Savings

On Tuesday, the Illinois Senate voted to become the eighth state to eliminate its TANF asset test—and the second state thus far in 2013. This development reflects a longstanding trend initiated by the states to reform their programs’ asset limits to better support families’ long-term financial stability—while saving time and money in the process. Yet in the current Farm Bill debate happening at the federal level, House Republicans are proposing changes that would completely undermine this wave of progress. Let’s take a look at some key lessons from Illinois about why asset limit reform makes so much sense.

As any parent will tell you, mobility is a game-changer. Once junior can crawl, gone are the days of leaving him on his playmat while you step away, however briefly, and expect him to be in the same spot playing with the safe and developmentally appropriate toys you left him with. No, he'd rather be exploring the shoes you left in the corner of room with his mouth or in pursuit of the family cat. What worked before has to be reexamined to be successful once mobility enters the picture. 

What if I told you that very poor people, living in the most expensive city in America in the aftermath of a massive economic collapse, were challenged to save $500 and not touch it for a year with the promise of a 50 percent bonus if they succeeded? Do you think that some of them would be able to do it? A few?

What would you think the impact of that small amount of money would be? Equally small? Would you think that sequestering those resources would make families more likely to go into debt? More likely to skip paying their bills?

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include inequality, retirement, the workforce, and financial services.

Student loan debt has been in the news a lot these days. In the last week, a number of news outlets wrote about mounting student loan debt and the delaying of life events by their borrowers (see ABC News, the Chronicle of Higher Education, CNN Money, the NY Times [here and here], and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few). The article in the NY Times provides a great example of this, "Consider Shane Gill, a 33-year-old high-school teacher in New York City. He does not have a car. He does not own a home. He is not married. And he is no anomaly: like hundreds of thousands of others in his generation, he has put off such major purchases or decisions in part because of his debts."

As part of their effort to reform the tax code, the House Ways and Means Committee created a series of working groups and put out a call for public comment on tax reform ideas.

The uproar from the financial industry over President Obama’s proposed “retirement cap” is preposterous, but unsurprising. In the usual vein, the industry presents the proposed limit as an attack on the hard worker and diligent saver, despite the fact that it comes nowhere close to affecting even the top 1 percent of earners. In fact, it doesn’t touch the top one-tenth of one percent. For every 10,000 IRA account holders, a whole six accounts would be affected by the limit. That number is even lower for 401(k) accounts. As Fred Hiatt for the Washington Post explained, the employee-benefit lobby quickly mobilized to forestall this outrageous “’socialist idea’ of ‘raiding’ retirement accounts.” And it is succeeding.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include retirement security, racial wealth disparities, housing, and homelessness.

A new study came out this week evaluating the impact Medicaid coverage has on participants' health, financial lives, and general well-being. Sarah Kliff describes the study design:

The research uses data from Oregon, where the state held a lottery among low-income adults in 2008 for a limited Medicaid expansion. Of the 90,000 people who applied, 10,000 ultimately gained coverage. The lottery gave researchers a unique opportunity to conduct the first randomized experiment on Medicaid coverage, by studying those who gained insurance through the lottery and comparing them against a similar group of adults who did not.

The randomization of the study is an important feature: other studies have struggled to control for the differences in people who seek out Medicaid coverage and those who do not (but may be eligible). As Joe Colucci from New America's Health Policy team explains, "That created an incredible research opportunity - the randomized design allows researchers to really see the effect of Medicaid enrollment on people’s health, and hopefully put to bed the nonsense idea that Medicaid is bad for people’s health."

The study looked at what impact Medicaid coverage has on people's physical health, as measured by things like blood pressure, cholesterol levels and other "easy to obtain" indicators. In the two year study period, the researchers found "few short-term physical health gains," which came as a surprise and disappointment to some and as fodder for others to decry the program as ineffective. (The results on the physical health side are complicated and mixed, but I would refer you to Kevin Drum's analysis for more on some of the statistical issues at play. A question posed Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt is also relevant here: "How many people saying that are ready to give up insurance for themselves or their family?") 

From an asset-building perspective, the really amazing finding from the study is on the impact Medicaid coverage had on participants' financial security. Jonathan Cohn explains:

The big news is that Medicaid virtually wiped out crippling medical expenses among the poor: The percentage of people who faced catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenditures (that is, greater than 30 percent of annual income) declined from 5.5 percent to about 1 percent. In addition, the people on Medicaid were about half as likely to experience other forms of financial strain—like borrowing money or delaying payments on other bills because of medical expenses.

I bolded parts of that because I really want to emphasize what a striking impact having health insurance had on people's financial situations. On top of the benefits to low-income people's financial security, the study also reported "significant improvements in mental health outcomes, with rates of depression falling by 30 percent."

On April 9, 2013, the Savings Bond Working Group, a coalition of national and grassroots non-profit organizations, commercial tax preparers, tax software firms, and public officials, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Lew regarding access to U.S. Savings Bonds at tax time. Asset Building Program Director, Reid Cramer, along with other members of the working group, called for continued commitment from the Treasury Department to preserving and modernizing access to U.S. Savings Bonds as a secure, simple, and powerful savings tool for working Americans at tax time.