Poverty Reduction through Federal and State Policy Mechanisms: Variation over Time and across the United States

Bruch, Sarah K.; Naald, Joseph van der; Gornick, Janet C.

doi:10.1086/724556

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 68 publications

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“…In 2018, only 3 percent of EITC dollars were directed at tax filers with no children who qualified for the credit, and in 2015, less than one-third of SNAP benefits were allocated to childless households (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2017). Income eligibility (typified by the means test) now combines with categorical eligibility (e.g., based on age, citizenship, family status) to shape how antipoverty programs distribute aid (Bruch, van der Naald, and Gornick 2023), a process deeply colored by racial stereotypes and perceived threat (Gilens 2009; Wetts and Willer 2018).…”

Section: Us Welfare Policy After the War On Povertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality Below the Poverty Line since 1967: The Role of the U.S. Welfare State

Parolin,

Desmond,

Wimer

2023

Am Sociol Rev

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Since the War on Poverty in the 1960s, the U.S. social safety net has shifted away from direct cash assistance for the lowest-income households and toward tax-based transfers targeted at working families with children. Previous research has assessed this shift by evaluating its effect on the national poverty rate. Doing so, however, overlooks how it may also have led to increased inequality among low-income households. We apply a decomposition framework to measure how changes in taxes/transfers and composition have affected trends in inequality below the poverty line from 1967 to 2019. Income inequality among the poorest households has been volatile since the 1960s, and changes to the American welfare state played a decisive role in expanding or reducing inequality below the poverty line. Unlike in previous decades, after the mid-1990s, the policies that most reduced poverty were also those that most increased inequality among the poor. These findings challenge standard theories regarding the effectiveness of income transfers in reducing poverty by revealing that recent state-led antipoverty efforts have placed the near poor and the deeply poor on divergent paths.

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Section: Us Welfare Policy After the War On Povertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality Below the Poverty Line since 1967: The Role of the U.S. Welfare State

Parolin,

Desmond,

Wimer

2023

Am Sociol Rev

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Inequality in high-cost borrowing and unemployment insurance generosity in US states during the COVID-19 pandemic

Berger,

Brown,

Collins

et al. 2024

Nat Hum Behav

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Social Transfer Programs as Non-Spatially-Targeted Methods of Reducing Interregional Geographic Inequality

Manduca,

Castro,

Ochoa

2024

Social Service Review

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Geographic inequality between regions of the United States has grown substantially over the past 40 years, and is an increasingly urgent topic for scholarship and policy. In this paper we consider the role that national social insurance programs, such as Social Security and the Earned Income Tax Credit, play in reducing geographic inequality. Although these programs do not have an explicit goal of reducing geographic inequality, they nonetheless have that effect, because they are disproportionately used by residents of low-income regions. We show that transfers from social insurance programs had the effect of reducing interregional inequality in 2019 by 12%, equivalent to reversing 28.6% of the growth in pretransfer inequality since the 1970s. We also use simulations to evaluate the geographic consequences of proposed expansions to the US welfare state such as the expanded Child Tax Credit enacted in 2021 or a Universal Basic Income, showing that these programs could achieve further reductions in interregional inequality.Reducing the economic inequality between regions of the country is a key step toward reversing the political polarization and extremism that is destabilizing US democracy (Axelrod, Daymude, and Forrest 2021). Policymakers and scholars have begun to explore the ways in which federal government policy can be used to reduce geographic inequality (e.g. Bartik 2020b; Liu et al. 2022). Many proposals fall under the broad category of "place-based policies," which spatially target government investments or subsidies to economically struggling locations. Specific proposals run the gamut from subsidies for investment in economically struggling areas (Austin, Glaeser, and Summers 2018; Gaubert, Kline, and Yagan 2021) to spatially targeted research and development expenditures (Atkinson, Muro, and Whiton 2019; Gruber and Johnson 2019) to labor market assistance programs (Bartik 2020a). Yet place-based policies have also been met with skepticism from both policymakers and scholars, who worry that they can be challenging to administer and prone to mistargeting and corruption (Glaeser and Gottlieb 2008; Neumark and Simpson 2015).This paper considers an alternative framework for reducing interregional inequality, which we term "place-conscious policies" (Manduca 2021). Unlike place-based policies, place-conscious policies do not explicitly target expenditures based on geography. Rather, they are universally available policies that are designed to have a disproportionate impact on economically lagging regions. In this, they apply the logic of "targeting within universalism" that has been effective in maintaining broad support for programs to reduce other forms of inequality (powell, Menendian, and Ake 2019;Skocpol 1991).Place-conscious policies can take a variety of forms, from trade policy to government procurement to industry regulation. Here we evaluate the geographic implications of an underappreciated set of place-conscious policies that already exist: cash and near cash transfer payments from the US social ...

show abstract

Poverty Reduction through Federal and State Policy Mechanisms: Variation over Time and across the United States

Cited by 5 publications

References 68 publications

Inequality Below the Poverty Line since 1967: The Role of the U.S. Welfare State

Inequality Below the Poverty Line since 1967: The Role of the U.S. Welfare State

Inequality in high-cost borrowing and unemployment insurance generosity in US states during the COVID-19 pandemic

Social Transfer Programs as Non-Spatially-Targeted Methods of Reducing Interregional Geographic Inequality

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