University of California Hastings College of the Law
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America’s Failure to Rescue Parents: A Narrative of Inequitable Tax “Reform”
No full textOther developed nations provide a slew of direct benefits to parents, such as paid parental leave and affordable childcare. America instead takes a circuitous route, heavily relying on the Internal Revenue Code (the “Code”) to provide tax breaks to certain parents. In addition to being indirect and comparatively stingy, these “parental tax benefits” are not awarded equitably. Instead, they favor nonpoor, one-breadwinner families, ignore the plight of nonpoor, working parents incurring substantial childcare and other work-related costs, exhibit an outright hostility toward poor parents, and raise a host of other distributional concerns. This preferentialism is sticky— when Congress alters parental tax benefits, it rarely deviates from these patterns.
That is, until the COVID-19 pandemic. Signed into law on March 11, 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act (the “ARPA”) provided much-needed relief to parents attempting to maintain jobs and care for children during this global health crisis. As is America’s tendency, the ARPA leaned extensively on the Code to do so. But it abandoned its consistent preferentialism for nonpoor, one breadwinner parents, expanding the various tax benefits available to nonpoor, working parents and poor parents in historically significant ways.
This was short-lived. The ARPA’s expanded parental tax benefits were only available in 2021 and have now expired, leaving parents back where they started. And while it initially appeared that the “Build Back Better Act” would resurrect many of these benefits, Congress ultimately let them all lapse. Because the ARPA was born in a crisis, there is a danger that this fleeting legislation will be viewed as having little historical relevance beyond the emergency context in which it was enacted. I resist this narrative and create a counter one. By situating the ARPA within a broader historical context, an alternative narrative is developed—one where the ARPA’s expansion of parental tax benefits enacted long overdue adjustments that began to correct the distributionally problematic way in which America has historically favored some families over others.
Preserving this historical narrative is imperative. It underscores the alarming failure of Congress to extend any of the ARPA’s parental tax benefits. And even more importantly, the narrative of inequitable tax reform developed in this project—supported by history—should ground imminent conversations that will shape the future of how parents in America are taxed. The parental tax benefits effectuated in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act amplified Congress’s inequitable treatment of families and favoritism towards nonpoor, one-breadwinner families, These benefits, however, will expire at the end of 2025, providing a date certain on which Congress must revisit its method of taxing parents. During these imminent conversations, a mastery of the historical context preserved in this Article should arm those who advocate for a more inclusive method of supporting parents attempting to raise children in the United States
Racial Capitalism and the Proliferation of Charter Schools in Oakland
No full textOver the last thirty years, charter schools have flooded the American public education system. The publicly funded and privately operated alternative to neighborhood district schools is often celebrated as a means for under-resourced students to receive a quality education. However, the effect of charter school growth on districts themselves and the students who remain at traditional district schools requires greater scrutiny. A case study of Oakland reveals that intermingling private enterprise with public education has led to a disparate impact on low-income families of color and students with disabilities.
Under theories of racial capitalism, racial exploitation is central to the operation of capitalism and the free market, rather than an inadvertent side effect. Scholars of racial capitalism assert that economic structures designed to accumulate capital inherently reinforce racial inequality by systematically dispossessing vulnerable communities of essential resources. This Article employs a racial capitalism framework to argue that the economic structure imposed on school districts by charter schools reinforces inequality by divesting resources from district schools, dispossessing Black students and students with disabilities of educational opportunities, and creating conditions that lead to the displacement of Black families
