Abstract
This report tallies all federal spending and tax subsidies aimed at promoting the economic mobility of Americans for 1980, 2006, and 2012. This first effort at defining a mobility budget--$746 billion in 2006--reaches two major conclusions: (1) poor and lower-income households owe little or no tax and so are excluded from the bulk of economic mobility programs, which are often delivered in the form of tax subsidies; and (2) while these households do benefit from many other federal programs, those programs generally are not aimed at promoting mobility--and sometimes even discourage it. Furthermore, under current law, mobility enhancing programs targeted to toward lower income households would decline as a share of GDP from 2006 to 2012, while those targeted to the better off would increase over the same period.