Congress must tackle child poverty head on and expand the Child Tax Credit
The Census Bureau just released national poverty, income, and insurance data for 2023. It’s important to understand income and health insurance trends, but it’s especially important now since Congress will take up major tax legislation in 2025.
One thing we know for sure is that when the Child Tax Credit (CTC) was expanded in 2021, child poverty decreased by 46% overall, with Black and Hispanic/Latino child poverty falling by 6.3 percentage points in each community, impacting 716,000 Black children and 1.2 million Hispanic children. The new data shows that in 2023, the CTC lifted 2.4 million people above the federal poverty line―while important, falling far short of the 5.4 million lifted above the federal poverty line in 2021 by expanded monthly Child Tax Credit payments that included all children in low-income families.
Many people are facing food and housing insecurity, challenges with high child care costs, and dealing with other hardships that make it harder to make ends meet. Expanding the Child Tax Credit fixes a major flaw in current law: over 18 million children and their families are excluded from the full credit because their parents’ income is too low.
You read that right. Families where a parent can’t work due to illness or being laid off, cannot qualify for the Child Tax Credit at all. And many parents who work at low wages cannot get the full CTC. A single parent earning $15,000 a year and who has two children, will receive less than a family with a parent who has a higher paying job. This is a flaw that does nothing but exacerbate inequity and accelerate the racial wealth gap.
Instead of cutting investments in key programs and services, Congress must prioritize funding for human needs and that means passing an expanded Child Tax Credit that reaches the very poorest households.
The pandemic fatigue edition. Daily COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are once again on the rise. Daily cases have more than quadrupled since March and hospitalizations have doubled since May. But new polling suggests Americans have moved on – and are less willing than they have ever been to take steps to avoid contracting the virus. One poll finds that fewer than half of Americans are willing to undertake mitigation efforts. Only 36 percent of respondents said they wear a mask when outside their home – the lowest percentage since the pandemic began. And the same number of respondents said they never wear a mask when outside their home, a 14 percent increase since the same time last year.
Affordable child care, tax credits for families with children, and offering nutritious meals, particularly to children in families with low incomes, are the three vehicles best suited for driving families, young children, and the nation’s economy down a pathway to success. That’s the testimony offered this week by two academicians and one child advocate who appeared before the House Budget Committee.
While Tax Day has passed, families can still claim the expanded 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC). A new portal, GetCTC.org, relaunched in May, making it easier for families to do so. Many of the children most at risk of missing out on the CTC are in summer meals programs. Organizations running these programs can steer families to the new portal to help them claim the credit.
Much of my adult life has been spent homeless or incarcerated. Now I help homeless people and returning citizens. I’ve lived on the streets, been in Hollywood films, owned my own footwear service, rubbed elbows with a Saudi Prince, and even sung for Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago — while in and out of homelessness. I’ve also been to federal prison and battled substance abuse. We all make our own choices. But I’ve learned that our social and political systems often make choices for us, too. And those are the choices we can change together.
The reinfections edition. It has been said that although weary Americans may be done with the pandemic, the pandemic is not done with us. Unfortunately, this truism surfaced again within the past few weeks. The latest bad news is delivered by Omicron subvariant BA.5, which is taking the nation by storm – and which, in terms of infectiousness, is worse than all of its predecessors. “The Omicron subvariant BA.5 is the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen,” writes Eric Topol, a Professor of Molecular Biology at Scripps Research.
President Biden this week awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the nation’s highest civilian honor — to longtime CHN Board Member Sister Simone Campbell. Sr. Simone led NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, a CHN member group, from 2004 to 2021. She announced her retirement last year, and stepped down from her service on CHN’s Board of Directors. In 2013, CHN honored NETWORK with its annual Human Needs Hero award for its advocacy on behalf of immigrants.
The Coalition on Human Needs Thursday night marked its 40th anniversary with a Human Needs Hero gala that recognized decades of victories, clambering back from defeats, amazing organizing accomplishments, and more than a few heroes of the progressive movement.
CHN just released another edition of the Human Needs Report. Read on for the latest on FY23 spending, efforts to pass a reconciliation package, a critical child nutrition law, and more.
Low pay and stressful work conditions are causing Head Start providers across the country to lose key staff, shut down programs, and turn students from low-income families away, a situation that is setting off alarm bells among early childhood education advocates.
As we celebrate Juneteenth this year, it is important to acknowledge the lasting impacts of slavery on the workplace and the labor market. The at-will employment doctrine, which allows employers in most states to discharge workers for any reason, and the subminimum wage for tipped workers are both rooted in the employer backlash to Emancipation. These laws continue to disadvantage workers—Black and Latinx workers in particular.
The late U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) used to say that affordable access to the internet is the civil rights issue of the 21st century. And we saw this during the pandemic, when whether or not students could get online often meant the difference between learning and being denied an education at a time when schools were shuttered and classrooms went virtual. Now the federal government is addressing this inequity – and advocacy groups and service-providers across the country are jumping in to help.
The children are hurting edition. We’ve known for some time that students’ math and reading skills have suffered during the pandemic. This is mostly due to the shift to virtual learning that begun in March 2020. Students – particularly those from families with low incomes, disproportionately Black, brown and Indigenous students – did not achieve as well when they were out of the classroom. The pandemic has led to declines in school enrollment around the nation, which in turn is forcing budget cuts in many school districts – not a good way to repair the damage inflicted on students. But we now are learning more about other ways children are hurting – with more threats on the horizon.
