Poverty and Income Assistance
Employers in Many States Face Tax Hike To Help Repay Federal UI Loans
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Employers in 28 states owing $38.2 billion to the federal government for unemployment insurance benefits incurred an increase in their Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) tax this week. Revenues from the tax increase will go directly toward repaying the balance of the loans. A total of 35 states opted to borrow federal dollars because their unemployment insurance trust fund reserves were insufficient to weather the recent economic downturn. The deep and prolonged Great Recession, current sluggish recovery, and continued high rate of long-term unemployment have further reduced revenues and increased outgoing unemployment insurance payments.
Project on Social Security in Rural Areas Reveals Impact of the Program on Local Economies
The Center for Rural Strategies, an awardee of NASI’s Improving Lives of Vulnerable Americans Through Social Security project, recently analyzed Social Security recipients by county in the U.S. The Daily Yonder (affiliated with the Center for Rural Strategies) used this breakdown of Social Security beneficiaries to find the counties most dependent on Social Security.
Thankful for Three Key Social Insurance Programs That Kept Nearly 24.2 Million Americans Out of Poverty in 2010
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This Thanksgiving, nearly 24.2 million Americans, will undoubtedly be thankful for three critical social insurance programs that helped keep them out of poverty in 2010: Social Security, unemployment insurance and workers' compensation.
COLA Lite? There's a rumor that the supercommittee may push for the chained CPI
Rumor has it that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, aka “supercommittee,” is considering a switch from the present Consumer Price Index (CPI) to a “chained CPI” to determine Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). While proponents describe the change as a “technical correction” (because the present CPI is believed to overstate the inflation experienced by average consumers), the chained CPI would understate the inflation experienced by older Americans, largely because of their relatively high out-of-pocket healthcare costs and their limited ability to make substitutions (such as fuel for food) when prices rise. Switching to a chained CPI would mean cutting Social Security benefits by gradually eroding their purchasing power – a cut that would compound over time, becoming more and more severe as beneficiaries grow older.
Two NASI fact sheets discuss the consequences.
Read More…How Would Shifting to a Chained CPI Affect Elderly and Disabled Americans and the Federal Budget?
Shifting to a new CPI to lower future Social Security benefits is part of current debt ceiling negotiations. Some call for using the new consumer price index to make cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) in Social Security and other federal benefits and to adjust brackets in the federal income tax code. Proponents of the new index – the chained CPI-U – describe it as a technical correction that would make the benefit adjustments more accurately reflect the cost of living experienced by average consumers. In fact, the chained CPI-U falls short of reflecting the living costs of the elderly and disabled because it does not take account of their higher out-of-pocket spending for health care. NASI has two fact sheets on this topic.
Read More…
