Rachel Black: All Related Content

The authors of the NAF report, Rachel Black and Mark Huelsman, write in “Overcoming Obstacles to College Attendance and Degree Completion” that the rules and restrictions of public assistance programs can be confusing. “Asset limits create an impression that low-income families are not eligible even if they are.”

Original article

The rise in student loan debt has directed critical attention to the growing pace of college costs as well as the reliance on loans to finance those costs. For graduates entering the workforce in recent years, many are finding that they are unable to find the type of job they thought they were securing when they received their degree, if they are able to find a job at all. Consequently, more loans are going unpaid and student loan debt has become the only class of consumer debt where defaults are increasing.

It's a surreal experience waking up to a story related to what I work on on the radio. It's happened several times, and I'm never quite sure if I'm actually awake or just processing the day's events. Such was my experience this morning listening to NPR as Marketplace launched the first in a series on wealth and poverty. 

Conditional clauses are very important. Mitt Romney's statement yesterday that he's "not worried about the very poor" is based on the supposition that "there's a safety net there," an "ample" safety net at that. This is similar to my saying that I'm not worried about whether my husband will starve to death when I leave town because he knows how to order a pizza.

It’s unsurprising that the program formerly known as food stamps, currently the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, didn’t receive a mention at last night’s State of the Union address. The policies the President discussed outlined an aspirational portrait of where the country should be and the changes he believes are necessary to achieving that vision. At a time when over 46 million people are on SNAP to meet their most basic of needs, putting food on the table, it could be an uncomfortable reminder of the distance between where we are and where he’d have us be.

This is the fourth and final installment in a series of interviews with policy experts who participated in an event we hosted on November 22nd, "Poverty, Inequality, Mobility, Oh My," where we explored different ways of assessing how families are doing post-Great Recession and how applying these different approaches to the design of public policies might improve the conditions and opportunities of low-income families.

This is the second in a series of interviews with policy experts who participated in an event we hosted on November 22nd, "Poverty, Inequality, Mobility, Oh My," where we explored different ways of assessing how families are doing post-Great Recession and how applying these different approaches to the design of public policies might improve the conditions and opportunities of low-income families.

Two years after the official end of worst recession since the Great Depression, the economy is recovering but families are not. According to a flurry of new data, poverty and inequality are reaching historic highs and the current of economic mobility is flowing most forcefully down the economic ladder. 

CASA of Oregon, Neighborhood Partnerships, and NeighborWorks Umpqua hosted Rebuilding the Path of Opportunity: An Oregon Asset Builders' Conference on November 9-10. Rachel Black presented "Recovery and Resiliency" at a plenary exploring the landscape of policy options to expand savings opportunities among lower-income households from the local to the national level. In the presentation, she gives a federal policy perspective and argues that helping households build financial resiliency through savings should be a core part of the economic recovery agenda.

It's an incredibly uncomfortable scene. Michael Scott returns to the class of student to whom he made the pledge 10 years earlier that if they graduated from high school, he would pay for their college. Now as they anticipate this promise being fulfilled, they perform a song to demonstrate their appreciation:

In a clear case of adding insult to injury, beginning October 1st, SNAP (or, food stamp) participants in Michigan will have to provide even more evidence of how poor they are in order to receive assistance. Currently, households need only demonstrate incomes below 130% of the federal poverty line (in reality, most households have incomes below half of that), without consideration of any savings they might have.