Poverty

Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee Subcommittee on Oversight held a hearing to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in refundable credits ostensibly in the spirit of closing the tax gap and reducing the deficit. In announcing the hearing, Chairman Boustany said,

This presentation was made at the Stepping Stones Research Briefing, an event co-sponsored by the Washington Women's Area Foundation and the Urban Institute to elevate research with implications for increasing economic security and financial independence for low-income, women-headed families. Click here to view the presentation.

Mayan mythology enthusiasts, Christian evangelicals, and assorted conspiracy theorists all have their reasons to believe the world is going to end the Saturday after next, May 21. We will know that this particular date is wrong soon enough -- or we'll be too busy being flambéed to care. But it's worth engaging the generally apocalyptically inclined, nonetheless, if just to prove that, even on the terms of their own dystopian visions, the end of days are nowhere close to being near.

There is an increasing, and arguably inevitable, overlap between the financial inclusion and social protection fields. The success of conditional cash transfers (CCTs)—antipoverty social policy programs that direct funds toward qualified households or individuals based on a conditional behavior, such as children’s school attendance—has resulted in substantial investment and experimentation.

Last week, I attended the Federal Reserve Community Affairs Research Conference on “The Changing Landscape of Community Development” where researchers from the Fed and Universities around the country shared their most recent findings on the challenges facing low-income communities and community development policy-makers.  The conference covered a wide range of topics from foreclosures to farmers markets with eight discussion panels and keynote speeches by Columbia University professor and aut

Can Conditional Cash Transfers linked to Savings Help End Global Poverty? In the fight against global poverty, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) programs are finally getting their dues. These programs—recognized in January by the New York Times as “likely the most important government anti-poverty program[s] the world has ever seen”—direct funds toward qualified households or individuals if they fulfill certain requirements like visiting health clinics or making sure their children attend school regularly.

The image of the innocent indigene, unsullied by the coarsening traffic of civilization, has a long history. When Christopher Columbus returned from the New World, he reported his interaction with peaceful natives living the life of Adam and Eve in a new Eden. His descriptions were part of a ploy to snatch success out his failure to reach the Spice Islands of the East Indies. And the image remains a powerful advertising tool to this day.

The California Asset Building Program spent this morning and afternoon at the Annual Financial Literacy Fair, hosted by State Controller John Chiang.

Local press, financial institutions, advocacy groups, and state agencies turned out to hear Controller Chiang, Assemblyman Mike Eng, and Assemblywoman Alyson Huber speak at the fair's beginning. 

On Tuesday, Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) gave the keynote address at an event organized by the Center for American Progress and Women of Color Policy Network on Measuring Our Progress in Reducing U.S. Poverty. In a political environment where existing poverty fighting tools are fending off rescissions in the name of deficit reduction, Congressman McDermott insisted that, as the wealthiest nation on Earth, the U.S.

Policy makers are catching on to what retailers have long understood: tax time is an opportunity to cash in. Why? Listen to the grumbling around you about the impending filing deadline. Everybody is annoyed because EVERYBODY (not a precise measurement) files taxes. This makes tax filers a big market. Next, the refund.  A lot of people get A LOT of money back in their tax refund. The result is an abundance of businesses offering suggestions about where all those people can spend all that money.