This paper examines the role of car access (including but not limited to car ownership) in facilitating employment among recipients under the current welfare-to-work law. In 1996, Congress enacted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which dramatically altered this nation’s social policy. TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) replaced the old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program, but the transformation went well beyond renaming the welfare system. Instead of providing an entitlement, the legislation’s goals are ending welfare dependency and promoting economic self-sufficiency through employment. New regulations limit cash support, place a time limit on benefits, mandate strong work requirements, and delegate the implementation to the states and local agencies. As a result of these reforms, hundreds of thousands of recipients are entering the labor market, but their ability to find a job remains unanswered. Successful restructuring of the welfare system requires implementing agencies to eliminate as many barriers as possible. Many recipients are severely disadvantaged by limited education and work experience, but the obstacles are not confined just to human-capital deficiencies. Moreover, time limits have shifted strategies from training and schooling to placing individuals in a job as quickly as possible.

This policy brief is part of a series on the socioeconomic status of American Indian and Alaska Natives (AIANs) in the Los Angeles metropolitan region, home to the largest urbanized AIAN population in the country. This brief presents findings on the factors that determine educational, employment, and housing outcomes for AIAN adults in the Los Angeles metropolitan area relative to outcomes for non-Hispanic whites (NHW). The analyses are based on individual-level data and econometric models to estimate the independent impacts of observable causal factors.

This essay considers the past, present, and future of tax privacy. Regarding the past, it took until 1976 for the concept of tax privacy to be explicitly established in statutory law. Congress established this concept in Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, but has also made it subject to numerous exceptions. In the present, much personal financial information is now accessible out of the tax consent and is regulated by other statutes and regulations. This result has made the area of tax privacy somewhat less exceptional today as a regulatory area than in the past. Finally, in the future, tax information in the electronic age will be subject to the same critical issues, such as those involving data security, as other personal information. In conclusion, tax information remains important, but is increasingly subject to the same forces-- legal and technical-- as other personal information.