Planning for North Carolina’s next recovery

Despite the disproportionate public health and economic harms of COVID-19 on communities of color, the recovery from the pandemic was the most equitable in recent history.

It was possible because of swift action by federal policymakers to drive public money to care for people and communities. It was possible because of decades of research and investment that allowed for the development and dissemination of vaccines and the public funding that supported the infrastructure of public health workers, public schools and social service agencies in communities across the country.

Unlike past responses to economic downturns, policymakers recognized this time the need to be bold — providing for the first time funds directly to state and local governments to tackle the most pressing priorities in their communities to stabilize and advance well-being and directing dollars to households through economic impact payments and a fully refundable child tax credit to ensure basic needs could be met.

Childhood poverty was cut in half nationally, with children of color experiencing the greatest gains in economic well-being. The difference in unemployment rates between Black and white and between Latine and white workers shrunk and reached historic lows.

So why wasn’t this recovery — that saw improvements in Black employment and protection of income for households of color — enough to transform the landscape of opportunity in North Carolina?

The answers can tell us what we need to know to demand action by our local elected leaders and those representing us in Raleigh to build an economy that works for every person — Black, brown and white, poor and working-class, indigenous and immigrant — not just the wealthy few.

While the response federally was bold, the response from state leaders was modest at best. It was undermined, as well, by state leaders who continued to prioritize market solutions that bolstered the profits of big corporations over valuing people’s well-being and the positive role of government in serving the public good. Across the state, local governments didn’t have the capacity or the channels to connect with the most affected communities and drive dollars to the greatest need or incorporate public input into their decision-making process.

The lesson of the pandemic recovery for North Carolina should lead to a commitment to building more inclusive process for deciding where public money should go and to building the literal infrastructure in every community that enables a public response to opportunities and threats that is quick, caring and sustainable.

We won’t be able to undo decades of exclusion and preferential treatment that builds the economic power of a select few in one cycle of an economic downturn. But we can set up the rules of our economy going forward to place those hardest hit at the center of policymaking, and therefore, support the well-being of all North Carolinians.

We learned during the pandemic that policies enacted to minimize the harm to those most affected by an economic downturn ripple through our communities to benefit us all. By providing much-needed income to households, keeping people connected to work and learning and ensuring families’ health and safety, public policy can solidify the economic footing of every household — Black, brown and white — to seize a better future.

It should also provide policymakers with urgency around the persistent inequalities that would threaten our state’s progress. North Carolina can’t afford to wait to fund education from birth to career, the affordable housing needed in every community and the digital and transportation infrastructure that connects us to each other and opportunity.

The decade-long wait to provide health care to more North Carolinians — that led to preventable deaths, greater vulnerability during the pandemic and missed opportunities to advance healthy communities — should be a staggering reminder of the cost of policymaker inaction.

This year, as our state remains buoyed by the federal investments that stabilized our economy during the pandemic downturn, we need bold leadership from our state legislators to invest in our future and embrace the reality that we can only get ahead by moving together.

Alexandra Forter Sirota is executive director of the N.C. Budget & Tax Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that documents and analyzes fiscal and economic conditions in partnership with community leaders and North Carolinians with lived experience of poverty to advance systemic solutions through public policy that drive anti-racist outcomes.

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