In 2021, she became one of 100 Black mothers and caregivers who received monthly checks of $500 or more from Multnomah County’s Mother’s Trust guaranteed income program. The pilot was designed to ease the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black households, which officials and experts have said were disproportionately impacted in the years that followed.
The Multnomah Mother’s Trust was likely unconstitutional and probably would not have survived a court challenge. Basically, the county gave money to two charities, Black Parent Initiative and WomenFirst Transition and Referral, so they could give $500 a month exclusively to a cohort of black mothers from May 2022 until June 2024. That Multnomah County does not see the racism in this is very much Multnomah County.
In its short lifespan, Multnomah Mother’s Trust did not produce enough data to understand its full impact, officials wrote in a 2023 report. What the county did glean were increases in net assets such as homes, cars, retirement funds, stocks and other investments. The report found the program also helped participants climb out of debt, with loans and other dues decreasing by $5,000 on average.
“Not enough data to understand its full impact” but here’s some anecdotal evidence to support our case. Did recipients also spend money on things that would not be politically popular? Crickets.
On Tuesday, county Economist Jeff Renfro laid out a grave financial forecast for the county’s 2025-26 budget, with a general fund shortfall of $21 million dollars. That deficit, which is five times higher than the previous year, is a result of declining growth in property tax revenues in Portland and inflationary impacts on wages, Renfro said. Officials expect that deficit to grow as the next Board of Commissioners starts the budgeting process.
Interestingly, no comment in the article on how much the Mother’s Trust program cost taxpayers.
Despite all this, I’m generally very much in favor of governmental (and other) assistance for the economically disadvantaged. I hate the idea of applying a racial lens to that assistance, as poverty is hardly the unique experience of any particular set of Americans. And I’m no longer an advocate of blind cash transfers. People in economically difficult circumstances are frequently not good with money, almost definitionally, so I think oversight is required to make sure taxpayer money—and that’s what it is—isn’t spent on drugs, gambling, or nutritionally deficient foods.