Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Adam Carasso on State and Local Issues

Widening access to retirement savings vehicles and increasing the accumulations within these vehicles could help secure the future for many lower-income families. Currently, the role played by private pensions in asset building is small to nonexistent for most poor and lower-middle class workers. Instead, these persons rely primarily on Social Security and the savings in their home equity, if any, to sustain them in retirement. This brief, based on feedback from a roundtable of experts convened at the Urban Institute, provides background data on the assets of US households and discusses options for increasing levels of saving and retirement security for low- and moderate-income families.

The behavior of state and local receipts around the end of a business cycle is historically mixed, but the last three recessions exhibit a common trend: receipts trail expenditures during the recession, and even a year or two afterwards.

While federal, state, and local tax receipts have nearly tripled as a percentage of GDP over the last 70 years — rising from 9.5 percent in 1929 to 26.2 percent by 2002 — the magnitude of the decline in total receipts since 2000 is unmatched since World War II. The figure below shows the growth and change in the different sources of total tax receipts. Most of the growth in receipts occurred between 1929 and the nation’s entrance into World War II. From the late 1960s through the late 1990s, the level of total government receipts had largely stabilized, remaining between 25 and 27 percent of GDP.