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Green Book

From the

COMMITTEE ON WAY AND MEANS
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENATIVE

The “Green Book”
Background Material and Data on Programs
within the Jurisdicition of the Committee on Ways and Means

Prepared for the use of Members of the Committee on Ways and Means by members of its staff.
This document has not been officially approved by the Committee and may not reflect the views of its Members.

Editions available:

For your convenience, compressed copies of some older Green Books are available for download:

Notes for users:

The Green Book is compiled by the staff of the Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives from many sources and provides program descriptions and historical data on a wide variety of social and economic topics, including Social Security, employment, earnings, welfare, child support, health insurance, the elderly, families with children, poverty, and taxation. It has become a standard reference work for those interested in the direction of social policy in the United States.

Persons who download these chapters for local use should be aware that many of these chapters have very wide tables of data (20 or more columns) that are difficult to format properly. Fonts with proportional spacing cause the numbers in the tables to be misaligned and normal width pages cause the right hand columns within rows to wrap to the next line. This makes the tables undecipherable. We suggest that after you have downloaded these pages, each file should be formatted with a fixed-width font such as Courier and when wide tables are encountered that the page setup or format be set to 14 inch paper in landscape mode.