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Participatory Antipoverty Tax Coordination

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The U.S. tax system plays a central role in anti-poverty efforts, administering key benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. But these programs often operate in isolation from other social welfare initiatives, limiting their effectiveness. This article argues that improving coordination between the tax system and other agencies engaged in poverty alleviation is essential to enhancing the accessibility, fairness, and impact of anti-poverty measures. Rather than treating tax-based benefits as separate from broader social policy, policymakers should integrate them more effectively with direct assistance programs, ensuring that recipients experience a seamless and supportive system. In addition to administrative coordination, this article highlights the importance of participatory engagement by those directly affected. Current tax and welfare policies are often designed without meaningful input from recipients, leading to inefficiencies and unintended burdens. A more inclusive approach—one that incorporates the voices of low-income individuals in policy design and implementation—can help ensure that anti-poverty tax measures work as intended and avoid common pitfalls such as inaccessibility, administrative hurdles, and stigma. By drawing on insights from tax law, administrative law, and democratic theory, this article contributes to discussions on tax policy and social justice. It calls for a reconceptualization of tax-based anti-poverty efforts, one that prioritizes coordination across agencies and centers the perspectives of those the system aims to serve. Strengthening these dimensions can make tax-based benefits more effective tools for economic inclusion and democratic equality.
DOI: 10.5195/taxreview.2024.240
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4407984367
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