American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Helping Middle-Class Families

摘要

One of the central goals of the Middle Class Taskforce is to identify public policies that will help middle class families by improving their living standards. This taskforce goal is an especially important one, because even in normal times of economic growth in recent years, the middle class has not gotten very far ahead. In fact, even during the economic expansion of the 2000s, as we show below, the real income of working-age, middle-class households actually fell by about $2,000. In this current period of widespread economic hardship, a key tool for helping these families is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA. The ARRA is the $787 billion package supported by the Obama/Biden administration, which was passed by Congress and signed into law on February 17, 2009. This staff report focuses on how the ARRA helps middle-income families.