Hi, I'm Paul Constant. I am a writer at Civic Ventures. Today I'm going to be talking to Kitty Richards.

Kitty is the Policy Consultant and Strategic Advisor for Groundwork Collaborative.

And we are going to be talking about an exciting report that she recently authored for the Roosevelt Institute.

It's titled bolstering state economies by raising progressive taxes,

and it explains that the only way out of the recession that has been brought on by coronavirus is by keeping essential spending rather than cutting budgets and raising taxes on the rich to pay for it.

Might sound simple and straightforward to listeners of this podcast,

but I can assure you that I know some Republicans

and some Democrats who haven't quite gotten this literal memo.

We were all very excited when this report came up because it really thinks through an appropriate response to help the most people and to create the

speediest recovery from this recession.

And so I was really excited to have a chance to talk to Kitty about that and sort of expand on the ideas in the report. And so here's our conversation.

My name's Kitty Richards. I am a Senior Strategic Advisor with the Groundwork Collaborative and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

So you recently published an issue brief with the Roosevelt Institute about the unprecedented

revenue shortfall state and local governments are facing and how and how not

to mitigate this crisis. It's kind of like austerity versus pro-growth investments writ large.

Could I ask you to sort of briefly summarize the report and the takeaways so that our

listeners are up to speed before we start digging into it?

Absolutely.

So as you said, state and local governments are facing really unprecedented

revenue shortfalls as the economy has collapsed along with the pandemic,

so have tax collections at both the state and local level.

And states and localities are responsible

...