 2012, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explicitly stated for the first time an inflation target of 2% per year. If the Fed can somehow hold to this target, which it has not been able to do historically, it equates to doubling the price level every 35 years. Last August, it backed away from this policy. Because of all the pandemic spending and monetary expansions, the Fed approved a policy to allow inflation to rise “modestly” above its 2% target.

It is not just the Fed that has shied away from promoting purchasing power. In 1978, and in the midst of the stagflation years, Congress legislated the modest goal that inflation should be 3% or less, but the target rate was supposed to come down to zero percent by 1988 unless it might have impeded employment.

The Fed is not alone to blame for the inability of the federal government to control inflation. Congress’s lack of fiscal discipline resulting in soaring budget deficits place the Fed in a tenuous position to keep interest rates low so federal debt service costs also remain low. Furthermore, recent Fed direct purchases of Treasury debt because of all that federal spending adds to the money supply, eroding—not promoting—purchasing power.

How Congress can better help the average working family

If economics has any immutable law, it must be that you can’t get something out of nothing. This explains why the Consumer Price Index increased 5.4% since last year, as announced today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the rate of increase appears to be accelerating. The monthly rate was 0.6% in May but 0.9% in June. If this June inflation rate persists, and hopefully it does not, we will have double digit inflation. A 0.9% monthly rate equates to an 11.4 % annual rate.

Considering all the recent deficit spending by Congress and expansionary policies by the Fed, expect more of the same, or worse. In fact, according to a survey of economists in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “Americans should brace themselves” because economists are waking up to the prospect of higher inflation, expecting “brisk price increases for a while.”

Economic history indicates deflation should be the norm. In fact, innovation spawns increased productivity that allows prices to fall, which should show up as deflation. We have the opposite: productivity gains with inflation. This outcome places the blame squarely on monetary and fiscal policy.

In the meantime, Jazmine and other hard working Americans struggle to keep up with rising prices. Instead of pushing for increases in the minimum wage that help some at the expense of others, Congress needs to renew our nation’s purchasing power policy and get its fiscal house in order.

*Jazmine’s last name withheld for confidentiality.

*This is not intuitive. It takes a smaller percent decrease to offset a percent increase, such as a 43% reduction will offset a 74% increase. For example, suppose you receive a 20 percent pay raise this week, but next week you receive a 20 percent pay cut. Are you back where you started? The answer is no; you are worse off. If your weekly pay was $100, the increase took you to $120, but then your pay cut took you to $96, even lower than your starting point.

Erik Randolph is the Director of Research at the Georgia Center for Opportunity.