Welfare

Experienced workers in Seattle had their hours cut but were able to find work outside the city to offset their lost wages, less experienced workers had no gains, and those out of work were less likely to enter the workforce. Those are the key findings of the latest look at…

“The high cost of housing is an important factor in trapping millions of Americans in poverty,” Michael Tanner writes in National Review. “On average, Americans in the lowest third of incomes spend more than 40 percent of their income on housing, a number that rises to more than 50…

“Skill disparities, family dynamics, early childhood development and incarceration effects” are important factors in long-term income inequality left out of recent work that has garnered national headlines, write Nobel economist James Heckman and Archbridge Institute CEO Gonzalo Schwarz. They warn that incomplete assessments could lead to wrong prescriptions of…

Denise Superville’s Education Week article, In Some Cities, Closing Achievement Gaps Is Not for Schools to Fix Alone, examines the role of schools in providing social services to students.  She writes, The idea is that focusing on student’s individual needs in four areas—academics, health, family, and social-emotional well-being—and matching…

Robert Doar of the American Enterprise Institute describes one way to ensure families have food on the table. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Wednesday released its findings on food insecurity in our country and the results revealed progress. USDA reported that 11.8 percent (about 15 million)…

Kristina Rasmussen explains in a Washington Examiner column why Congress faces a rare opportunity in its latest farm bill. For millions of families stuck in government dependence, the stakes couldn’t be higher: Their opportunity to experience work through welfare reforms that promote work is in the hands of…

Get paid now to take parental leave in exchange for deferring Social Security payments later. It sounds like a simple and “budget neutral” to help women earn more in their careers while getting their children off to a good start. Kristin Shapiro, Andrew Biggs, and others have argued on…

We have a love-hate relationship with philanthropy, which starts with questions of fairness and has been magnified for the past hundred years by the income tax. One manifestation is the continuing debate over donor-advised funds from community foundations and Donors Trust to the National Christian Foundation and…