A Marriage Penalty I Didn’t Know About

Conservatives are often big proponents of ending the “marriage penalty” on federal income taxes. Basically, the “penalty” refers to the higher tax rates that married couples face than if they have filed their taxes individually as “heads of household.”
Yesterday, the Innovation Lab team met with our free tax preparation team, who are planning their 2010 [...]

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Into and Out of Poverty

I posted yesterday about the links between single parenthood and poverty and referred at the end to the relatively small portion of people that fall into poverty by becoming single parents. Well the Urban Institute just dropped a great research brief into my inbox summarizing the research on poverty “spells.” Just in the interest of [...]

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“Broken Families Cost Taxpayers”

The Tulsa World reports on a state legislative panel’s hearing yesterday on reducing divorce and births to unwed parents. I know the author isn’t responsible for writing the headline, but the headline editor definitely captured the spirit of the article with the headline “Broken Families Cost Taxpayers.”
So that I don’t bury the lede here, let [...]

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What Does Hunger Look Like?

Yesterday the Tulsa World, our local paper, published a front-page story describing the huge increase in the amount of food the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma distributed to local food pantries in recent months.  Food pantries are the entities that get the food into the hands of people – so the article included a [...]

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Moveable Oases for the Food Desert

Some of the innovation gang headed over to a local taco stand for lunch to enjoy the weather and much talked about experience by the local media of late. When we came back, I had an a-ha moment of why doesn’t Tulsa introduce some sort of traveling fruit and vegetable truck in our food deserts? Since [...]

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Turning the Tide of Childhood Hunger

Last week, the Food Research and Action Center suggested a strategy for ending childhood hunger by 2015, a goal to which President Obama committed during his Presidential campaign. The strategy includes:

Restoring economic growth and creating jobs with better wages for lower-income workers
Raising the incomes of the lowest-income families
Strengthening the SNAP/Food Stamp Program
Strengthening the Child Nutrition [...]

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Recession Likely to Double Child Poverty Rates

Via Matt Yglesias, the Economic Policy Institute warns that the U.S. child poverty rate is likely to increase more than 50% as a result of rising unemployment (and underemployment). The rate, at 18.0% in 2007, is likely to grow to 27.3% among all children and an astonishing 52.3% for black children.

Tulsa’s 2007 child poverty rate [...]

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What Does a Living Wage Look Like in Tulsa?

Penn State’s “Poverty in America” project has just released an updated “living wage calculator.”  The calculator reflects the minimum cost of living for low-wage earners.  In the City of Tulsa a single parent with one child, working full-time year-round, needs to earn $15.47 per hour to cover basic food, child care, medical, housing, transportation, and other costs.  Two adults with two [...]

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What Gets Measured Gets Worked On

There’s probably a cleaner way to phrase the title of this post, but the important thing is to share news about Delaware’s plan to slash childhood poverty (pdf) by 50% by 2019.  Delaware’s Child Poverty Task Force, created in the summer of 2007, released its 250 page plan on April 21.  Six summits were held around the [...]

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Stress, the Brain, and Poverty

The Economist reports on a new study linking stress to intergenerational poverty.  Research conducted a few years ago demonstrated that the “working memories” of children in poverty had less capacity than those of middle income children.  This in turn impeded the ability of children to learn, since they cannot store as much information in their RAM [...]

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