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Full-Text Articles in Social Work
Altruism Or Self-Interest? Social Spending And The Life Course, Debra Street, Jeralynn Sittig Cossman
Altruism Or Self-Interest? Social Spending And The Life Course, Debra Street, Jeralynn Sittig Cossman
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
The primacy of self-interested individuals is often regarded as the appropriate basis for US social spending decisions. One thread of this argument has advanced age-based self-interest and politically powerful elderly to explain why Social Security and Medicare have thrived in a policy environment that has seen retrenchment in other programs. We argue that crude self-interest and individual programs considered in isolation are insufficient to understand social spending preferences. We use General Social Survey data to contrast conventional and critical explanations for understanding the role of age in preferences for social spending. Factor analyses demonstrate that social spending preferences cluster into …
The Earned Income Tax Credit: A Study Of Eligible Participants Vs. Non-Participants, Richard K. Caputo
The Earned Income Tax Credit: A Study Of Eligible Participants Vs. Non-Participants, Richard K. Caputo
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study (N = 1,504) showed that about half the EITC eligible tax filers in 2001 did not file EITC tax returns and that differences between EITC tax filers and non-EITC tax filers varied by birth place, Food Stamp program participation, marital status, race, residence, sex, socioeconomic history, and worker classification. Findings suggested that the EITC is well targeted in the sense that economically marginalized groups are likely to participate and that increased outreach efforts are also needed to ensure greater participation among tax filers eligible for the EITC but who …