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Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst

Katherine Gallagher Robbins

Katherine Gallagher Robbins is a Senior Policy Analyst for Family Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center where she examines how tax and budget policies influence the financial stability and security of low-income women and families.  Before joining the Center in 2010, Ms. Gallagher Robbins worked as an organizer for the California Public Interest Research Group at the University of California, San Diego. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a graduate of the College of William and Mary.

My Take

Who Needs Facts? We Do, Whatever the House GOP Leadership Thinks.

Posted by | Posted on: May 15, 2012 at 12:34 pm

Did you know…

These facts aren’t trivia; they have important implications for public debate and public policy. And they all come from the American Community Survey (ACS) a dataset that almost all House Republicans and a handful of House Democrats voted to eliminate last week.  

The ACS is invaluable to researchers, businesses, non-profits and the government. The ACS is the only source of annual data on the social, economic, and demographic characteristics of our country down to the neighborhood level.

The arguments to eliminate the ACS are tenuous at best. Some policy makers, like Congressman Daniel Webster (R-FL), have stated that the survey is a violation of privacy. This is simply ludicrous – the Census Bureau takes extreme caution to make sure that all survey results are confidential. No one’s responses are identifiable – from looking at the public data, it is impossible to tell who answered a survey question a specific way.

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When Poverty is Personal

Posted by Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst | Posted on: May 11, 2012 at 11:34 am

This blog post is a part of NWLC’s Mother’s Day 2012 blog series. For all our Mother’s Day posts, please click here.

My mother and meI spend a lot of time working with and thinking about the statistics of poverty – I think it is a valuable job and I love it. But poverty is more than statistics. Poverty is a personal issue and it is especially personal for me.

When my mom was a child, growing up in New England in the 1950s, she was poor. What did being poor mean for my mom? It meant that her family didn’t have enough to eat – sometimes they would divide up a head of lettuce and call it dinner. It meant that she and her three brothers had to decide who got to go to school on which day because there wasn’t enough money for everyone to have shoes – and if it was your day to be barefoot, you had to stay home.

When I think about my mom’s childhood, it pains me to think about all of the safety net programs we have now that her family could have benefitted from but didn’t have access to.

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Where the Women Are – and Aren’t

Women deserve a raise!

Women deserve a raise!

Some more numbers that underscore the importance for women of raising the minimum wage:

  • Annual earnings for a full-time minimum wage worker: $14,500;
  • Minimum cash wage for tipped workers: $2.13;
  • What the typical woman working full time, year round makes for every dollar paid to her male counterpart: 77 cents.
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The Wage Gap Over Time

Posted by | Posted on: May 03, 2012 at 10:01 am

77 cents.

That’s what the typical woman working full time, year round makes for every dollar paid to her male counterpart.

Just a few weeks ago, we “celebrated” Equal Pay Day – the day that represents how much longer the typical woman working full time, year round would have to work to be paid as much as the comparable man makes in one year. For the typical woman who makes just short of $37,000 a year, that means working three and a half months longer.

Three and a half months is a lot of extra work. Sadly, it used to be even longer.  In 1963, the year the Equal Pay Act was passed, the typical woman working full time, year round made 59 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. By 1973, the wage gap reached its widest point since the Census Bureau began tracking earnings – the typical woman working full time, year round made less than 57 cents for every dollar made by her male counterpart. Now we’ve been stuck at 77 cents for about a decade. So while the wage gap has shrunk since the Equal Pay Act became law in 1963, it hasn’t come anywhere close to disappearing. 

The Wage Gap over Time: Ratio of Median Earnings of Full-Time, Year-Round Workers

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House Passes Giveaway to Millionaires, Cuts Help for Poor and Middle Class Families

Millionaires have had a very good week. Women and their families have had a very bad week.

It started Monday, when 45 Senators voted to block the "Paying a Fair Share Act" (S. 2230), which would have implemented the Buffett Rule by requiring households with incomes above $1 million to pay at least a 30 percent income tax rate. Tax revenues support programs vital to women and their families at every stage of their lives, and women pay the price when millionaires and billionaires avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Today, the House passed "The Small Business Tax Cut Act" (H.R. 9). The bill provides a 20 percent tax deduction in 2012 for businesses with fewer than 500 employees — not exactly your mom-and-pop store!

H.R. 9 would have more aptly been named the Giveaway to Millionaires Act. The Tax Policy Center estimates that taxpayers making over $1 million a year would receive nearly half of the windfall. Exactly how big is this tax break? The average millionaire would get a new tax break of $44,635 next year. The average benefit for low-income tax payers in the bottom fifth of the income distribution? Just $2. All while adding $46 billion dollars to the deficit over the next ten years.

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