In the face of abject poverty, any money is welcome, but what is sorely lacking from so many policy initiatives that happen as tax credits is any intelligent analysis of how much money is needed. When you look at the comparisons between people's incomes and their actual living costs, what we desperately need are programs that fill those gaps. The arbitrary dropping of amounts of money that are computed through some other calculation that isn't targeted toward the needs of those groups...all money is helpful for someone who doesn't have any or has very little, but the idea that we could see a measurable effect of something that's small...those things invariably end up looking like drops in the bucket. There needs to be a point when the pendulum swings and we start to see tax credits or redistribution schemes, when the dollar amounts are calculated based on some evidence of need. In that case, we'd probably figure out that somebody needed way more than $500 a month. Certainly the people we study do. Others probably don't need any money, and if they got an extra $500, the most we could expect is what Lisa suggested, maybe some exacerbation of inequities.
On October 26th, 2006. See this statement in context.