January 21, 2021 — Issue Brief

To protect families who are struggling to make ends meet in the face of mushrooming debt, and to
help workers and the economy recover from the COVID-19 crisis, Congress should:

▪ Adopt a temporary moratorium on the garnishment of wages and bank accounts.
▪ Permanently increase the amount of wages protected from garnishment to prevent pushing
families into poverty.
▪ Adopt new protections for a base amount of funds in bank accounts sufficient to cover a
family’s essential expenditures, modeled after the protection of Social Security benefits.

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