The expanded child tax credit briefly slashed child poverty. Here's what else it did

Originally posted on: National Public Radio (NPR)

By: Cory Turner

Blink and you could have missed it.

For six months, the United States experimented with an idea that’s new here but is already a backstitch in the social fabric of many wealthy nations: a monthly cash payment to help families cover the costs of raising children. Less than a year in, though, this U.S. experiment, known as the expanded child tax credit, has already been unwound by a deadlocked Congress.

Still, it’s worth asking: What did it accomplish? Here’s what the data tells us.

The benefit reached more than 61 million children in December

In March 2021, Congress blew the doors off a preexisting child benefit known as the child tax credit. As part of the American Rescue Plan, lawmakers made three key changes:

• Congress chose to disburse half of the benefit in monthly payments, from July to December, instead of forcing families to wait for all of it to arrive as a lump sum at tax time.
• Lawmakers increased the benefit from $2,000 per child per year to a maximum of $3,600 per child 5 or younger and $3,000 for kids 6-17. For many families, that meant six monthly payments of $300 or $250, respectively, and the rest at tax time.
• Finally, Congress closed a hole that prevented roughly one-third of the nation’s children and half of all Black and Hispanic children from fully benefiting — because their families earned too little income.

This expansion reached 61.2 million children across more than 36 million households in December.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that by the end of tax season, families will have received an average of $4,380 from the 2021 version of the child tax credit, compared with the $2,310 they got under the previous version.

The payments cut monthly child poverty by roughly 30%

“The first payment, in July, kept 3 million children out of poverty,” says Megan Curran, policy director at the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy. By December, Curran says, the benefit was keeping 3.7 million children out of poverty.

Curran and her colleagues, Zachary Parolin and Sophie Collyer, looked at the benefit’s effect on child poverty rates from month to month.

In July 2021, for example,...   >>> CONTINUE READING<<<