Donating feminine hygiene supplies through Food Bank (photo via @FoodBank4NYC)
The nearly one million women and girls living below the federal poverty level in New York City are often forced to make impossible sacrifices when it comes to their basic needs. Limited budgets mean having to choose between purchasing essentials, like feminine care and household products, and paying for other necessities, like rent and food.
The cost of these feminine care products adds up. On average, women between the ages of 12 and 54 buy approximately 250 feminine care products every year, including pads, tampons, and panty liners. That presents a significant financial burden to families already struggling to balance the competing costs of everyday living expenses and turns basic essentials into luxury products.
Part of the challenge is that low-income families have little support to help defray the cost of non-food essentials, and there is no reliable source of regular donations of sanitary napkins or tampons available to those in need. This means the majority of families struggling to put food on the table have no choice but to pay out of pocket for these necessary items.
This issue is more than a matter of health and hygiene—it’s a matter of dignity. Girls faced with the prospect of attending school without the products they need will opt to skip class, harming their chances at success to avoid embarrassment. Similarly, women in the workplace often encounter these same dilemmas. Our city has made significant recent strides by enacting legislation to ensure women and girls in public schools, shelters, and jails have access to the supplies they need. And the budget just enacted in Albany extends access to public schools throughout the state. But there’s more work to be done.
That’s why Food Bank For New York City launched Woman to Woman, a campaign to make New York the first city to offer feminine care products at all of its food pantries. We are committed to establishing a regular supply of products and creating first-time space on pantry shelves to meet the basic needs of women and girls living in poverty because these New Yorkers face burdens that food alone cannot ease.
This year, we are asking for donations of products and funds to help the women of our city. Right now, thanks to generous support from the City Council, feminine care products are available at 25 of Food Bank’s campus pantries in public schools across the five boroughs but the need is far greater. Almost three in four (73 percent) food pantries and soup kitchens say they need more household and hygiene items to better serve their communities.
This is an opportunity for New Yorkers to take the lead in caring for their most vulnerable neighbors. Needed items include tampons, pads and panty liners, as well as toothpaste, toothbrushes, baby wipes, adult diapers, shampoo, conditioner, and deodorant.
People can continue to donate these products at locations throughout the city. They can also coordinate a product drive at their workplace or rally their friends by hosting an online fundraiser. Additionally, volunteers can sign up to repack donated products at Food Bank’s Bronx warehouse so that they’re ready for distribution to our network of 1,000 charities across the city.
Last, we are calling on New Yorkers to raise their awareness and help remove the stigma and embarrassment around menstrual health. Addressing this problem means having a public conversation about the terrible choices women and girls living in poverty confront every day. No one should be ashamed to need a tampon and the more people talk about it, the better.
By having a greater understanding of the unique challenges women face, especially in an expensive city like New York, we can help overcome them. Ensuring all New Yorkers have full access to the range of essential items they need will help everyone achieve greater dignity, independence, and success.
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Margarette Purvis is CEO of Food Bank For New York City. On Twitter @FoodBank_Prez & @FoodBank4NYC.
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Gov. Cuomo (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)
Other high-tax states have considered it, but New York just became the first state to actually do it: revamp its tax code to mitigate the new $10,000 federal cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT). As part of the new state budget, the Legislature enacted the Governor’s plan for a new voluntary 5% payroll tax New York employers can opt into. It would exempt their employees from paying state income tax, and thereby help keep them below the federal cap.
But the new payroll tax has many detractors, including the New York Business Council, which called many of its provisions unworkable, the New York chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business, which said its members feared it sets the stage for a tax hike on small businesses, and experts convened by the Manhattan Institute, who point out it will penalize commuters from New Jersey and Connecticut. Many predict that only a few small, well-heeled firms will be able to take advantage of it, and many worry the IRS will simply close down the loophole Cuomo just opened.
These objections are all well-founded, but there’s a bigger, more fundamental problem with the scheme: payroll taxes hurt job growth.
In theory, employers who opt into the tax will be made whole because they can pass the cost onto workers by lowering wages 5%. Workers will be made whole since they wouldn’t pay state income tax, and it would help them stay below the federal deductibility limit on SALT. All together, it’s supposed to be a wash.
But in practice it doesn’t work that way. Wages are “sticky” and notoriously hard to pull back once workers attain a certain number on their pay stubs. In a large workforce, getting all employees to accept a nominal 5% pay cut will be a nightmare. Even for small firms with few workers, existing contracts, minimum wage, and competition for sought-after employees will bedevil an across-the-board pay cut. As the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance warned, if employers can't pass the full tax bill onto employees, their net labor costs go up. That drives hiring down.
The new payroll tax doesn't exist in a vacuum, but as part of the larger tax environment, which includes high federal payroll taxes that already inhibit job and economic growth.
They are the biggest taxes a large majority of Americans pay, and the most regressive, squeezing workers who don’t earn enough money to pay income tax or benefit from income tax cuts. Paying payroll taxes lowers workers’ earnings and curtails consumer spending and economic growth. Even so, Congress refused to cut them when it cut federal income and corporate taxes (though Senators Lee and Rubio tried).
Federal payroll taxes also distort relative prices of labor versus. non-labor inputs to business (energy, materials and land) making hiring artificially expensive and consumption artificially cheap. The distortion amounts to over $1 trillion a year (the amount federal payroll taxes raise), or about 5.4% of GDP.
