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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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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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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Jan. 5 Poverty Fact Follow-up

The article Micah mentioned in the Jan. 5 poverty fact (that only 7% of all families living in poverty receive all 4 of the major public supports) is actually quite a good primer on the various assistance programs available.  For me, the takeaway was how unbelievably complicated it is for families to weave together the strands [...]

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Poverty Fact of the Day

“Of the more than 10 million families living in poverty in the United States, only 7 percent receive all four major types of support — tax credits, Medicaid, Food Stamps and child care — for which they qualify, and one in four families living below the poverty line receives no benefits at all, according to [...]

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Reducing Poverty = $$$

Since we wouldn’t want to reduce poverty in Tulsa just for the heck of it, CEOs for Cities shows us the money. They argue that reducing the poverty rate by one percentage point would add $73 million to the Tulsa economy. They call this the opportunity dividend. There’s also a talent dividend for raising a [...]

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Poverty = Stroke?

The USA Today reports on a new study to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. The study found that poverty impairs brain function in 9- and 10-year-olds nearly as much as a stroke:
A new study finds that certain brain functions of some low-income 9- and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy [...]

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Event: Combating Poverty through Place-based Initiatives

The Urban Institute and Chapin Hall hold a monthly forum called Thursday’s Child. This one looks pretty interesting to me, since I’m joining up with a place-based initiative at Eugene Field:
Location, Location, Location: Combating Urban Poverty through Place-Based Initiatives

December 11, 2008

Listen to a live audio webcast
10 am ET / 9 am CT / 8 [...]

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Philadelphia Field Project

Here’s something. The Philadelphia Field Project is an inter-disciplinary project out of Penn State University that looks for non-economic solutions to poverty. The theory is that there are lots of things that impede one’s ability to escape poverty, including the high costs of urban transportation, inadequate access to healthcare and nutritious food, poor schools, etc. [...]

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