Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has endorsed a set of policy proposals that put forth “actionable” steps designed to help reduce the racial wealth gap, BuzzFeed News reports. The proposals include guidelines aimed to help fix systemic economic racial inequality in the United States.
The New York Democrat, who announced in January that she was running for president in 2020, has endorsed a report — “Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide” — that was released this week by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Institute for Policy Studies, and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.
Gillibrand told BuzzFeed News that she is “proud” of the report, which includes some issues she has supported thus far during her campaign, including a federal job guarantee, which would guarantee a job at a living wage to every worker, and postal banking (which would allow unbanked people to receive basic financial services from the U.S. Postal Service). “Institutional racism throughout our society has created a racial wealth gap that holds families back for generations,” Gillibrand tweeted on Tuesday. “We need solutions both broad and targeted, from full employment and raising wages to postal banking and studying reparations.”
But with this endorsement, Gillibrand has also put her name behind ideas she hadn’t yet publicly supported during her presidential run, BuzzFeed News explains. Now, she has formally endorsed administering federal trust accounts to children in need at the time of their birth. Those amounts would appreciate in value, and be accessible in adulthood. (Senator Cory Booker has also proposed a similar plan, sometimes referred to as a “baby bonds” plan, as the Root notes.) The report also endorses forming a commission to look into reconciliatory reparations for slavery, as well as raising taxes on the extremely wealthy.
Per the Root, the report’s co-author Darrick Hamilton, executive director of the Kirwan Institute, said, “For far too long we have tolerated the injustice of a violent, extractive and racially exploitive history that generated a wealth divide where the typical black family has only a dime for every dollar held by a typical white family.”