That’s a big, structural drag on jobs that has resulted in a big, structural (though largely hidden) overhang of joblessness. There’s a shocking fact hiding in plain sight in the rosy Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment charts: out of 257 million non-institutionalized American adults, over 100 million don’t have jobs.
Of those, 95 million aren’t counted as “unemployed;” they’re just considered outside the workforce. That’s legitimate for people who are retired, or who aren’t able or don’t chose to work. But many tens of millions of them, including millions in New York, aren’t working because they lack job opportunity, due in significant part to the corrosive effects of payroll taxation.
To whatever extent firms adopt it, New York's new payroll tax will only compound these problems.
Instead, payroll tax should be cut to boost jobs, both at the federal and state levels, like Colorado did. Since 2008, Colorado’s Job Growth Tax Credit has refunded state payroll tax for job creating businesses. It brought thousands of high-quality jobs to the state and grew its tax base.
Revenue lost from cutting payroll taxes could be replaced with non-labor taxes on resource consumption, waste, inefficiency and pollution. That’s a tax reform approach known as payroll tax shifting. According to the bipartisan group Get America Working!, which I advise, it would reverse payroll tax’s longstanding distortions, roughly doubling the job-creating effects of cutting payroll taxes alone, creating tens of millions of jobs nationwide. In New York, non-labor taxes on consumption we want to limit could raise state revenues and fund tax relief for individuals hurt by the federal deductibility cap.
Which non-labor taxes exactly is a topic for the next budget debate. But there is no lack of options. How about getting serious about collecting the 20% of New York sales tax that still goes unpaid? Or adopting real congestion pricing instead of the quarter-measure in this year’s budget? Or considering the state carbon tax designed by NYRenews that would raise $7 billion annually, help meet New York’s climate goals, and stimulate renewables sector jobs?
New York’s new payroll tax is aimed at downstate, high-paying firms. It might or might not help a narrow band of them at the cost of undercutting job growth. But New York needs a tax policy that boosts employment statewide, including upstate. That’s why we need a tax overhaul that takes the burden off employment and puts it on harmful consumption, waste and pollution.
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Stephen Kent is president of the public interest PR practice KentCom LLC and consults for the bipartisan employment policy group Get America Working!
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Gov. Cuomo at church (Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo)
It has been nearly three years since Kalief Browder tragically ended his own life after being caged, abused, and tortured on Rikers Island. Elected officials promised us that his story would be a turning point and that New York would fundamentally transform a criminal justice system designed to criminalize low-income black and brown New Yorkers and then place a bounty, through the money bail system, on our freedom. With another new state budget now passed in Albany, it is clear state leaders are not going to make good on those promises and New York will continue to keep people locked in cages because they are too poor to pay bail.
I cannot imagine what Kalief must have felt while trapped in a cage, spending much of his time in solitary confinement, facing abuse from the guards and other incarcerated youth -- only there because he could not afford bail. As a young black person, growing up in Brooklyn, I can relate to how Kalief must have felt that night; his future was permanently disrupted. I have been out in my neighborhood, just enjoying myself, or hanging out with friends, only to have the NYPD initiate an interaction that reminds black youth we cannot afford to be care-free when the criminal justice system surveils, restricts, and criminalizes our very existence.
That is why I organize with youth across Brooklyn and New York City to end racist and biased policies and practices throughout the criminal justice system. It is why last week, I traveled three hours to Albany to join civil rights organizations, public defenders, community organizations, and NFL player DeMario Davis (formerly of the New York Jets), to demand New York legislators pass bail reform that will completely eliminate wealth-based detention, significantly reduce the number of New Yorkers caged before their trial, reduce racial disparities, end profiteering in pre-trial services, and does not increase the likelihood that people will be detected, detained or deported by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In Governor Cuomo’s State of the State speech he made promises to reshape New York’s bail and pre-trial detention that will “will transform our criminal justice system by removing critical barriers, reaffirming our beliefs in fairness, opportunity and dignity, and continue our historic progress toward a more equal society for all." He did not follow through by passing reforms that would have made positive change.
And, unfortunately, when I studied his proposals, it became clear some parts could actually bring reform in the wrong direction. If passed, the governor’s proposal would increase the number of New Yorkers who are detained before trial without the possibility of release, give prosecutors the power to hold New Yorkers before trial, expand the use of electronic monitoring and house arrests, and pass the costs of pre-trial services on to people awaiting their trial. It isn’t progress if we extend mass incarceration into our homes and communities through ankle bracelets and house arrests and then charge poor people for the cost of their release before trial.
A recent report from the New York Civil Liberties Union found that black New Yorkers are twice as likely as white New Yorkers to spend at least one night in custody on bail, and more than 90,000 New Yorkers spent a day or longer in custody on bail between 2010 and 2014. Kalief Browder was arrested in 2010. Eight years after his arrest and three years after his death, the turning point we were all promised seems farther and farther away.
With Governor Cuomo now celebrating the new budget and the state Legislature on vacation; and as we hit the 50th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we should all remind our elected officials that justice delayed is justice denied.
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Nicshel Samedi is Youth Leader, Make The Road New York. On Twitter @MaketheRoadNY.
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