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INTRODUCTION There has been a sharp decrease in rural land ownership among Black Americans since the end of the Reconstruction Era. (1) This land loss is largely attributed to systemic [...], Black rural land ownership is not what it was once was and Black rural landowners own far less than what they could and should own. Upwards of ninety percent of Black rural landowners have been dispossessed of their land due to government agency failure, systemic discrimination, and private prejudice that has shaped the legal landscaped since Reconstruction. Without legislation or policy to protect Black rural landowners, a lack access to legal representation, debt, and poorly shaped federal relief make them more vulnerable to dispossession of their land. This note examines the history of land dispossession of rural Black American farmers through a survey of relevant case law and offers critiques of federal legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Black Farmers Act. This Note argues that initiatives intended to provide relief for historic racialized injustices have no place in federal government legislation aimed at providing relief for the entirety of the American population. In response, this Note proposes the authors' own recommendations for future policy initiatives which are aimed at effectively remedying injustices suffered by Black American farmers through institution of policies that prevent localized discrimination and target systems of injustice that have too long enabled racially prejudicial dispossession of land from Black rural landowners.

INTRODUCTION 170 II. WHAT is CHILDCARE and Why is it Important? 172 A.Overview of the Childcare and Out-of-School Time Industries 172 B.Issues in the Childcare and Out-of-School Time Industry 174 [...], COVID-19 caused a perfect storm that showcased the indispensability of childcare to the overall well-being of children, families, and communities while simultaneously illuminating the many gaps and shortcomings rife within the American childcare system. The virus only exacerbated the accessibility and affordability challenges faced by families seeking high-quality childcare. This Note evaluates the necessity of accessible, high-quality childcare and out-of school time options for working moms while considering the pandemic's impact on the care industry. The Note argues that the American Rescue Plan's influx of federal funding to the childcare and out-of-school time industry, while a necessary life-preserver, was not enough to sustain the sort of growth in quality and affordability long overdue. The Note asserts solutions such as making permanent monthly payments to families through the expanded 2021 Child Tax Credit and expanding incentivization structures for large companies to include in their plans how they will provide affordable childcare for their workers. With federal relief money expiring in 2024, now is the time for state and federal legislators to either make portions of the American Rescue Plan permanent or incorporate key ideas from the Plan into existing structures.

I. INTRODUCTION 123 II. BACKGROUND on ARPA and SLFRF Program 124 A. The SLFRF Program Provides Some Funding Directed at Housing Relief 124 B. The SLFRF Program Provides Direct Funding [...], Access to affordable housing in the United States is a significant and growing challenge, exacerbated by recent economic trends and the COVID-19 pandemic. Issues like supply chain disruptions and rising interest rates have worsened the shortage of affordable housing for both renters and homeowners. This crisis disproportionately affects low-income individuals and communities of color, who were already grappling with housing instability and high housing costs before the pandemic. Structural racism continues to play a role in these disparities. Notably, no state or major metropolitan area has sufficient affordable housing for extremely low-income renters, particularly those from marginalized racial backgrounds. The federal government allocated $350 billion through the American Rescue Plan Act to address economic impacts, and some localities used these funds creatively to increase affordable housing supply. However, some misused the funds, including building correctional facilities, which were later deemed ineligible. The Treasury Department has the authority to investigate and recoup misused funds to redistribute them elsewhere in the nation. This Note analyzes data on fund usage and offers recommendations for federal policymakers to ensure future funding effectively addresses affordable housing needs.

