Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to make the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, fight big pharma price gouging, pass the PFAS Action Act and the Freedom to Move Act, and keep bigger, heavier trucks off our roads. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers -- or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.
Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make the Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion from the American Rescue Plan permanent. The CTC expansion provides an extra $300/month to parents of children under 6 and $250/month to parents of children between 6 and 17, and I can tell you from experience that an extra $250 a month goes a long way. I guess all the Republicans who voted against it but will still try to take credit for it will argue that it was only supposed to last a year anyway, but, ah, are children going to stop having needs after this pandemic is over? The CTC expansion is good policy that'll cut child poverty in half in America, and would cost a mere $109 billion (out of some $4 trillion-plus in federal expenditures) in 2021, and when was the last time our government spent $109 billion to do people some good, instead of just throwing it away on corporate welfare? That would be a habit we would want to help them cultivate.
Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fight big pharma corporation price gouging. Surely our Congressfolk know we all hate big pharma price gouging -- diabetics who spend more on insulin than they do on their rent or mortgage certainly know it more acutely! -- but we still have to tell them we expect them to do something about it, and even though the Social Security Works petition doesn't get into many specifics, there's still space in the comments for you to get into specifics. Like, say, allowing Medicare to negotiate its own drug prices, which even the right-wing Mercatus Center says would save over $80 billion annually. And $80 billion in lower costs for the taxpayer could help pay for a lot of better things -- like expanding Medicare.
Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PFAS Action Act. The House passed the PFAS Action Act last term, and even though that bill attracted two dozen Republican votes in the House, Mob Boss Mitch wanted no part of it in the Senate, which meant two more years of "forever chemicals" that never break down and which scientists have linked to cancer and reproductive issues in our water. The PFAS Action Act would require PFAS manufacturers to clean up their own messes -- which seems as unprecedented in our politics as it doesn't in our parenting! -- and would require our EPA to limit the amount of PFAS chemicals that can appear in our water. That would cause a lot of non-stick pan makers and firefighting foam makers to make their products differently, but c'mon! This is a can-do nation!
The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Freedom to Move Act. What would the Freedom to Move Act do? It would offer grants to states and localities so they can offer fare-free public transportation -- it is public transportation, after all! -- and also so they can build out more public transportation to underserved urban and rural areas. The bill would authorize $5 billion in grants annually, which one could fund almost entirely by repealing oil and gas drilling subsidies! Those are big, big private industries that don't need taxpayer help, after all, but public transportation by definition belongs to us, and everyone who wants to use public trans should be able to. I am irritated to find any of these are controversial matters.
Finally, the Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep bigger, heavier trucks off our highways. But bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, says the tiny little Satan sitting on my right shoulder, and thus save money! Yeah, Satan always loses me at "save money." Bigger, heavier trucks can haul more, that's true, but bigger, heavier trucks can also overturn more easily and they can also use more gas and pollute more easily and they also damage our roads and bridges more easily, so there has to be a point where having the biggest, heaviest truck actually costs us all more money, even if it allows some trucking executive to gild the plumbing in his 14th vacation home. And no one's advocating hauling goods in Geo Smart cars. Satan was just about to tell me they were. But I'm so on to Satan.
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