What’s Missing in 2022 Campaign Issues? Child Poverty
Well, that was nice while it lasted.
For six months we seemed to be making real progress against childhood poverty.
The progress came as a consequence of a national emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic. President Joe Biden expanded the child tax credit to help bring relief to low-income families and, immediately after benefits went into effect in July 2021, they showed what experts have said for decades: Direct cash grants to families in financial distress can make a world of difference.
Six months of payments lifted millions of children out of poverty, according to various studies.
The tax credit lowered tax bills for 36 million families and lifted nearly 4 million children out of poverty with monthly payments, a major initiative that Republican leaders had killed earlier.
As the liberal New Republic cheered, “The result was vastly beneficial: In the six months of the expanded CTC, the overall rate of child poverty in the United States was slashed by 30 percent; food insufficiency was cut by 26 percent.”
An August report from the Niskanen Center predicted that the CTC would “boost consumer spending by $27 billion, generate $1.9 billion in revenues from state and local sales taxes, and support over 500,000 full time jobs at the median wage.”
The tax credit brought many benefits and comparisons of Biden to Franklin D. Roosevelt, until it couldn’t.
Unfortunately for those of us who were delighted by the poverty-fighting news, the 2021 law only called for a year of payments. That was partly because Democrats believed the costly program would be so popular among voters that politicians wouldn’t let it expire.
That’s how things usually work — or used to work — in Washington, particularly for programs like Social Security or Medicare that become popular enough to be “political third rails,” as the saying goes, touch it and you die.
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