This tax season, Oregon will require a minimum wage worker who was employed full-time, year-round last year and supported one child to pay about $321 in state income taxes. That’s equivalent to about a month of food for this hard-working but financially insecure family.

Oregon’s Earned Income Credit, enacted in 1997, has certainly helped Oregon’s most vulnerable families. The minimum wage family of two described above would have owed about $484 in state income taxes – $163 more – without the tax credit. Because the credit is so small, though (it’s one of the nation’s smallest among states with such credits) Oregon income taxes are still taking a month’s worth of food off the table of vulnerable families. In a state where two-thirds of corporations pay just $10 a year in income taxes, that’s shameful.

Read the full fact sheet here: Expanding the EIC in 2009