Policy officials told a University of Wisconsin crowd Thursday the recent stimulus bill fills fundamental gaps in current government systems but falls short of a cure-all solution.
The panel, comprised of officials from the nonpartisan Institute for Research on Poverty, sought to explain what the stimulus bill does specifically to fight poverty, educate citizens and improve public health.
In regards to fighting poverty, “the biggest ticket item is the new tax policy called ‘the making work pay tax credit,'” said Daniel Meyer, panelist and UW professor of social work.
He added this will provide people who are working with a 6.2 percent credit on income tax. This element of the stimulus bill accounts for $116 billion.
According to Meyer, there are two reasons this is significant.
“One reason is that this is a new tax credit that is a new change that will last. Secondly, it covers a pretty wide range of the population. It is not targeted at low-income families,” Meyer said.
However, fresh strategies such as this are not as common in the bill as many might have hoped, according to Meyer.
Meyer said the bill represents a continuation of the trends over the last 30 years in policies affecting low-income families. Conversely, it does exhibit some non-trivial increases in non-traditional policies.
In regard to education, the bill represents a whole new era, according to Sara Goldrick-Rab, panel member and assistant professor of education policy studies and sociology.
“This is a completely different president than we’ve had before with regards to education in particular. … He is definitely fully embracing the notion that education is key to social mobility, and he has brought people into Washington who completely get this,” she said.
While Goldrick-Rab is optimistic about President Barack Obama’s educational vision, she is cognizant of the sobering realities.
“Within the $100 billion allocated for education in the bill, a major caveat, $54 billion of that, is just to keep schools open,” Goldrick-Rab said. “The biggest change in my opinion is a very heavy duty emphasis on higher education.”
Similar to how education spending largely aims to maintain the mainline, a large chunk of the allocated health care spending will go to keeping Medicaid afloat, according to Pamela Herd, panelist and assistant professor of public affairs and sociology.
She explained about one-fifth of the stimulus is going to health care spending.
Of this, “57 percent is going to Medicaid, and really that’s just an infusion of money to the states to support existing Medicaid functions,” Herd said.
All the panelists seemed to agree the stimulus bill is far from perfect.
While there are many vital policy problems addressed, the amount of actual stimulus is questionable, Meyer said.
“I think it’s fair to say this bill has multiple goals, not all of which are stimulus-related,” Meyer said. “If you think about designing a stimulus bill you would want some mechanisms that provide money quite quickly to people who are going to spend it, and there’s not very much of that in this massive bill.”
