Category: Rural

While members of the U.S. Senate considered the first increase in minimum wage in a decade, the Carsey Institute released findings of a study showing that it would benefit rural, low-wage workers every bit as much, if not more, than workers in big cities.

The Making Work Pay Tax Credit provides eligible U.S. workers with additional money in each paycheck throughout the year. The fact sheet shows that 78 percent of rural working families will receive the full amount of the credit, while an additional 10 percent of families will receive a partial credit due to low earnings or high earnings. These tax credits, along with the expansion to the Child Tax Credit, are an important financial boost to families in rural America, particularly low-income working families.

This brief examines predatory mortgage loans and the harmful impact they have on rural homeowners and their communities. The report finds that minorities and low-income people are more likely to fall victim to higher-cost loans. The brief includes recommendations for policy changes at the state and federal levels, as well as advice on identifying and avoiding predatory loans.

In 1996 welfare reform ushered in a new era in which cash assistance for poor parents became both temporary and conditional on activities to promote economic independence through work. Cash assistance from TANF relieves, but does not eliminate, poverty because benefit levels are far too low to lift families above the poverty threshold. These ameliorative effects are weaker in rural than urban areas. Over time, the positive impacts of TANF receipt have continued to decline. The authors assert that the necessity of re-authorizing TANF gives us an opportunity to reflect on its strengths and limitations. TANF is an important component of poor families' budgets. However, in its current form, it is insufficient; strengthening TANF would help alleviate some material hardship in the lives of America's neediest citizens. In order to adapt TANF to better support struggling families in a modern economy, the authors suggest that the TANF reauthorization keep America's rural poor in mind, acknowledge differences in ameliorative effects, re-establish the TANF Emergency Fund, reinvigorate the Contingency Fund, and reconsider TANF Supplemental Grants.

Over the last two decades, opioid overdose deaths have increased over 400 percent, reaching 45,838 in 2016. Although the crisis is not disproportionately worse in rural than in urban America, opioid mortality rates have grown faster in rural areas, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. Rural areas also face unique challenges in dealing with the crisis, including a smaller health care infrastructure than is available in more densely populated areas, community and family factors, and labor market stressors.

The Affordable Care Act in 2010 gave states the option to expand Medicaid access to adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Thus more able-bodied and working adults have become eligible for Medicaid. In addition, several states have petitioned the federal government to have the option to enforce work requirements for those receiving Medicaid in their state.1 Specific waiver requests vary by state, but could have broad implications for Medicaid recipients across the nation, and typically include a requirement of able-bodied, adult Medicaid recipients to complete a certain number of hours spent working, or in some kind of other approved activity, like job training or looking for work. Children under age 19, pregnant or recently postpartum women, people with disabilities, and sole caretakers of young children are typically excluded from these proposed work requirements.

Author Justin Young reports that underemployment (or involuntary part-time work) rates doubled during the second year of the recession, reaching roughly 6.5 percent in 2009. This increase was equally steep in both rural and urban places. By March of 2012, underemployment was slightly lower in rural places (4.8 percent) compared to urban places (5.3 percent).

Data in this brief shows that the percentages of children living in low-income areas and poverty over the past fifteen years in rural and urban America are converging.

Political commentary often divides the nation into two partisan zones, urban and rural, but new analysis demonstrates that the rural–urban gradient is a continuum, not a dichotomy. In this study of the 2018 congressional midterms, authors Kenneth Johnson and Dante Scala confirm their earlier analysis of the 2016 presidential election and demonstrate how voting patterns and political attitudes vary across the spectrum of urban and rural areas.