Tax credit helps poor, but many unaware, By Rita Price, February 25, 2011, Columbus Dispatch: “As a single mother who works and goes to college, Brandi Hardgrow adheres to a budget that leaves little room for wiggle – or for unexpected car repairs. But she gets by, and a big reason is her tax savvy. Hardgrow, 29, files for the Earned Income Tax Credit and then carefully manages a hefty refund – sometimes more than $2,500 – that keeps her household humming when her job as a Columbus-schools latchkey worker pauses for summer break. ‘It’s made a total difference in my life,’ she said. Researchers say the EITC is the nation’s best poverty buffer for low-income workers. It’s also an economic boon for their communities because recipients often need to spend a big chunk of their refunds right away…”
Month: February 2011
Paid Parental Leave
Report decries lack of paid parental leave in US, By David Crary (AP), February 23, 2011, Washington Post: “Americans often take pride in ways their nation differs from others. But one distinction – lack of a nationwide policy of paid maternity leave – is cited in a new report as an embarrassment that could be redressed at low cost and without harm to employers. ‘Despite its enthusiasm about ‘family values,’ the U.S. is decades behind other countries in ensuring the well-being of working families,’ said Janet Walsh, deputy director of the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch. ‘Being an outlier is nothing to be proud of in a case like this.’ Human Rights Watch, based in New York, focuses most of its investigations on abuses abroad. But on Wednesday, with release of a report by Walsh on work/family policies in the U.S., it takes the relatively unusual step of critiquing a phenomenon affecting tens of millions of Americans…”
UNICEF Report: State of the World’s Children 2011
- One billion people forgotten in fight against poverty, By Annie Kelly, February 25, 2011, The Guardian: “This year Unicef’s annual flagship State of the World’s Children report, released on Friday, focuses exclusively on adolescents. A recognition, says Unicef, of the increasingly urgent need to invest in the world’s 1.2 billion 10-19 year olds, an invisible generation who are nevertheless pivotal in global efforts to reach the UN millenium development goals targets by 2015. The report argues that adolescents are often marginalised in development budgets and programming, and that if this is not corrected then investment in global poverty, health, education and employment goals will be compromised. Many of the world’s teenagers were babies or young children when the MDGs were established in 2000. Since then, many of them will have been the direct beneficiaries of the significant global gains in child survival, primary education, access to safe water and sanitation…”
- Indian teen girls most ill-fed: UN, By Chetan Chauhan, February 25, 2011, Hindustan Times: “Indian adolescents girls are worse than even those in world’s poorest region — Sub-Saharan Africa – in terms of nutrition and empowerment whereas a majority of boys are at high risk because of their sexual activity, a new United Nations report on adolescents on Friday said. The report, ‘Adolescence an Age of Opportunity’, released three days before the union budget had found that 63 per cent of the Indian boys in the age group of 15-19 were engaged in high-risk sex with non-marital, non-cohabitating partner as compared to just one percent girls in the same age group. Still it was lowest in the developing world with the highest being in South Africa with 95 % boys and 99 % girls reporting high risk sex. The report found sexual activity among Asian children below the age of 15, including India, to be lowest in the world…”