In Utah, conservative state Senator Stuart C. Reid sponsored the Intergenerational Poverty Mitigation Act. The bill requires the state to build and maintain a system to track intergenerational poverty in the state. The bill received bipartisan support in the state’s legislature and from advocacy groups across the state. No matter your political persuasion or your feelings on government spending, you have to concede that we need more data to support both decision-making and policy making surrounding poverty and the programs designed to mitigate its effects.
As a data person and public administration nerd, I am interested to see how everything shakes out when the bill is implemented. Someone remind me to come back to this in 6 months or a year!
For more discussion on the bill check out Jodie Levin-Epstein’s, Deputy Direct of CLASP, article “Painting a Picture of Poverty in Utah: By the Numbers” on Huffington Post.
For the full text of the bill, click here.
