Welfare

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include housing, retirement, wealth disparities, employment, and government assistance.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include financial security, housing, gender equality, the safety net, and workforce and consumer protection.

Or, so should have been labeled the justification to cut SNAP in the budget proposal from House Budget Chair Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) yesterday. Underlying this move was the need to increase integrity in the program. In its own words: “These programs also have little incentive to root out waste, fraud, and abuse…"

And the compelling example of why this is necessary?

“In Michigan, two lottery winners received SNAP benefits.”

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the household balance sheet, cash and payments, higher education, housing, and public benefits.

The recent deliberations in Washington about the fiscal cliff have triggered a national debate in the United States about the nature, extent and future sustainability of key elements of the U.S. social safety net: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, support for education, the unemployed and the poor.

Editor's note: We're off next week, so there won't be another Asset Building News Week until 2013! We wish our readers a very safe and happy holiday season and look forward to connecting with you in the New Year.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the middle class, student debt, housing, inequality, gender-based issues, and tax time.

If there is to be any durable hope for a social contract that transcends left-right partisanship, that contract must rest upon a majority consensus about policies that are efficient, fair, and sustainable. Once the smoke has cleared from this November’s battle over the role of government, what will endure are several policy prescriptions kept alive by an objective reading of economic history and a general consensus among economists.

Here at the Asset Building Program we write regularly about the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of asset limits in public benefits programs. Recent research conducted by our own Aleta Sprague and Rachel Black documents the substantial burden asset limits place on benefits administrators and participants alike, examines trends with asset limit policies at the state level, and identifies ways to reform these policies to better promote long-term financial stability.

In particular, Sprague and Black found that asset limits for benefits like SNAP (food stamps) and TANF (cash welfare) run counter to purported program goals of efficiency and financial independence. As guest blogger Jessica Bartholow recently put it: "remember what more than a decade of research on asset poverty and economic security for low-income households has taught us: that families are less likely to find their way back to financial solvency when they’ve lost everything they have." Forcing families to spend down any small savings they have before they qualify for benefits thwarts their efforts to get back on their feet.  

Sprague and Black have a new piece of commentary up on the Spotlight on Poverty site that delves into some of the recent policy conversations states are having about asset limits.

In his 2012 nomination acceptance speech in Charlotte, President Obama argued that this election represented “a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.” It is also true to say that we faced a choice between two fundamentally different visions of the past. And despite Obama’s reelection, the debate rages on in a closely-divided electorate and in Washington. Underneath disagreements over Obamacare, Medicare advantage cuts and Medicare vouchers, and individual retirement accounts, there is an argument about which model of social policy is best for the country.