Wide support for lifting earned-income credit, By Katie Johnson, March 4, 2015, Boston Globe: “Quanda Burrell, a single mother of two, works full time as a day-care teacher, earns $24,000 a year, and juggles the bills that inevitably pile up in her Boston home. But each year around this time, she says, she is able to ‘clear the slate,’ paying her debts with an income tax refund bolstered by an $800 state credit. Burrell, 29, is among more than 400,000 low-income workers in Massachusetts who would benefit from a proposed increase in the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, widely viewed as one of most effective antipoverty programs and supported by lawmakers and policy makers across the political spectrum…”
Day: March 4, 2015
SNAP Enrollment
- Despite high poverty, Californians’ food aid use is low, By Dan Walters, March 3, 2015, Sacramento Bee: “Nearly a quarter of California’s 38 million residents are living in poverty by a new Census Bureau method of calculating economic well-being – by far the nation’s highest rate. But the 23.8 percent of Californians who are impoverished – due largely to the state’s very high costs of housing and other necessities – have one of the nation’s lowest rates of using federal food assistance benefits, according to another Census Bureau report and data from federal and state agencies…”
- The astonishing state-by-state rise in food stamp reliance, By Niraj Chokshi, March 3, 2015, Washington Post: “The share of households on food stamps has more than doubled since 2000, a new Census Bureau report finds. From 2000 to 2013, the share of households receiving aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has grown from 6.2 percent to 13.5 percent nationally. What was once a program providing aid to 1 in 16 Americans is now helping 1 in 8.