Charleston Gazette-Mail – A couple years ago, Bambi Curry put a fence around the small backyard of her home, next to St. Cloud Common Park in west Huntington. Read
In the past few years she’s also put a new roof on her house and made some fixes to its aging plumbing. This spring, she paid the business taxes for the small company she just started and gave a few hundred dollars to each of her three grown children, who used the money to pay bills and for basic living expenses.
Each of these expenditures was made possible when Curry received her tax refund from the earned income tax credit, one of the country’s largest anti-poverty programs.
More than 26 million low to moderate income households will receive more than $60 billion in reduced taxes and refunds this year thanks to the credit, according to the Tax Policy Center.
In West Virginia, the earned income tax credit went to about 160,000 households in 2012, bringing those households a total of more than $340 million.