By Ezra Klein, Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images, The New York Times, April 17, 2022
“We said we wouldn’t accept the levels of child poverty we have as a permanent feature of our democracy,” Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, told me. “And not only did the world not come to an end, but the families I talked to, who spent the money on everything from school clothes to a bicycle, were relieved of stress. That was the word they used with me. They were relieved of enormous, backbreaking stress.”
Bennet is talking about the single best policy of the Biden era, a policy he helped design: The expanded child tax credit. It gave parents $3,000 for every child age 6 to 17 and $3,600 for every child under age 6. There were no strings attached. It was just money. It could be used for child care, for food, for clothes, for anything. It treated parents, even poor parents, as the experts on their family’s finances, a quietly radical idea in American social policy. It was a huge experiment, it was studied exhaustively, and we can now say this definitively: It worked.
A study out of Columbia found it cut child poverty by more than 25 percent, pulling 3.4 million children above the poverty line, despite the raging Covid pandemic. Data from the census shows that the number of parents who said that their children didn’t have enough to eat fell by more than three million. Conservatives warned that the benefit would discourage work among parents, but the economists watched, and there’s no evidence it did. Poor people, just like rich people, want to live on more than $3,000 per child per year.
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