Scioto Analysis Releases Analysis of Antipoverty Proposals

This morning, Scioto Analysis released an analysis of three antipoverty proposals—one to end poverty in Ohio, one to provide guaranteed income for Ohioans, and one to target deep poverty in Ohio.

All three of the proposals would double the income of individuals in deep poverty and would have substantial impacts on other individuals in poverty as well. All three proposals would also have large impacts on racial inequality of income and would sharply reduce poverty rates in urban and Appalachian Ohio.

“With the passage of the expanded Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan Act, cash transfers are front and center in the American political discourse,” said Scioto Analysis Principal Rob Moore, “this analysis shows what the impacts of cash transfers could be on poverty in Ohio.”

While these interventions would be effective and equitable, they would also be costly, with the three proposals estimated at a cost of $10-12 billion per year.

“More work needs to be done on modeling the financing of proposals such as these,” said Moore.

This analysis builds on Scioto Analysis’s past work calculating the most accurate poverty measure in the state to date. The analysts used the dataset, built on the base dataset of the American Community Survey and supplemented with Current Population Survey data, to simulate the impacts of different policies on incomes in the state of Ohio.

This analysis was led by Madeleine Gaw, Mansi Kathuria, and Sky Mihaylo, Master of Public Policy candidates at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.