Social Welfare Law Commons^™

The New Welfare Rights, Susannah Camic Tahk

Brooklyn Law Review

Participating in the tax system gives rise to what could be enormously powerful rights for poor people. The tax system has become one of the main tools the United States uses to fight poverty. A thick bundle of tax rights accompanies the many tax antipoverty programs. This paper is the first to recognize the potentially substantial rights that poor people have through the tax code. For decades, poverty law advocates and scholars have lamented the decline of the “welfare rights” that poor people once had in their benefits. No one has yet recognized that in fact poor people still have …