It’s been Fiscal Cliff-awareness week in Washington, and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center published a Tax Calculator to help you determine how the proposed solutions would affect you and your family.

In the meantime the MetroTrends blog covered issues directly related to the Fiscal Cliff: its effects on the safety net and entitlements.

• Sarah Minton and Christin Durham posted the last in a three-part series about low-income working families’ access to child care subsidies. Securing affordable child care is crucial to finding and maintaining work – and where you live dramatically affects whether you’ll be eligible for support.
• Julia Isaacs published her annual predictions on child poverty for 2012, based on a model of her design that anticipates final numbers 9 months before release. The upshot: child poverty remained worryingly high this year.

We also posted on a wide variety of other important policy topics:

• Erwin de Leon argued that policy makers should take more care to understand the diversity of people, culture and policy needs among a group often perceived as monolithic: Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.
• Bob Lerman takes an interesting look at income inequality: the reality of purchasing power disadvantage is more complicated than the size of your paycheck.

More next week: see you back on MetroTrends.