INTRODUCTION 1263 I. FAMILIES AND THE STATE 1264 A. The State in Discharge of Its Obligations to Families 1264 B. The State and the Crisis of Intimate Partner Violence 1266 [...], The interdependency between private needs and public support is nowhere set in as sharp relief than in the relationship between the family and the State. Families, perhaps the most intimate of all social arrangements, depend upon government "safety net" guarantees to families in need. But the norm of State support to families is a condition that exists principally in the breach. Indeed, the State operates within a settled political economic context that grants families "negative liberty" but denies households the positive right to assistance in order to subsist. The State has largely signaled an economic and moral indifference to the care and well-being of households. These circumstances have summoned mutual aid activists to fill the void created by the failure of the State to function in behalf of the commonwealth. Acting on principles of prefigurative politics, these entities have sought to establish protocols of cooperation and reciprocity to support communities in need. The importance of mutual aid extends beyond elevating norms of altruism and practices of generosity and implies the need to develop self-sustaining systems of support to assist families without releasing the State from its obligations to citizens. This Article considers ways to organize social responses to support families in need. It critically examines State institutions and mutual aid entities to assesses their comparative strengths and weaknesses in the context of a neoliberal political economy. It does so in the context of pandemic-related support. It concludes by identifying the challenges of relying on State or mutual aid and suggests that adequate support for families in crisis requires multiple strategies and collective efforts.

I. INTRODUCTION 590 II. THE HISTORY AND PRESENT UNCERTAINTY OF THE CTC 591 A. A Brief History of the CTC 592 B. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 593 [...], More than ten million children in the United States live in poverty, largely because of the country's relative lack of investment in children and families. Child poverty is associated with higher rates of child maltreatment and contributes to a host of outcomes that harm children and society. Recent legislation that increased the size and scope of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) demonstrated the power of cash assistance policies to reduce child poverty. However, implementation issues prevented many of the poorest families from receiving benefits, and the CTC expansion expired at the end of 2021. This Note proposes a Universal Child Benefit (UCB) that would provide $700 monthly for children under age six and $400 monthly for children ages six to seventeen. All families would automatically receive the benefit through the Social Security Administration (SSA). The UCB would drastically reduce child poverty and improve child well-being in the U.S.

In the closing chapter of their 1996 book, Educating the New Majority, Laura Rendon and Richard Hope wrote that minority student enrollments at community colleges had already exceeded 50 percent [...]

This year marks the 20th year of our National Access and Finance Survey (NAFS) studies of access and funding issues in public higher education. Over the last 20 years of [...]

Background: The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 awarded $500 million toward scaling "strike teams" to mitigate the impact of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‐19) within nursing homes. The Massachusetts Nursing Facility Accountability and Support Package (NFASP) piloted one such model during the first weeks of the pandemic, providing nursing homes financial, administrative, and educational support. For a subset of nursing homes deemed high‐risk, the state offered supplemental, in‐person technical infection control support. Methods: Using state death certificate data and federal nursing home occupancy data, we examined longitudinal all‐cause mortality per 100,000 residents and changes in occupancy across NFASP participants and subgroups that varied in their receipt of the supplemental intervention. Results: Nursing home mortality peaked in the weeks preceding the NFASP, with a steeper increase among those receiving the supplemental intervention. There were contemporaneous declines in weekly occupancy. The potential for temporal confounding and differential selection across NFASP subgroups precluded estimation of causal effects of the intervention on mortality. Conclusions: We offer policy and design suggestions for future strike team iterations that could inform the allocation of state and federal funding. We recommend expanded data collection infrastructure and, ideally, randomized assignment to intervention subgroups to support causal inference as strike team models are scaled under the direction of state and federal agencies. See related Commentary by Berry et al. in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION On May 13, 2022 the Joint Economic Committee issued a report detailing the barriers to economic mobility that Native American communities face (Joint Economic Committee, 2022). The report described [...]

