Expanding the EITC Would Help Workers in Every State

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) rewards the work of low- and moderate-income working families across the country.  Our new data show that bipartisan proposals to expand the EITC for low-wage workers who aren’t raising children in the home — a group that the credit now largely excludes — would extend the EITC’s success to workers doing a wide range of jobs in every state.

Providing a more adequate EITC to low-income workers not raising children in the home and lowering the eligibility age would boost these workers’ incomes and help offset their federal taxes, among other important benefits. 

President Obama’s and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s nearly identical proposals would lower the eligibility age for the EITC for workers not raising children in the home to 21 and raise the maximum credit for these workers to roughly $1,000.  These changes would make significant progress toward meeting the core principle that no American worker should be taxed into poverty, though they wouldn’t fully reach that goal. 

More robust proposals from Senate Finance Committee member Sherrod Brown and House Ways and Means Committee member Richard Neal would essentially ensure that the federal tax code doesn’t tax childless wage-earners aged 21-64 into poverty by providing an EITC that fully offsets these workers’ payroll and income taxes.

Click on the map below to learn how these proposals to expand the EITC would benefit workers not raising children in the home in a wide variety of occupations in every state.

And to learn more about how expanding the EITC would promote work and reduce poverty, join my colleague Chye-Ching Huang (@dashching) and me (@ChuckCBPP) for a tweetchat today at 1 p.m. EDT.  Follow along at #ExpandEITC.