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No Great Country Would Stand For This [1]

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Date: 2023-03-01

“The success of the 2021 (Child Tax Credit) expansion showed us that high child poverty rates are a policy choice, not an inevitability.” – The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan and one of its key pieces – expanding the Child Tax Credit – cut child poverty by 46 percent.

It dropped the child poverty rate, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), from 9.7 percent in 2020 to 5.2 percent in 2021. Overall, it lifted 5.3 million people out of poverty, including 2.9 million children, the Bureau reported.

So, why hasn’t Congress extended the CTC in its expanded form after its expiration at the end of 2021. Why in heaven’s name have our politicians – mainly Republicans -- put the kibosh on something that’s done so much good. That’s helped so many people. Most importantly, that’s helped so many children?

The American Rescue Plan, a Democratic initiative that passed with no Republican votes, increased the value of the CTC from $2,000 to $3,600 for children under age 6, and to $3,000 for children between ages 6 and 17.

A key point was that it was made fully refundable, meaning even if a parent could not or did not work, their child was covered under the extended CTC. They got the money even if they paid little or no taxes.

As the Motley Fool, a private financial and investing advice company, reported last week: the CTC “unlike most financial programs … provided immediate results.” Within weeks of CTC money going into bank accounts, “child poverty fell dramatically.”

But, once the CTC reverted back to its pre-pandemic form, the children of very low-income parents were no longer eligible for the expanded funding.

“When Congress failed to carry the expanded Child Tax Credit into 2022, millions of children fell back below the poverty line, almost immediately,” the Motley Fool said.

That’s just great. Let’s just shove a few million kids back into despair so we can concentrate on what really counts – tax cuts for the rich and corporations.

President Joe Biden has called on Congress to reinstate the expanded CTC. So, what’s the problem?

For one thing, Republicans are upset that the CTC was expanded to help people who don’t pay much if any taxes because they’re not working. I know what you’re thinking, doesn’t that approach cut funding for children of the poorest of the poor? Aren’t we punishing these kids, the ones who need help the most, because we want to make examples of their parents?

Think what you want about adults who can’t or won’t work, but to keep their kids in poverty and increase the chance for the cycle of poverty to continue in their lives, is a level of cruelty that has no place in our government.

Republicans want to include a work requirement in any CTC expansion. I can understand the reasoning, but are they prepared to include programs to help these folks get work. Things like matching people with available jobs in their area, or providing training to help them fill jobs that are in demand where they live?

And, just as importantly, are they willing to provide help in paying for child care for the parents whose paychecks would be pretty much wiped out by the cost of day care that they’ll need while they’re at work?

If the GOP won’t do things like that, then it shows you they aren’t serious about a work requirement. They’re just looking for a way to spend less money, because that’s money that can help cover tax cuts for their rich individual and corporate donors.

You can read the Census Bureau report here.

You can read the Motley Fool piece here.

Let’s look at another measure of how well we’re doing by our children. Households with children have a substantially higher rate of food insecurity (12.5 percent) than those without children (9.4 percent), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In some of them only adults were food insecure, but in 6.2 percent of households with children (2.3 million households) both children and adults were food insecure. The government defines food insecurity as meaning that at times during the year they were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.

About 5 million children under 18 lived in food-insecure households in which children, along with adults, were food insecure. Children are usually protected from substantial reductions in food intake, but still about 521,000 children experienced reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns at some time during the year – a subclassification called very low food security

It’s worse in single parent homes, where there’s food insecurity in 24.3 percent of households with children headed by a single mother (including 8 percent with very low food security compared to the overall figure of 3.8 percent) and 16.2 percent in households headed by a single man.

All this while many Republicans would be very happy to cut food stamps.

Looks like another good argument for making child care affordable so that going to work isn’t a losing proposition.

You can read the Department of Agriculture report here.

You see, we’re not looking at the right people. Republicans want to draw attention to adults who they love to characterize as lazy takers. We need to look past them at their children. Are we dooming too many of them from the womb because we want to make their parents pay for what some people see as their flawed character and work ethic?

We need to invest in our children, and we need the bulk of that investment to go to the poor and lower middle class. It may not level the playing field, but hopefully it’ll make it fairer. It should, to some degree, make a child’s talent and effort more of a factor in his or her success, as opposed to how many advantages their parents can buy for them.

If we don’t do that, we’ll lose too many kids, some of whom could have done great things. Republicans want you to see things like investments in cutting child poverty and improving the schools of the very poor as handouts, not what they really are: a hand up.

Their voters don’t agree with them. A recent poll by the family policy group Humanity Forward surveyed Donald Trump voters living in red states. The poll found that 70 percent of those GOP voters felt that Biden’s expanded CTC had a positive impact on their financial situation. More than 50 percent saw the CTC payments as tax relief rather than “welfare.”

There’s something wrong with a party and a country that look the other way when kids aren’t getting enough to eat. When their parents struggle to provide them with the basic necessities, let alone the “luxury” of a new toy or a vacation to see the world outside the suffocating sphere of their own poverty.

It’s sickening to know that our government can help so many people but is hamstrung by a Republican Party devoted to the rich, even at the expense of the poor. That would let children suffer while the fat cats rake in even more wealth.

No great country would accept that.

Why do we?

***

Thank you for reading my post. You can see of my writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody.

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