Poverty guidelines play two important roles, they are a scorecard for how we are doing as a state, and they help determine eligibility for dozens of programs that low-income Arkansans rely on. Because the current guidelines are outdated, they...
The teenager at your local burger joint is probably making minimum wage, but he or she isn’t a typical minimum wage worker. If Arkansas passes the ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage to $8.50 an hour, most of...
The federal Child Tax Credit (CTC) helps many low-income and middle-income working parents make sure that their kids grow up strong, but key improvements to the CTC are set to expire in 2017. The CTC prevented 1.6 million kids...
The current poverty benchmarks in the United States are miserably out of date, basing their measurements on decades old research. In the 1960s, the average family of three spent about a third of their after tax income on food,...
Poverty numbers don’t look good for Arkansas Numbers released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau show poverty is on the rise in Arkansas. The 2011 American Community Survey numbers show that total poverty has increased to just under 20...
Drug Testing for Unemployment Insurance: Unnecessary, Not Helpful, and Possibly Unconstitutional Senator Jeremy Hutchinson has filed SB38, which proposes drug-testing individuals who are unemployed as a condition of receiving benefits. This bill requires workers who have already been through...
Youth and work The state of the American economy continues to dominate the news, but one statistic is startling and demands our attention ─ the number of employed youth is at the lowest rate since the 1950s. Today only...
Poverty numbers don’t look good for Arkansas Numbers released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau show poverty is on the rise in Arkansas. The 2011 American Community Survey numbers show that total poverty has increased to just under 20...
Congress breaks promise, votes against working families Leaders in the United States House of Representatives went back on their word last night. Last summer, Congress and the President agreed on a deficit reduction deal that would force equal cuts...
The Corporation for Enterprise Development released their Assets and Opportunities Scorecard recently, and the news is not great for Arkansas. On balance the state ranks 44 out of 51 (all U.S. states and the District of Columbia), but the...