Trump's plan today: Start fight with Paul Ryan. Hillary's plan: Outline agenda to fight deep poverty

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Ezra Klein ‏@ezraklein 43m43 minutes ago
Trump's plan today: start a fight with Paul Ryan

Clinton's plan today: outline agenda to fight deep poverty http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/11/13237160/hillary-clinton-child-tax-credit

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton unveiled what is arguably among the most important policies she’s announced during her entire presidential campaign. It is an ambitious but politically attainable plan that will lift huge numbers of families with children out of poverty. It is targeted exclusively at the poor, and the extreme poor in particular, with no money spent on the middle class or rich.

Specifically, Clinton is calling for a change in the refundability threshold of the child tax credit. Those sound like technical changes, but it has tremendous ramifications. Currently, the poorest American families can’t claim the credit, which is a mainstay of the tax returns of most middle-class families. That’s because households that make less than $3,000 a year — the truly, desperately poor — are excluded entirely, and households making under $9,666.67 can’t get the full credit.

Clinton would change the law so that families start getting the credit with the first dollar they earn. That would effectively increase the tax refunds of the poorest families with children. In addition, Clinton would double the credit for children 4 and under, something that helps both poor and middle-class families with young kids, and she’d make the credit phase in much faster for families with kids in that age range.

The plan is not a complete answer to the increase in extreme poverty that’s occurred over the past two decades, but it’s a very good start. And it takes the US closer to the system most other rich countries use of simply giving every family a child allowance of a few thousand dollars per kid every year, no strings attached.

read more: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/11/13237160/hillary-clinton-child-tax-credit

ryan cooper ‏@ryanlcooper 23m23 minutes ago
HELL YES http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/11/13237160/hillary-clinton-child-tax-credit …

[Cha]

1. K&R!

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. As Wonkette says, this is the kind of thing normal elections are about

and thus it has been completely starved of publicity in this election nightmare.

http://wonkette.com/607469/clinton-unveils-child-tax-credit-proposal-as-if-this-were-normal-election-and-people-noticed-policy

In particular, she's proposing a two-part change in the child tax credit. First, instead of kicking in at $3,000, it would kick in at $0. This would help people in the deepest poverty. Second, for families with children under four, it would max out at $2,000 instead of $1,000. The chart below shows what families would get compared to the current CTC (in blue):



The mainstream press pretty clearly couldn't care less about this, and I suppose that's hardly surprising given the Hindenburg-like dimensions of the meltdown of one of America's two major parties. Still, surely it deserves a little bit of attention?

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/10/hillary-clinton-releases-plan-help-children-deep-poverty