Research Roundup

Disconnected Families: Some poor single mothers manage to find work after being on TANF or combine work and welfare to make ends meet.  However, a brief by the Brookings Center on Children and Families profiles the 40 to 45 percent of the TANF caseload who are long-term recipients and aren't working because they face multiple barriers to securing and keeping employment.  Yet, because of time limits imposed by the 1996 federal TANF law, many of those families have been terminated from the program, terminations that will only increase with new rules implementing changes in the law passed in 2006.  The brief advocates creation of new state programs to help these long-term disadvantages families outside the traditional TANF programs.

A new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts
finds that while many children do improve their income relative to
their parents, the degree of upward mobility is usually limited and
blacks experience dramatically less upward economic mobility than
whites.  The racial gap in economic mobility for the poorest families
remains even when controlling for single- or two-parent families.

Incumbent Advantages:  In Advantage, Incumbent, the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that 92 percent of incumbent state legislators were re-elected and that 84 percent of all winning legislative candidates raised more funds than their opponents.