Authors Katherine S. Newman and Rourke O’Brien discuss the way we tax the poor in the United States, particularly in the American South, where poor families are often subject to income taxes, and where regressive sales taxes apply even to food for home consumption. The authors argue that these policies contribute in unrecognized ways to poverty-related problems like obesity, early mortality, the high school dropout rates, teen pregnancy, and crime. Newman and O’Brien show how, decades before California’s passage of Proposition 13, many southern states implemented legislation that makes it almost impossible to raise property or corporate taxes, a pattern now growing in the western states. Taxing the Poor demonstrates how sales taxes intended to replace the missing revenue—taxes that at first glance appear fair—actually punish the poor and exacerbate the very conditions that drove them into poverty in the first place.

About our speakers:
KATHERINE S. NEWMAN, is a widely published expert on poverty and the working poor and an experienced academic administrator; she joined Johns Hopkins in September 2010 as the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. She has served on the faculties at Harvard University, Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley. Newman, who has written or co-authored 11 books and has one more in progress, has focused much of her scholarly work on the lives of the working poor and mobility up and down the economic ladder. She also has investigated the impact of tax policy on the poor, the history of public opinion’s impact on poverty policy, school violence, and the impact of globalization on young people in Italy, Spain, Japan and South Africa, among other issues. Among her many books are Falling From Grace, No Shame in My Game, Rampage and The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America. Newman graduated in 1975 from the University of California, San Diego, where she majored in sociology and philosophy. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1979 from the University of California, Berkeley.

ROURKE L. O’BRIEN is a graduate student in sociology and social policy at Princeton University and a non-resident fellow of the New America Foundation. He achieved his BA in Social Studies from Harvard University. Rourke’s interests include poverty, domestic and comparative social welfare policy, and wealth inequality. Prior to his arrival at Princeton, Rourke served as a Policy Analyst with the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington where he continues to serve as a nonresident research fellow. His ongoing research includes analyzing the impact of welfare eligibility policy on the savings behavior of the poor. Rourke is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Contact Adrienne if you are interested in meeting with either or both of these visiting scholars!