David Neumark is professor of economics and director of the Center for Economics and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine.
Proponents of raising the minimum wage often point out that the real minimum wage is lower now than it was decades ago. But the federal policy aimed at low-wage work and low-income families has shifted — wisely — away from reliance on the minimum wage and toward a generous earned-income tax credit, which is better focused on poor families. There is nothing wrong with reducing our reliance on a less effective policy when we have adopted a more effective one. In fact, we should hope that research on public policy leads to exactly this kind of outcome. The decline in the real value of the minimum wage is indisputable. As shown in the chart below, the real value of the federal minimum declined sharply over the 1980s, and then further in the mid-2000s, before partly recovering with the fairly steep increases in the minimum wage in 2007-9. But despite those increases and low inflation in recent years, it still remains well below its real value in the 1970s. There has been a significant policy shift, however, in how to guarantee a minimally acceptable income to families with low-wage workers. In particular, the earned-income tax credit was instituted in 1976, and its generosity has since been expanded considerably. |
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Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Friday, December 13, 2013
The Minimum Wage Ain’t What It Used to Be
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Professionalism and Caring for Medicaid Patients — The 5% Commitment?
Physicians have good reasons for not accepting Medicaid patients, as I learned from direct experience as a member of a nine-physician primary care practice in California. We accepted Medicaid patients, but it was difficult. Medicaid's payment rate was very low — we lost money on each Medicaid visit. When referrals were necessary, we often had to personally ask specialists to accept our patient.... |
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Monday, November 11, 2013
Worried About Costs And Unaware of Help, Californians Head Into New Era of Health Coverage
Today's post was shared by Kaiser Health News and comes from www.kaiserhealthnews.org
As uninsured Californians head into a new era of health coverage, they're worried about costs and unaware of the help they'll get from the government, a new survey finds.
The survey, by the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that three out of four Californians who earn modest incomes and could buy government-subsidized private coverage believe, wrongly, that they're not eligible for federal assistance or they simply don't know if they qualify. "This has been, for so long, a political debate," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a Sacramento-based consumer advocacy group. "We're just starting to move it into a practical reality. Now that the benefits are close at hand, there is a concerted effort to educate people about what their benefits are." California is one of two dozen states preparing to dramatically expand Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for the poor, yet the survey found only half of newly eligible low-income Californians presume they will qualify. The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed some 2,000 uninsured Californians from mid-July until the end of August, a summertime lull before a burst of... |
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Thursday, October 3, 2013
Report Finds 8 Million California Residents Lived in Poverty in 2011
There were about 8 million California residents living in poverty in 2011, according to a new report that factored in health care and other costs, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reports. The figure is significantly higher than federal estimates of nearly 6 million state residents living in poverty that year. Federal poverty estimates for California and other states use a formula from 1964 that defines poverty as income less than three times the cost of a "minimum diet," which would have been $22,811 for a family of four in 2011. However, some observers have called this method outdated because food is a smaller part of most families' budgets than it was 50 years ago. The study was conducted by researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. Unlike federal figures, the study's poverty estimates include:
When the study factored in cost of living:
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