Benefits

The bill offers a loan that families would have to repay, not a new benefit, and provides no new job protection for workers seeking to take time off.

Policymakers should accompany any provision to aid restaurant and retail owners with provisions to help millions of people who work hard for low pay in restaurants, retail stores, and elsewhere by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the low-income part of the Child Tax Credit.

This week at CBPP, we focused on housing, full employment, and the economy.

A new proposed rule from the Trump Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would make it significantly harder for families to fight housing policies and practices that restrict access to housing or perpetuate disparities for certain people.

Do low-wage workers respond to high-pressure labor markets by increasing their labor supply? What evidence is there that tight job markets pull in such workers? We find highly cyclical responses to both the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply for low-income, prime-age persons.

This week at CBPP, we focused on the federal budget, state budgets and taxes, federal taxes, health, and the economy.

Latino communities across America come together between mid-September and mid-October to celebrate their diverse cultures and share their traditions. But Hispanic Heritage Month also offers a chance to recognize that expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit could benefit millions of Latino families nationwide.

A recent presidential proclamation will require certain people seeking to immigrate lawfully to the United States to prove they have health insurance, can quickly sign up for it, or can pay for any reasonably anticipated medical expenses.

The nation’s projected long-term finances have notably improved, largely due to significant reductions in prospective health care cost growth and interest rates.

The Senate Appropriations Committee proposes to cut 2020 funding for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education by $2.7 billion below the 2019 level in inflation-adjusted terms, even though the President and Congress agreed this summer to increase overall non-defense discretionary (NDD) funding for 2020.

Fewer Americans struggled to make ends meet in 2018, but progress on income growth was felt unevenly across states as well as racial and ethnic groups, new data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey show. This drives home the need for states to advance policies that create broad prosperity and tear down barriers to economic opportunity.

The Senate Appropriations Committee-approved bill to fund the departments of Transportation as well as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides enough resources to continue assisting the 5 million low-income seniors, families with children, and others who rely on federal rental assistance to afford a decent, stable place to live.

As the President and Congress turn this fall to finalizing the full-year appropriations bills to fund the government, they should make the changes that they’ve failed to make so far to protect SNAP from possible funding shortfalls.

In addition, if policymakers need to enact another short-term continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government when the current CR expires on November 21, they should make the changes necessary to ensure that if a shutdown occurs when the next CR ends, SNAP beneficiaries won’t experience benefit delays — as they did earlier this year.

This summer’s budget deal between President Trump and congressional leaders offers enough total discretionary dollars to give the Social Security Administration (SSA) a much-needed funding boost in 2020, but the Senate majority plans to cut $2.7 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars from the appropriations bill that funds SSA

The IRS didn’t collect billions of unpaid employment taxes due to inadequate funding for a key compliance program, a new report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) finds. It shows that deep IRS funding cuts over the last decade have weakened the agency’s ability to perform its core functions: collecting taxes and enforcing tax laws.

This week at CBPP, we focused on state budgets and taxes, health, the federal budget, and the economy.

This week at CBPP, we focused on housing, the federal budget, health, and the economy.

The gap between median renter income and median rent widened in 2018, new Census data show, with median rent rising 2.1 percent in inflation-adjusted terms but median renter household income rising just 1.6 percent, to $40,500. Today’s data underscore the continued need for additional federal rental assistance.

Earlier this year, the Tennessee legislature enacted a bill requiring the governor to seek federal approval to convert federal funding for much of its Medicaid program (TennCare) to a block grant. On September 17, Governor Bill Lee released a Medicaid waiver proposal that would radically change TennCare.

The economy is in the 124th month of the longest expansion on record, and while expansions don’t die from old age alone, fears are rising that a recession may be on the horizon. Recessions can hurt workers and their families in many ways, so policymakers should try to make them as short and shallow as possible. That means temporarily shelving longer-term deficit concerns and enacting anti-recessionary fiscal measures — namely, targeted spending increases and tax cuts — that raise deficits in the short term.