Back in March, in the middle of another year’s push with my middle students on our statistics unit, I noticed a statistical claim that, if true, struck me as nothing short of a miraculous. According to researchers at the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, changes in the child tax credit signed into law by President Biden as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 will reduce overall child poverty in the US by 45 percent, with poverty reductions for Black and Latino children even higher. You can look at the Columbia analysis, gleaned from data through the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, here.
This was of course several news cycles ago, and all the information you need on the policy change is available in the form of fact sheets from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Brookings, and many other think tanks and academic/government institutions. I found this article from The Conversation particularly accessible.
What I have to add is simply an exclamation mark and a deadline reminder. First the exclamation mark. The U.S. is now in the business of providing a cash assistance benefit to families with children! There are very few policy changes, or more simple ones, that could be better news for urban prosperity! I guess that’s two exclamation marks.
This cash assistance, moreover, is not held to the end of the year and buried in the tax code like the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit has been previously. Families will receive a monthly benefit that annualizes to $3,000 for children 6-17 and $3,600 for younger kids. This kind of policy change would have been the stuff of blue sky thinking at best in the early 2000s when I was last working full-time as a policy analyst, and the fact that such a change could pass now shows the significant cracks that have formed in the once dominant neoliberal economic consensus. The change in the child tax credit is also the kind of policy shift that puts the U.S. closer to being part of the family other developed nations, and not the strange outlier we are on issues like health care prices and gun control and mass incarceration and paid parental leave and too many others. As I have noted in a previous post, I find our outlier status crazy and increasingly sickening. Not being an outlier is darn nice for a change.
But here comes the deadline reminder. The change is for a single year. The US could easily slip back into outlier status if our leaders lose focus on the child poverty issue or fail to make it a bipartisan priority. At the end of the day, it may not matter if child poverty reduction comes through the child tax credit, or through the Social Security system as Sen. Mitt Romney among others has suggested. The point is that a massive reduction in child poverty is far more possible than many of us perhaps ever thought. To make it the change permanent though, we need to keep our collective eyes on the ball.