Wonky Word Wednesday: Living wage
Imagine coming home after working a ten hour shift at a minimum wage job. Its pay day, but you’re stuck having to make a tough decision for your family. Your rent is due, you’re running low on groceries for...
Economic hardship hurts Arkansas kids
Economic hardship during childhood is the leading Adverse Childhood Event (ACE) in Arkansas. It is associated with learning and behavioral problems for students early on and can lead to health problems later in life, according to a new report...
What would it take to be number one?
Every year, the Annie E. Casey Foundation releases the Kids Count Data Book, a comprehensive, 50-state look at child welfare. Arkansas made gains in health coverage and education over the last year, but the child poverty rate went up...
Poverty guidelines are out of date
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 Because the current guidelines are outdated, they...
85 percent of minimum wage earners are over 20
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...
Thousands of Arkansas kids rely on CTC renewal
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...
Poverty guidelines are out of date
The current poverty benchmarks in the United States are miserably out of date, basing their measurements on decades old research.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
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
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
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...