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…”
Tag: Earned income tax credit (EITC)
Earned Income Tax Credit
Childless adults qualify for earned income credit, too, By Susan Tompor, February 4, 2015, Detroit Free Press: “The Earned Income Tax Credit has one of those clunky names that you might ignore, as unfortunately some do. But the complex credit can put real money into the pockets of working people. Each year, the Internal Revenue Service, volunteer tax preparers, and others roll out a National EITC Awareness Day to warn that much-needed money is being left on the table. After years of such publicity and with almost 28 million people receiving $66 billion for the credit last year, it is hard to believe that anyone would not know about a key tool that fights poverty…”
EITC and Poverty Measurement
Everyone’s favorite anti-poverty program doesn’t reduce the poverty rate, By Dylan Matthews, July 29, 2014, Vox: “As we mentioned during the rollout of Paul Ryan’s poverty plan last week, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the few anti-poverty measures both parties can agree about (even if they can’t come to an agreement on how to fund it). But at the same time, the EITC does exactly nothing to reduce the official poverty rate. The reason has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the policy — the best evidence we have is that the EITC improves health, school achievement in children of recipient households, and those children’s wages once they grow up, among other things. It has to do entirely with what is and isn’t included in the official poverty numbers. . .”