Frankfurt Professor Fred Brooks of Georgia State University shared with me a dense academic paper by Amanda Agan and Michael Makowsky, economics professors at the universities of Rutgers and Clemson respectively. The title of the paper was “Minimum Wage, EITC, and Criminal Recidivism,” which is not normally the kind of thing that comes into your …
Tag: EITC
The IRS Enables the Return of Refund Anticipation Loans
New Orleans Refund anticipation loans or RALs, as they were known, were one of the most predatory products on the market in their heyday targeted solely to low-and-moderate income workers who were most desperate for their tax returns. They were on the other side of the digital divide so less likely to file with the …
Public Subsidies of Low Wages
New Orleans The Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California has released a report looking at many federal and state subsidies directed at relief for lower income Americans. All good. What they found though is that a huge percentage of this kind of support is not in Republican ideological terms, …
Tax Preparers Refund Anticipation Loans are Out of Control – Again!
New Orleans After years of campaigns by ACORN and agreements with the major tax preparers, H&R Block, Jackson-Hewitt, and Liberty Tax Services, to rein in the abuses and predatory pricing of “refund anticipation loans” or RALs, as they are known in the industry, it appears that the rats will play “while the cat is away.” …
Making Earned Income Credits a Better Incentive for Work and Fair to the Childless
Peterborough In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Princeton economist, author, and former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder made a brilliant case for Congress to actually read Obama’s proposal and do more to make the Earned Income Tax Credit really increase citizen wealth and even, are you listening my …