Feature Story

February 6, 2008

How Much Does the Federal Government Spend to Promote Economic Mobility? And for Whom?

From Urban Institute:

This report tallies all federal spending and tax subsidies aimed at promoting the economic mobility of Americans for 1980, 2006, and 2012. This first effort at defining a mobility budget--$746 billion in 2006--reaches two major conclusions:

(1) poor and lower-income households owe little or no tax and so are excluded from the bulk of economic mobility programs, which are often delivered in the form of tax subsidies; and

(2) while these households do benefit from many other federal programs, those programs generally are not aimed at promoting mobility--and sometimes even discourage it.

Furthermore, under current law, mobility enhancing programs targeted to toward lower income households would decline as a share of GDP from 2006 to 2012, while those targeted to the better off would increase over the same period.

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