In January, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill (that in itself is something of a miracle) that would provide tax credits to help 16 million poor children. It would lift an estimated 400,000 children out of poverty in its first year.
To get support from Republicans, the bill matches the child tax credits with tax cuts for businesses totaling the same amount. The business tax cuts extend some of the lavish corporate tax cuts larded out when Trump was president. House Republicans insisted on no help for poor children without more giveaways to corporate donors. So it goes.
Now, Republicans in the Senate are lining up to tank the bill. They want a better deal for business. As Catherine Rampell reports in the Washington Post, they think that they can win a majority in the Senate in November. They don’t want to give Biden a triumph before that. If they do win the majority, then they believe they can extend the corporate tax cuts and discard the help for children.
“What side are you on,” the old Union song goes. Over and over again, it is clear.
Children in poverty are not only a moral blight in a country as rich as this one–they represent a profound political failure. Childhood poverty exposes the young to malnutrition, to disease and illness, to homelessness, and too often, to lifelong mental and physical injury. It snuffs out home in the salad days of life.
We know how to eliminate childhood poverty. When COVID hit, and the country closed down, the Rescue Plan passed by Congress expanded the child tax credit to provide assistance to those whose incomes were too low to benefit from the credit. The number of children in poverty was cut by more than one-half.
Then, despite the best efforts of Democrats to keep the expanded credit in place, the Congress allowed the program to expire. In the next year, an additional 15 million people fell below the poverty line, and childhood poverty more than doubled, with an additional 5.2 million children in poverty.
The compromise bipartisan bill that passed the House wouldn’t revive the full-expanded credit–but it would make more low-wage families with children eligible for greater assistance.
During the COVID period, we saw what poor parents did with the added resources that came to them. They bought food. They paid down debt. They bought clothes and health care for their children.
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