NYC Wins Award for Innovative Government

New York City's pioneering anti-poverty work has won an award for "Innovations in American Government" from Harvard University. The award recognizes the City's Center for Economic Opportunity and the innovative work done there to experiment with a variety of anti-poverty programs. Among those programs is the SaveUSA innovation, a working model of our Saver's Bonus proposal to provide a matching incentive to support savings among low-income New Yorkers at tax time. (In full disclosure we've worked closely with NYC on a number of items in the past, and are delighted to have an on-going, informal relationship with them at this time.)

The program has been effective in New York City and received a grant to expand to three new cities last year: Tulsa, OK; Newark, NJ; and San Antonio, TX. Two weeks ago Mayor Bloomberg announced that the first year of SaveUSA in those cities appeared to be as successful as the previous years had been in New York. As this project moves forward we're going to continue to develop good data and supporting information for this project. What are we going to find? I believe we're going to find further confirmation that low-income families can and will save, given the right structures. I believe we'll find further evidence that developing savings is economically beneficial to those families served. Finally, I believe that we'll find a great deal of information that supports the enactment of the Saver's Bonus, to bring access to the power of saving at tax time to millions of American families.

Congratulations to Mayor Bloomberg and all of the hardworking folks in the Center for Economic Opportunity. This is further confirmation of the good work they're doing for the benefit of low-income families, not just in New York, but all across the country. My colleagues Rachel Black and Reid Cramer have written the best summary of the need for this program, its early results, and the case for a national policy. I recommend their paper highly.