News Round-Up: October 10, 2017

Here are some highlights from the past week’s news and upcoming events on family tax credit issues.

  • U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) released a new tax plan, the Stronger Way Act, which includes an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) to benefit low-income Americans. Specifically, the plan would grow the size of the existing EITC, expand the credit for workers without dependent children, make the CTC refundable and grow the size of the credit. (Daily Kos)
  • The Arkansas Tax Task Force presented a state-level EITC as an option to improve fairness in the state’s tax code at its most recent meeting. (Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families)
  • An editorial in the Akron Beacon Journal calls on Ohio lawmakers to help working Ohioans facing financial hardship, in part by making the state’s EITC refundable. (Akron Beacon Journal)
  • Connecticut Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney wrote a letter to the editor in the New Haven Register speaking out against the Republican state budget, which would reduce the size of the Senator Looney outlines why the EITC is necessary to improve the well-being of low-income Connecticut families and how the proposed changes would hurt workers in the state. (New Haven Register)
  • David Blatt, executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, highlighted how revenue proposals by Republicans in the state legislature would disproportionately harm low-income workers. Blatt argued that to mitigate the effect of the proposals, Oklahoma lawmakers should enact measures that benefit low-wage workers, such as restoring the state’s EITC, which was made nonrefundable in 2016. (The Journal Record)