INTRODUCTION Fiscal year 2020 promised another year of record economic growth, which would generate natural revenue growth for local governments. (1) Instead, local governments spent much of 2020 addressing record [...], As scholars of local government have long noted, without adequate local revenue, home rule provides hollow legal authority. Recognizing the importance of local revenue, the National League of Cities' Principles of Home Rule for the 21st Century ("'Principles",) explicitly includes taxation as a power granted by home rule and articulates a constitutional commitment to adequate intergovernmental aid. To further strengthen local budgetary control, the model bans unfunded mandates and incorporates an anti-coercion principle that requires conditions on state aid relate to the purposes of such aid. Together, the anti-coercion and unfunded mandate provisions limit state lawmakers' ability to indirectly limit home-rule authority through state purse strings. This Article applies these provisions to three recent examples of state efforts to tie local fiscal support and taxing authority to substantive state policy goals. In doing so, the Article highlights the ways the Principles might strengthen local democracy and also explores the challenge local governments face when confronting state legislatures with oppositional policy preferences. Introduction 1506 I. Purse Strings and Taxing Authority 1509 II. Arizona's 2020 Audit and S.B. 1487: Hyper Preemption as a Tool of Democratic De-Legitimacy 1512 A. S.B. 1487 1512 B. S.B. 1487 Under the Anti-Coercion Provision 1515 III. H.B. 1900 AND POLICE REFORM: HYPER PREEMPTION OF Local Budgeting 1517 A. H.B. 1900 1518 B. H.B. 1900 Under the Anti-Coercion and Unfunded Mandate Provision 1520 IV. Arizona's Education Grants 1522 V. Breaking the Chains of Fiscal Preemption 1525

ARTICLE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1722 1. SAFETY-NET BENEFITS AND CHILD-CLAIMING RULES 1728 A. Child-Benefit Programs in the United States and Abroad 1729 1. The Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax [...], To address the staggering problem of child poverty in the United States, policy-makers distribute a host of safety-net and transfer programs designed to support children and families. All of these programs require rules to determine how benefits are distributed. Among the more important of these arc "child-claiming" rules. These rules determine which adults can receive benefits for which children, driving how well a program helps recipients and satisfies societal goals. This Article critically assesses the design of child-claiming rules for safety-net programs, using as case studies the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. It considers how best to design child-claiming rules to achieve specific program goals, the foremost of which is supporting children's well-being. This analysis illustrates that no single rule regime dominates. Rather, policymakers must compromise between important objectives such as channeling benefits to children's caregivers and providing flexibility to claimants' households. Informed by a principledriven framework, the Article considers how best to navigate these difficult tradeoffs and proposes specific child-claiming rules under several different benefit structures. The analytical framework can inform the design of administrate and inclusive child-claiming rules across safety-net programs.

I. INTRODUCTION Tax benefits for children are a central component of the social safety net in the United States. Among the most important is the Child Tax Credit (CTC), which, [...], The Child Tax Credit (CTC) provides cash transfers to millions of families in the United States. We examine the distributional effects of the rides governing the credit, focusing on the rules governing years prior to 2021. We document striking disparities in eligibility by income and race. For instance, three-quarters of white children are eligible for the full CTC, compared with only about half of Black and Hispanic children. We estimate the distributional effects of a range of reforms to the CTC eligibility rides, demonstrating how such reforms could more evenly distribute the credit by race and income. Keywords: child tax credit, race, tax reform, individual taxation, family taxation JEL Code: H20

Households with children face burdens that households without children don't face. Besides food, clothing, shelter and healthcare, childcare can easily run several thousand dollars each year. Historically, US economic and social policies have done little to help families with children. Until 2018, families with children were helped indirectly through tax exemptions for children and some child tax credits. These benefits mainly helped middle-income families in high tax brackets. Things changed with American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which provided a refundable tax credit to all families with children ($3,600 annually for children under six and $3,000 for those six and older)—even families with no taxable income. This payment is like the child allowance programs that exist in nearly all nations. Our paper examines how the refundable child tax credit affected the economic condition of US households with children, and the impact of this credit on poverty and income inequality in the United States. We conclude with some suggestions for improving the refundable child credit so that it does a better job of helping families with children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American Rescue Plan Act enacted in March 2021 expanded the child tax credit to as much as $3,600 a year for children under six and made it fully refundable [...]

Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 45 I. SETTING THE STAGE 46 A. THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY THEATRES 46 1. A Path to the Theatre and Film Industry 47 2. Positive Social [...]

Abstract This paper uses an econometric approach to examine the inflation consequences of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. Price equations are estimated and used to forecast future inflation. [...]