Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
December 8, 2023
Last month, members of the House of Representatives and Senate sent a letter encouraging Farm Bill negotiators to consider the Hot Foods Act. The legislation would allow recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) to use their benefits on hot prepared meals sold at grocery stores. Currently, the program restricts hot foods from purchase…
October 27, 2023
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has released its annual report on household food security—a survey that measures whether US households have “access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.” The report documented the largest yearly increase in food insecurity since the Great Recession—increasing from 10.2 to 12.8 percent of all US households…
October 17, 2023
COSM scholars and AEI affiliates include some of the nation’s foremost experts on poverty measurement. On October 17, COSM gathered several of these scholars to provide a primer on opportunity in the United States. Angela Rachidi began by exploring the meaning of poverty, outlining the most fundamental decisions in measuring it and describing how different…
September 18, 2023
Wisconsin’s legislative budget session ended in July 2023 with an increase in childcare funding in the 2023-’25 biennial budget. However, the final budget did not include $340 million requested by Gov. Tony Evers to continue a pandemic-era program offering direct operating assistance to Wisconsin childcare providers. Instead, Republican lawmakers added $42 million in childcare funding…
September 12, 2023
Join AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility for the release of the Census Bureau’s 2022 income and poverty estimates. AEI’s poverty experts will break down the numbers and discuss what they mean for the United States’ economic well-being. Then, they will discuss the state of poverty measurement and how it can be improved in…
August 9, 2023
The expiration of the American Rescue Plan Act at the end of 2021 brought with it the end of the fully refundable Child Tax Credit (CTC). The CTC has since returned to its pre-pandemic form, phasing-in at 15 percent of earnings beyond $2,500, up to a maximum of $1,600 in a refundable CTC per child…
July 17, 2023
Chairman Bennet, Ranking Member Thune, and subcommittee members, thank you for theopportunity to testify. My name is Angela Rachidi and I am a Senior Fellow on poverty andopportunity at the American Enterprise Institute. Before I joined AEI, I was a DeputyCommissioner for the New York City Department of Social Services, where for more than a…
July 12, 2023
Skeptics of work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) often argue that most families receiving SNAP benefits are already working. A recent NBCNews article, for example, claimed that four out of five SNAP households have at least one working person in the household, and that 10 percent had three or more workers in 2021,…
June 24, 2023
On June 22, AEI’s Scott Winship and Angela Rachidi were joined by Oren Cass of American Compass and Idrees Kahloon of the Economist to review the evidence on family affordability in America. Event Summary The event began with presentations from the three panelists, each presenting original research on changes in the ability of the average…
June 23, 2023
A headline in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year read, “America Is Binging on Snacks, and Food Companies Are Eating It Up.” The article explains how American diets that were already heavily reliant on snacks and packaged foods, have only gotten more so since the pandemic – to the tune of $181 billion in household snack purchases…