Children are among the poorest of Maine's residents. Nearly 1 in 5 children under the age of 18, 19.3%, lived in families below the federal poverty line in the early 1990s. Most of these poor children lived in working families. The working poor are often missing from policy debates, but their numbers are likely to increase with welfare reform…

This report explores promising welfare-to-work programs and practices of states and localities as they balance supply- with demand-side strategies to help welfare recipients and low-wage workers work their way out of poverty while meeting employers' needs for reliable workers. Chapter 2 describes the new environment created by changes in the…

The impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on working families was analyzed. The analysis established that the EITC is, on balance, a highly effective program that meets its primary objectives well. The following benefits of the EITC were identified: (1) it reduced the poverty rate in 1999 by an estimated 1.5 percentage points; (2) it is…

The Minnesota Family Investment Program, the Canadian Self-Sufficiency Project, and Milwaukee's New Hope Project are three antipoverty programs that were undertaken in the 1990s to end dependency on welfare by "making work pay." The impacts of all three programs were reviewed and compared to those of the Seattle/Denver Income Maintenance…