The Alabama Legislature may consider removing the state FICA income tax deduction during 2015’s second special session. Without significant new General Fund revenue, the state may make enormous cuts to Medicaid, child care, public safety and other vital services.
As lawmakers decide how to address the General Fund shortfall, here are six things to know about the FICA deduction.
The Alabama Legislature is considering a cigarette tax increase during 2015’s second special session. Without significant new General Fund revenue, the state may make enormous cuts to Medicaid, child care, public safety and other vital services.
As lawmakers decide how to address the General Fund shortfall, here are seven things to know about tobacco taxes.
How much should people have to pay to get financial help in a tight spot? Payday and auto title lending are two forms of high-cost credit marketed toward Alabamians who are desperate for short-term cash. These loans carry triple-digit interest rates that can threaten the economic well-being of borrowers who fall behind on payments.
What makes a state strong? We likely all could agree on a few answers: healthy people, a dependable workforce, a stable government, safe streets and vibrant communities. But without new revenue to address a huge General Fund budget shortfall, Alabama will face devastating cuts to education, health care, public safety and other vital services that make shared prosperity possible.
If the Legislature can’t agree on new revenue to avoid these cuts, Alabamians would see thousands of lost jobs, a sharp decline in our state’s quality of life and a weaker future for years to come. Here’s a snapshot of what Alabama would look like if the cuts in a no-new-revenue General Fund budget become reality.
Hundreds of thousands of uninsured Alabamians would qualify for Medicaid if Alabama expanded eligibility to adults with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. (That’s about $15,000 a year for individuals and $31,000 a year for a family of four.) Many hard-working Alabamians have no health coverage because they earn too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to afford private health insurance. This fact sheet examines what’s at stake for Alabama in deciding whether to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
People don’t have a choice about whether to buy electricity. Quite simply, it’s one of the things we’ve got to have to survive in the modern world. Your only real choice is how much you use – and even that amount can’t reasonably go below a certain threshold.
Congress established WIC in the 1970s to try to reduce disturbingly high infant death rates, and the program has been a success story ever since. Infant mortality rates in Alabama and nationwide have fallen by nearly two-thirds since the creation of the program officially known as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.
WIC has saved tens of thousands of lives and improved the health of hundreds of thousands, all while pumping billions of dollars a year into the economy. But WIC also sometimes runs out of money and has to remove participants until the next budget year. This fact sheet by ACPP policy analyst Carol Gundlach looks at what makes WIC so effective and considers some of the near-term challenges that may lie ahead for the program.
The cost of living has increased in the last two decades, but federal money for temporary cash aid for very low-income families has not kept up. The federal government in 1997 froze its allocations for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, informally known as welfare. Since then, the number of families receiving benefits has plummeted in Alabama and nationwide, even as needs mounted during the Great Recession. Years of inflation also have eroded the buying power of Alabama’s already meager benefits.
Fewer Alabama families are receiving TANF aid, and those benefits don’t go nearly as far as they once did. This fact sheet by ACPP policy analyst Carol Gundlach details TANF’s origins and structure, examines its eligibility requirements and considers how the program could do a better job of helping low-income Alabamians endure tough times.
Many hungry children miss out on far more than regular meals. Hunger can do serious, long-term harm to a child’s health and ability to learn, and childhood hunger is a bigger challenge in Alabama than in most other states. More than one in four of the state’s children live in families with incomes below the poverty level, and more than one in five Alabama families with children say they have trouble putting enough food on the table.
Three key child nutrition programs — the National School Lunch Program, the School Breakfast Program and the Summer Food Service Program — have been shown to help improve children’s health and ability to learn. This fact sheet by ACPP policy analyst Carol Gundlach examines what these programs mean for hundreds of thousands of Alabama children and considers some ways the programs could serve even more hungry children.
Taxes are the tools that Americans use to pay for education, public health, transportation and other elements of the common good. But in Alabama, the tax system is upside down, with low- and middle-income people paying twice the share of their income in state and local taxes that the top 1 percent pay.
This updated fact sheet looks at the different ways that states collect revenues to pay for public services and examines some of the differences that place Alabama’s tax system out of line with the way most other states do things.
