Ask your candidates
This November, we will elect leaders that either make life worse by maintaining the unacceptable status quo or make life better for Wisconsin’s children and families of color and those furthest from opportunity.
Questions to ask…
Will you advocate for workers’ rights?
Will you fund schools and communities in Wisconsin?
Will you fund our children’s future through an equitable state system?
Read on for details.
Advance Workers’ Rights.
Everyone should be able to support their families, put food on the table, and make ends meet. Yet, Black and Brown workers in Wisconsin, especially immigrant workers, continue to experience structural challenges to securing employment, including bias in the workplace, and employment discrimination. We have let protections for workers and potential workers erode, in exchange for favoring corporate handouts over common-sense reforms that support essential workers and boost the economy.
To improve the economic security of Wisconsin families, state policymakers need to:
Support workers organizing
Ensure that everyone, regardless of where they work, has quality, affordable health care.
Expand BadgerCare and eliminate unnecessary barriers to health care and other public assistance programs that harm people furthest from opportunity.
Paid sick leave and family leave for all
Increase access to affordable childcare
Raise and enforce the minimum wage
Drivers License for all
Limit the practice of suspending driver’s licenses for people who can’t afford to pay fines or are behind in paying child support, and allow immigrants who are undocumented to get licenses.
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Fund Schools, communities, and families.
As Wisconsin’s economy continues to grow, it becomes more evident that the public institutions generating income are rooted in racial inequities. Affording basic needs is a daily challenge for many families of color, low-income families, and families living in rural areas. Our economy is only as strong as the communities within it. We need to aggressively pursue strategies to make sure that all our communities can thrive and attract new residents and businesses—from the rural towns in the northwest to urban areas like Milwaukee and everywhere in between. That means making sure that rural communities aren’t left behind as we shift to high-speed internet, and that residents have access to safe, affordable housing no matter where they live.
To make effective investments, state lawmakers should:
Increase state support for local governments– especially aid distributed based on need.
Support public schools, and ensure they have the resources to safely educate children and address racial gaps.
Bring high-speed internet to broadband deserts in rural areas, low-income areas, and communities of color.
Reassess how to most effectively use the state and local funding currently dedicated to law enforcement.
Adress the harmful impacts of systemic violence and racism in policing and mass incarceration.
Promote safe, affordable housing.
Support local efforts to alleviate the dangers posed by lead paint and pipes
Strengthen a tax credit that enables homeowners on fixed incomes and people earning low-wages to stay in their homes, and expand the legal rights of renters.
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Fund our children’s future through an equitable state system.
Taxes and other sources of revenue should be invested in a way that broadly benefits working families living in Wisconsin. The state’s tax code is loaded up with a collection of special-interest tax breaks that shifts resources away from where it is needed most, and instead direct them towards a small number of rich, well-connected individuals and wealthy corporations who have rigged the system for their own benefit. In addition, lawmakers should invest tax revenues in public sectors that support Black and Brown communities who have been historically denied access to Wisconsin’s economic growth because of structural racism.
The following changes would clean up Wisconsin’s tax code and restore millions to fund crucial priorities our communities need:
Close tax loopholes that favor big corporations and the well-connected.
Reverse tax structures that uphold and reinforce structural racism.
Increase and expand state tax credits for working parents with low wages.
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