Controlling Costs from Cradle to Home

What NYC’s childcare success teaches us

Despite budget cuts, retrenchment, and the changing winds of politics, New York City’s universal pre-K has lasted through multiple mayoral administrations and is poised to expand. In a new brief, Josh Wallack—who served as deputy chancellor for early childhood in the NYC public schools under Mayor Bill de Blasio—examines how the program’s design helped it stick.

“Making Pre-K for All universal, approaching it from the supply side, and ensuring that people knew about it and made use of it were all critical—not only for the initial success of the program, but in creating the feedback loops that saved it.”

Read the brief: How Did Universal Childcare Survive Attack?

Lower-income households miss out on mortgage refinancing

When interest rates fall, homeowners can take advantage by refinancing their mortgage and save thousands of dollars on payments. But various points of friction in the system, from paperwork to fixed closing costs, make it more difficult for low-income homeowners to refinance. In a new report, Roosevelt’s Brad Lipton and housing finance expert Peter Carroll explore straightforward, low-lift policy fixes that can help close this gap.

“Ultimately, expanding equitable access to refinancing is not just a housing finance tweak,” Lipton and Carroll write. “It is a highly cost-effective way to ensure that falling interest rates provide broad-based economic relief rather than a windfall concentrated at the top.”

Read the report: Unlocking the Significant Potential of Mortgage Refinancing for Working Families

And use our calculator to see how much you could save with a refinanced mortgage:

What else we’re up to

• What Kevin Warsh should keep in mind: In a new blog post, Principal Economist Michael Madowitz traces the new Fed Chair’s changing positions on monetary policy and explains what we’d actually need to see if he wanted to lower interest rates.
• As Elon Musk becomes the world’s first trillionaire, the 99 percent face a different reality: “If you think about what it felt like to go through Covid, and then inflation, and also political unrest and instability, you come out of those things thinking, ‘How am I supposed to plan for the future?’” Roosevelt President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins told the New York Times.
• “Saving” Social Security isn’t enough—let’s strengthen it:  The Social Security “Trust Fund is under strain because Congress has failed to update the program for the economy we actually have,” Wilkins told the Ohio Capital Journal this week. That past inaction will require even stronger action now, Roosevelt’s Stephen Nuñez added, calling for an approach “that demands more from the wealthiest, closes loopholes that allow income to escape tax, and protects and expands benefits.”
• Government needs to show up—positively—in peoples’ lives: Roosevelt’s Rey Fuentes discussed the Good Life Agenda on the Neon Liberalism podcast, calling on policymakers to visibly wield the tools of government to provide childcare, housing, and other “necessary resources for a good life.” Doing so successfully could in turn foster “a sense of trust that government is there to deliver and can actually deliver in the future.”
• Anti-Black racism has structured our economy since early US history: Roosevelt Senior Fellow Michelle Holder and Jeannette Wicks-Lim spoke with Truthout about their new book, The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States:

“Policies implemented upon the end of slavery further limited the ability of Black individuals and families to accumulate wealth. Contemporary income and wealth inequality in the US tracks very closely with race, with Black Americans in the least favorable economic position compared to whites.”

What we’re talking about