In Case You Missed It...

This week on Off the Charts, we talked about the federal budget, Medicaid, state budgets, and poverty.

• On the federal budget, we featured Robert Greenstein’s discussion of reforming federal tax expenditures and of protecting vulnerable families and not worsening inequality as part of deficit-reduction efforts in his recent Senate Budget Committee testimony.
• On Medicaid, Judy Solomon explained why allowing states to scale back their programs would undercut health reform and why Rhode Island’s experience under a special federal waiver doesn’t show how states would fare under a Medicaid block grant.
• On state budgets, Nicholas Johnson warned that proposed cuts to Earned Income Tax Credits would hurt low-income families, and Liz McNichol answered questions about public-sector workers.
• On poverty, Arloc Sherman highlighted recent evidence of the far-reaching and harmful effects of childhood poverty.

In other news, we released reports on the Ryan-Rivlin deficit-reduction plan, public employee pension reporting requirements, Rhode Island’s Medicaid waiver, the Hatch-Upton report on costs to states of expanding Medicaid, a podcast on state and local workers, and Paul Van de Water’s testimonies on health reform before the House Budget Committee and Senate Finance Committee.