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December 8, 2023
Room for Compromise on the Hot Foods Act
…foods—such as prepared foods and sugary beverages. When federal lawmakers first created the program in 1939, policymakers chose to allow recipients to purchase any food items except “drugs, liquor, and items consumed…
November 30, 2023
A Valuable New Perspective on America’s War on Poverty
…This relative measure adjusts yearly thresholds in line with median income changes. “The dramatic reduction in poverty by 2019 based on President Johnson’s absolute 1960s standards suggests that policymakers might…
October 5, 2023
Changing the Official Poverty Measure Would Help Rich States and Hurt Poor States
…producing independent and apolitical statistics. Aside from these process related issues, policymakers should be concerned about this matter for two additional reasons. First, as already noted making the SPM the…
September 15, 2023
Putting This Year’s Poverty Numbers in Context
…subsidies also contributed more to child poverty reduction in 2022 than 2021. As discussed extensively at Tuesday’s AEI event, policymakers and the public are in dire need of a poverty…
June 7, 2023
Don’t Give Away the Farm Bill
…GOP lawmakers should focus on reining in President Biden’s unprecedented and expensive food-stamp hike. The American Rescue Plan’s temporary 15% increase in food-stamp benefits was set to expire shortly after…
December 15, 2022
The Myth of Income Stagnation
…the former. This is not to suggest that wages and incomes have been growing fast enough, or that policymakers should be satisfied with where we are. Increasing participation in the…
December 9, 2022
“Automatic Stimulus”: How It Would Have Increased the Record Unemployment Benefits Paid During the Great Recession and Pandemic
…long-standing pattern of contemporary lawmakers determining when emergency benefits should be paid, some have proposed instead using unemployment rate “triggers” in the future to automatically turn and keep on such…
July 2, 2021
Addressing the Shortcomings of the Supplemental Poverty Measure
…the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) has offered researchers and policymakers an alternative way of measuring poverty in the United States and assessing the effectiveness of antipoverty policy. The SPM addresses…