Regional young child poverty in 2008: rural Midwest sees increased poverty, while urban Northeast rates decrease

In 2008, America\u27s recession affected poverty rates for children under age 6 unevenly, with rates in the rural Midwest rising significantly, while rates in northeastern central cities fell slightly. And in the rural South, where more than 30 percent of young children are poor, poverty rates for young children persisted at a very high rate. This is an analysis of American Community Survey data released by the U.S. Census Bureau

Child tax credit expansion increases number of families eligible for a refund

The analysis shows that more than 500,000 rural families, or almost 9 percent of rural families, will become newly eligible for the Child Tax Credit under the expansion included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Within these families are an estimated 900,000 rural children. The proportion of urban families benefiting from the expanded Child Tax Credit is slightly lower than in rural areas, but only 5 percent of suburban families are newly eligible for the credit

Forty-three percent of eligible rural families can claim a larger credit with EITC expansion

This policy brief on the changes to the Earned Income Tax Credit in the ARRA also shows that families with three or more children and married couples will receive an increased refund under these new EITC rules for tax years 2009 and 2010. Many families in urban and suburban communities will also see increased benefits under these new provisions

Seventy-eight percent of working rural families to receive full Making Work Pay tax credit

The Making Work Pay Tax Credit provides eligible U.S. workers with additional money in each paycheck throughout the year. The fact sheet shows that 78 percent of rural working families will receive the full amount of the credit, while an additional 10 percent of families will receive a partial credit due to low earnings or high earnings. These tax credits, along with the expansion to the Child Tax Credit, are an important financial boost to families in rural America, particularly low-income working families

Over 3 million low-income children in rural areas face cut in child tax credit if recovery act improvement expires

According to this new research, at the end of 2010, the Child Tax Credit improvements that were included in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will expire if Congress does not extend them. If this happens, low-income working families across America will be affected

Unemployment insurance: a safety net for victims of intimate partner violence and their children

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that over 5 million intimate partner assaults are perpetrated against women each year, and they lose more than 8 million days of work annually. Expanding Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits to victims of domestic violence is one mechanism for supporting women as they seek to escape the violence in their lives

Child Care Expenses Push Many Families Into Poverty

In this fact sheet, authors Marybeth Mattingly and Christopher Wimer use the Supplemental Poverty Measure to assess the extent to which child care costs are pushing families with young children into poverty or preventing them from escaping it. They focus on families with at least one child under age 6 who report any child care expenditures. They report that one third of poor families who pay for child care for their young children are pushed into poverty by their child care expenses. Families most often pushed into poverty by child care expenses include households with three or more children, those headed by a single parent, those with a black or Hispanic head of household, and those headed by someone with less than a high school degree or by someone who does not work full time. Their findings suggest that lowering out-of-pocket child care expenses for families with young children would serve to reduce poverty. Additionally, things like increased subsidies may expand access to higher quality child care or open the door to increased labor force participation

Husbands’ job loss and wives’ labor force participation during economic downturns: are all recessions the same?

Earlier research showed an added-worker effect for wives when their husbands stopped working during the Great Recession (December 2007–June 2009) but not when husbands stopped working in recent years of prosperity (2004–2005). By including one recession per decade for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, this article builds upon that research by using Current Population Survey data to compare wives’ labor force responses to their husbands stopping work across three recessions to determine whether wives’ employment responses during the Great Recession differed from those during earlier recessions. Additionally, we hypothesize motivations for wives entering the labor force and consider the occupations they enter. Across all three recessions included in this study, wives entered the labor force more often when their husband stopped working. More nuanced analyses show that during both the Great Recession and the 1990–1991 recession, wives were more likely to seek work and find a job if their husband became not employed, while in the 1981–1982 recession wives were more likely to seek work but less likely to find a job. We also find that wives who started a job during the Great Recession or the 1990–1991 recession were more likely to enter service occupations than professional or managerial occupations, but this was not the case during the 1981–1982 recession. Furthermore, during the three recessions, college-educated wives who started a job were more likely than wives with less education to enter professional and managerial occupations relative to service occupations or other occupations. However, these newly employed college-educated wives were somewhat more likely to enter service or other occupations than their college-educated counterparts who were employed continuously

Share of tax filers claiming EITC increases across states and place types between 2007 and 2010

In this brief, Authors Beth Mattingly and Elizabeth Kneebone use Internal Revenue Service tax filing data to show that the share of tax returns claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) increased between 2007 and 2010, as did the size of the average credit claimed and the number of EITC filers benefitting from the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit (the Additional Child Tax Credit, or ACTC). They report that one in five federal income tax filers claimed the EITC in tax year 2010, which represents a 4 percentage point increase since 2007, when just over one in six filers claimed the credit. Though the share of filers claiming the EITC varies widely across the country, EITC receipt rose across and within every state following the Great Recession. Using its comprehensive supplemental poverty measure, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that these expanded credits kept millions of children and families out of poverty and lowered the poverty rate by 2.8 percentage points overall, and by 6.3 percentage points for children in 2011. Should these expansions be allowed to expire at the end of 2012, eligibility and benefit levels will decline for these families, diminishing the impact of these credits, even as many continue to struggle with the aftereffects of the recession

Most U.S. School Districts Have Low Access to School Counselors: Poor, Diverse, and City School Districts Exhibit Particularly High Student-to-Counselor Ratios

In this brief, authors Douglas Gagnon and Marybeth Mattingly examine access to school counselors in public school districts, as well as how this access is mediated by district demographic and location characteristics. They use a large nationally representative data source compiled from the 2013–2014 Civil Rights Data Collection, the 2014 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, and 2007 urban centric locales made available by the U.S. Census Bureau to conduct their analyses. The authors report that only 17.8 percent of school districts meet the American School Counselor Association’s recommended student-to-school counselor ratio of 250:1 or lower. The median ratio is 411:1. Although rural districts are the most likely to lack any school counselors, the median caseload in rural districts is lower, at 380:1, and 25.5 percent meet ASCA recommendations. Only 4.2 percent of city districts nationwide meet or exceed a ratio of 250:1, with the median city district reporting a student-to-counselor ratio of 499:1. Access to school counselors varies considerably across states. Median ratios are over 1000:1 in Arizona and California but under 250:1 in North Carolina, North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Montana