South By North Strategies, Ltd.

A new policy brief from the N.C. Budget & Tax Center finds that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has helped to keep 206,000 North Carolinians out of poverty. Recovery act provisions also have shielded an additional one million Tar Heels from additional economic hardship. From the center’s brief …

The Make Work Pay tax credit, improvements to the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, unemployment insurance benefits and food stamp levels as well as one-time payments to the elderly and disabled. This aid not only lessened the economic hardship for these families but also spurred the economic recovery as low-income families are most likely to spend quickly the money they receive. Thus, the Recovery Act was estimated to create or save between 1.3 and 2.7 million jobs maintaining workers source of income and reducing the risk of being pushed into poverty by job loss.
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For North Carolinians, the rough estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in December 2009 suggested that 206,000 North Carolinians were kept out of poverty as a result of the Recovery Act. A million North Carolinians did not experience the full severity of economic hardship because their incomes were lifted through these provisions.