poverty

5Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL JUSTICE

George Floyd Deserved A Better Life. A New Book Charts His Trajectory From Poverty To The US Prison-Industrial Complex – And The Impact Of His Death

George Perry Floyd, Jr. was murdered when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sank his knee into Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Video footage went viral within hours, helping to inspire protests against racism and police violence that lasted all the American summer of 2020. But while the size of the protests was unprecedented, the activism of that summer had deep roots. Journalists across the United States and indeed the world, focused attention on that history of protest, as they had done during the 2014 police killings of Eric Garner, choked to death in New York, and Michael Brown, shot in Ferguson, Missouri. Review: His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice – Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Penguin RandomHouse) At the...

Labor Unions Help Lower The Risk Of Poverty – Research Shows

6Jul

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

LIFESTYLE

Labor Unions Help Lower The Risk Of Poverty – Research Shows

Tom VanHeuvelen, University of Minnesota and David Brady, University of California, Riverside The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea Belonging to a union or living in a U.S. state where organized labor is relatively strong helps lower the likelihood that you will fall into poverty, according to our new research. In a peer-reviewed study, we examined how unionization is correlated with poverty. So we analyzed data on poverty and unionization rates from 1975 through 2015 using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which is widely considered to be the gold standard for tracking individuals over time. We used a variety of poverty measures in our analysis. We found that households in which there was at least one union member had an average poverty rate...

Lifting Children Out Of Poverty Today Will Help Them Tomorrow

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism

Lifting Children Out Of Poverty Today Will Help Them Tomorrow

As part of the latest COVID-19 relief package, the federal government has expanded the child tax credit and made it available to all families with children except those with the highest incomes. Families will get US$3,000 per kid ages 6 to 17, and $3,600 for younger children. The Internal Revenue Service will deliver half of this money as monthly payments of either $250 or $300 during the second half of 2021 and the rest as a lump sum during the 2022 tax season. If the government extends this benefit beyond the one year that’s currently funded, as many members of Congress and the Biden administration would like, this policy has the potential to dramatically cut child poverty by as much as 50%. This kind of arrangement is already the norm in many countries, such as Canada, Germany and the...

Millions of America’s working poor may lose out on key anti-poverty tax credit because of the pandemic

4Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

IN OTHER NEWS

Millions of America’s working poor may lose out on key anti-poverty tax credit because of the pandemic

The pandemic is driving American families to the edge, with tens of millions at risk of losing their homes and over 1 in 10 U.S. adults reporting their households didn’t have enough to eat in the previous week. While Congress debates extending unemployment benefits that expired on July 31 and other additional aid, there’s an important program that already exists that could help struggling Americans get through the crisis however long it lasts. Known as the earned income tax credit, or EITC, it provides aid primarily to the working poor. In a typical year, it lifts more than 8.5 million people out of poverty, while improving the health and well-being of parents and children. Since the credit depends on earned income, many families may be at risk of losing all or some of the benefit becaus...