Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
Imagine the federal government could lift millions of American children out of poverty with a single program. That program would help parents put nutritious meals on the table, pay for school expenses and even save for kids’ college — all with no negative impact on the economy.
You don’t have to imagine. We had it just last year … and now we don’t.
By nearly every empirical measure, the expanded child tax credit (CTC) — the policy passed in 2021 that gave parents a few hundred dollars per month for each child in their family — was a wild success, dramatically reducing child poverty and making it easier for families to buy food and pay for housing and utilities. In combination with other COVID-19 relief measures, particularly the stimulus payments that went out to Americans in April 2020, January 2021 and March 2021, the CTC helped buffer families against the economic upheaval of the pandemic.
It’s rare that researchers can say with certainty that a program like the CTC actually worked. Politicians usually consider policies in an abstract, hypothetical way, knowing that a piece of legislation might not accomplish their aims. But by the time Congress was thinking about extending the CTC, there was a mountain of cold, hard data showing that this program did a lot to help children and families.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/congress-found-an-easy-way-to-fix-child-poverty-then-it-walked-away/
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