News Round-up: June 26, 2017
Here are some highlights from the past week’s news and upcoming events on family tax credit issues.
- Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) reintroduced his bill from the last Senate session to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC). His bill would increase the EITC for workers not currently raising children, create a separate child tax credit for families raising young children and index the CTC to inflation. Forty-five Democratic senators have signed onto the bill as co-sponsors (Sen. Sherrod Brown, My Champlain Valley).
- Republican lawmakers in the House introduced legislation to lessen the “marriage penalties” associated with means-tested anti-poverty programs like the EITC and CTC. These “penalties” refer to instances when a worker can get more federal assistance by filing taxes as a single adult than he or she would filing jointly with a spouse (Washington Examiner).
- MDRC researchers released preliminary results of their Paycheck Plus program, a pilot that gave workers not raising children an expanded EITC and tracked how the extra money influenced their financial decisions. The full report is due out in August (TCWF).
- Oregon Kate Brown (D) signed into law a bill that will raise awareness of refundable tax credits and encourage more eligible families to collect the EITC (TCWF).
- California passed a bill to raise the income cap on the state’s EITC, which means that next year 1.7 million Californians will be eligible for the credit, up from 600,000 in this last tax season (TCWF, The Nation, Capital and Main).