The problem that I am focusing on is how the income inequality is hurting the economy. This is an important issue to examine because the gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase. The income inequality may be higher today than in any other era. This is causing an unhealthy division in opportunities and is a threat to our economic growth. The wealthy are getting more while the wages are not going up for the bottom fifty percent, which is an issue at the federal level. There are many policies that offer solutions, but none of them are ever implemented because over time they become obsolete. One policy that could be implemented is to invest in education. This could be implemented by increasing the funds for the schools and changing the public school common core that would help students learn on a more individual basis. With a more educated population, the country is richer as a whole because high skilled workers are highly valued in the workforce and receive a higher wage.
Differences in early education and school quality are the most important components contributing to persistent inequality across generations. With more involvement from the government to fund programs like Head Start and Universal Pre-K, it gives children the opportunity to start learning at a younger age and help them become more educated. This can increase their ability in the future to be highly skilled which leads to more productivity. They would be in a high paying market for their highly valued skills that decreases the inequality of the incomes between the top one percent and the bottom fifty percent. Economists have long believed that investments in education are important source of economic growth. A labor force that is more educated have an easier time learning new skills and adapting to different environments.
People that have a higher education are able to learn how to use the vast variety of all the different technologies fairly quickly and tend to be more creative when it comes to problem solving when they face a challenge. An economy with an educated workforce can increase the country’s GDP and help people out of poverty. Some people believe that investing into education has no correlation with economic growth. They believe that there is no evidence that Head Start, a nearly eight billion dollar program. This argument has is flawed as it is shown that people with higher education are higher skilled. Children with a head start on education are ahead because they learn certain skills and are able to begin building on those skills while others are barely beginning to start.
The names of the two interest groups that I have chosen are American Federation of Teachers and RESULTS. The American Federation of Teachers is a governmental group, while RESULTS is a public interest group, which is a group that advocate issue of public good. The American Federation of Teachers elected leaders are President Randi Weingarten, Secretary-Treasurer Lorretta Johnson and Executive Vice President Mary Cathryn Ricker, along with a 42-member executive council. You can contact them by phone, mail, email, or by filling out the form they have on their website. The head of RESULTS is Sam Daley-Harris and you can contact them by phone, mail, email, and social media. They have a list of which people to contact depending on what you’re looking for.
The American Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, was founded in 1916 and today represents 1.6 million members in more than 3,000 local affiliates nationwide. Five divisions within the AFT represent the spectrum of the AFT’s membership: pre-K through 12th-grade teachers; paraprofessionals and other school-related personnel; higher education faculty and professional staff; federal state and local government employees; and nurses and other healthcare professionals. In addition, the AFT represents approximately 80,000 early childhood educators and nearly 250,000 retiree members. The American Federation of Teachers is a union of professionals that champions economic opportunity, high quality public education, healthcare, and public services for their students. They are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and through the work their members do.
The way I think that AFT helps with income inequality is the fact that they are a labor union. Labor unions are recognized as representatives of workers in industries. Their activity today centers on collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership. It also relates to my solution of education by helping students learn on a more individual basis since some of the things they do have to do with high quality public education and the other public services they do for their students.
RESULTS is a movement of passionate, committed everyday people. Together they use their voices to influence political decisions that will bring an end to poverty. Volunteers receive training, support, and inspiration to become skilled advocates. In time, volunteers learn to advise policy makers, guiding them towards decisions that improve access to education, health, and economic opportunity. With every hour of their time, volunteers multiply their impact through the power of advocacy, whether it’s helping change policy to support millions of families putting food on the table or helping raise billions of dollars for the world’s most vulnerable children. Since the early 1980s, RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund have been shining light on critical, effective solutions to poverty. By combining the powerful voices of citizen advocates with research and oversight of U.S. anti-poverty efforts at home and abroad, RESULTS has been changing government priorities and people’s lives.
This interest group helps with income inequality by how their volunteers use direct lobbying to influence political decisions to improve education, health, and economic opportunity that will bring an end to poverty. Direct lobbying is appealing directly to lawmakers and legislative staff. The way it relates to my solution of education is that they train their volunteers to become high skilled advocates. Even though they are volunteering, they can use these skills for jobs that are paying. High skilled workers are highly valued and receive a higher wage in the workforce. With a more educated population, it can help close the gap between the rich and the poor.
The names of the two bureaucracies that I have chosen are the Congressional Budget Office and the Employment Development Department. The Congressional Budget is a federal bureaucracy while the Employment Development Department is a state bureaucracy for the state of California. The head of CBO is Keith Hall and there are many different to contact them with depending on what you need. The director of EDD is Patrick W. Henning, Jr. and there are also several ways to contact them. You can contact EDD by mail, by phone, in person or online.
Since 1975, CBO has produced independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process. Each year, the agency’s economists and budget analysts produce dozens of reports and hundreds of cost estimates for proposed legislation. CBO regularly publishes projections of budgetary and economic outcomes that are based on the assumption that current laws regarding federal spending and revenues will generally remain in place. Those projections, which are known as baseline projections, cover the ten year period used in the Congressional budget process. The reports on those projections usually describe the differences between the current projections and previous ones.
CBO provides the Congress with budget projections beyond the standard 10-year budget window. Those projections, which focus on the coming 30 years, show the effects of demographic trends, economic developments, and rising health care costs on federal spending, revenues, and deficits. The assumptions about federal spending and revenue policies used for the long-term budget projections match those underlying the agency’s 10-year baseline for the first decade and are extended in a similar way to later years. The report also shows the long- term budgetary and economic effects of some alternative policies.
The way I think that CBO can help with income inequality is if they make budgets for all of these different projects. Even though it more along the lines of our federal spending, it is leading into national debt, but if were talking about income inequality then it could work because projects they budget for open a lot of new jobs for people which means more money that people can make.
The Employment Development Department (EDD) is one of the largest state departments with employees at hundreds of service locations throughout the state. For more than 70 years, they have connected millions of job seekers and employers in an effort to build the economy of the California. The EDD is responsible for the state programs involving unemployment insurance, disability insurance, payroll tax collection, and job training/workforce services. This is a very wide variety of programs and services, and like any large organization, the EDD also has internal programs such as business support, information technology, legal, public relations, internal auditing, and administrative positions to support our programs.
Administering such programs in a two trillion dollar economy with nearly 16 million employed Californians is no easy task. The department requires talented people with various areas of expertise to ensure the department continues to meet its objectives and obligations to the people of California. This bureaucracy for the state of California is very important when it comes to income inequality. The different programs they provide for people to find jobs is outstanding because it means more people have jobs and more people have good wage jobs that help towards closing the gap.
Something that I could do to help implement my solution is to talk someone like the mayor to start a child investment subcommittee and from there get the word around to different people to see what they could do to help. We could get together and talk about problems with our local education and how we could work towards making it better and could also start fundraising to help towards this solution. If we can’t work out a solution or the fundraising isn’t enough, we could reach out to different communities and pitch our idea to see if they could help us since education could really be beneficial to every community.
The quality of a child’s teacher is the single most important school related factor of their success and there’s no question that the country’s schools of education need to do a better job of producing properly trained teachers. Something that I could do is help bring this to attention Better teacher training is one step and we also need to improve the quality of our school and district leaders, so that they’re better able to lead. They need to get smarter about what good teaching actually looks like, and then help grow and develop their teachers and principals.