News Clips

• May 06, 2013  |  Post-Gazette Critics Decry Pennsylvania's Revived Asset Test on Food Stamps Such tests can be harmful due to the volume of paperwork and caseworkers' time they can tie up, but also because they discourage savings, said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, an expert on policies that impact low-income people at CLASP. "It sends the wrong signal," she said. "It encourages people to spend down rather than put money in the bank and save it against future needs."
• May 05, 2013  |  The Washington Post D.C. Area Appointments for the Week of May 6 Center for Law and Social Policy of the District appointed Olivia Golden executive director.
• Apr 25, 2013  |  Corporate Voices for Working Families A Milestone for Competency Based Education - College for America is Approved by Department of Education Corporate Voices for Working Families mentions CLASP's Emily Firgens's In Focus article "Lowest Income Families Remain Most Burdened by High Childcare Costs"
• Apr 23, 2013  |  Governing Tying Welfare Benefits to Grades Meets Resistance in Tennessee Campfield's assumption is that parents who don't participate in parent-teacher conferences would change that behavior to avoid losing $55 a month. That doesn't make sense to Elizabeth Lower-Basch, policy coordinator for CLASP, who points out that many welfare recipients miss school events because they hold multiple jobs, causing work conflicts. The bill is "grounded in a stereotype that the reason a kid might be failing in school is because parents don't care," Lower-Basch says. "Overall, low-income parents do care very much about their children and want them to succeed."
• Apr 22, 2013  |  WAMU D.C. Education Advocates Seek More Funding For Adult Programs "Federal funding for adult education is declining extremely rapidly, facing an almost 20 percent decrease in funding since 2002," says Foster.
• Apr 19, 2013  |  The Nation TANF: A Good News Story From the States Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) - the program created by welfare reform in 1996 - is a flexible block grant, meaning that while the federal government sets some general rules, states have been given an enormous amount of control, both over the ways that they spend the federal funds they receive and over the rules that they set for families receiving TANF cash assistance. This flexibility results in an enormous amount of variation from state to state.
• Apr 12, 2013  |  Philly.com Welfare Regulations in Tennessee, Pennsylvania Spur Arguments And, experts say, impoverished children often do badly in school precisely because they're poor: scant food, bad housing, and dysfunction in the family all contribute to difficulties making good grades. Taking money from such families would serve to further damage these children, noted Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a TANF expert with CLASP in Washington.
• Apr 11, 2013  |  The Huffington Post Drug Testing Bills Proliferate In State Legislatures "These are copycat bills that feed off of each other and are based on stereotypes," said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, policy analyst for CLASP. "The stereotype is that welfare [and unemployment] recipients are more likely to use drugs, and more broadly that people are poor solely because of their bad choices instead of an economy that's not creating enough jobs."
• Apr 08, 2013  |  The Huffington Post The Facts About the Social Security Disability Programs Additionally, as highlighted by Elizabeth Lower-Basch at the Center on Law and Social Policy (CLASP), there is no evidence of a large-scale shift from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to SSI. In fact, the decline in TANF enrollment from 1996 to 2011 is more than 20 times the magnitude of the increase in SSI child enrollment during that period.
• Apr 02, 2013  |  The Washington Post Lack of Paid Sick Leave is Unhealthy for America More than 40 million Americans - disproportionately low-income, black and Latino workers - cook, clean, fold, and ring us up without any paid time off when they or their children are ill. On any given day, these workers must choose between caring for a sick child and their job. They handle our food and our purchases, coughing and sniffling through Kleenex, to avoid being handed a pink slip.
• Apr 01, 2013  |  The Big Story Correction: SmallBiz-Small Talk In a story March 27 about paid sick leave laws, The Associated Press, relying on information from Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., reported erroneously the number of employees a company has to have to be exempt from paying for sick leave under the Healthy Families Act. The Healthy Families Act exempts companies with fewer than 15 employees from providing paid sick time.
• Mar 29, 2013  |  The Huffington Post Sick Days Go Viral This month, Portland, Oregon and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania both passed legislation (Philly awaits the Mayor's signature) and New York City is expected to follow suit. These actions build on laws enacted in Connecticut, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C.
• Mar 21, 2013  |  The Boston Globe Single-mother Families Struggling in Mass. In Massachusetts, the gap between rich and poor is among the largest in the country. The state's poverty rate is below the national average, but when regional living expenses are factored in, Massachusetts has the 10th-highest rate, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy.
• Mar 14, 2013  |  Inside Higher Ed Reimagining Financial Aid The most comprehensive ideas for changing tax credits came from the Center for Law and Social Policy, which devoted most of its white paper to tax benefits. The group looked at several options, including making the American Opportunity Tax Credit more refundable; front-loading part of the credit, meaning taxpayers could get their refunds earlier; and ending the separate tax deduction for tuition and fees.
• Mar 13, 2013  |  CNN Money Future of Medicaid and Food Stamps at Stake "When you talk about slashing the safety net to save it, it's hard to call that anything but Orwellian," said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, senior policy analyst at CLASP, which focuses on policy for the poor.
• Mar 01, 2013  |  The Christian Science Monitor Financial Aid: Finding Better Ways to Help College Students Earlier this week, my Tax Policy Center colleague Elaine Maag blogged about proposals by CLASP to improve federal assistance for low-income college students, including better targeting of higher education tax credits. But there may be even more effective ways to help these students. One idea: Cut back on tax credits and use the savings to improve Pell grants and loan programs.
• Mar 01, 2013  |  The Nation This Week in Poverty: Gangnam-Style Counting With Senator Jeff Sessions CLASP's Elizabeth Lower-Basch's Congressional testimony offers further detail on TANF in Greg Kauffman's article.
• Feb 28, 2013  |  The Hill House Welfare Hearing Gets Personal for Lawmakers "Employers are increasingly unwilling to just hire folks like your dad," Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a senior policy analyst with CLASP, said to Reichert. "They want people with skills, they want people ready to show up and do the job on the first day. So we need to give people access to those training programs."
• Feb 27, 2013  |  Youth Today EBT Money Withdrawn at Liquor Stores, Casino Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a policy coordinator at the Washington D.C.-based CLASP, said that depending on how states implement the federal restrictions, they may end up spending more on enforcement than the cash assistance recipients spend at questionable retailers.
• Feb 27, 2013  |  Philanthropy News Digest Investing in Young Men and Boys of Color: The Promise and Opportunity Improving the health of and educational and employment opportunities for young men and boys of color - the demographic cohort most likely to grow up in poverty, live in unsafe neighborhoods, and attend underresourced schools - requires alternative approaches to school discipline, job training, and postsecondary degree completion, as well as cultural shifts among health professionals, educators, and youth-serving agencies, a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Center for Law and Social Policy finds.