The Child Tax Credit Can Help Combat Child Poverty | Opinion

Vice President Kamala Harris’ remarks to her new campaign staff called for “a future where no child has to grow up in poverty.” Her first campaign ad doubled down on this message. Now she is outlining policies underpinning this vision, including a robust Child Tax Credit that would deliver $6,000 to babies in their first year of life and regular cash support throughout childhood.
With this, the Child Tax Credit is making headlines not seen since its temporary—now expired—2021 expansion. And not a moment too soon.
Last fall, my colleagues and I at the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy reported child poverty nationwide saw the largest ever one-year spike from 2021 to 2022. Yet just before that—amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021—child poverty fell to a historic low.
What we achieved in 2021 offers a policy roadmap for the future—how we can support children no matter their family income or family circumstances. And the power of what is possible when we center people in policy.
Left unchecked, poverty during the pandemic could have reached the highest levels in over 50 years. Instead, Congress acted with speed and purpose. Almost overnight, policy changed in ways we were told for years it never could.
Changes included paid sick days and family leave to care for yourself and loved ones. Compensation for our child care workforce, who make work across all other sectors possible. Unemployment insurance at a level realistic enough to keep your family afloat between jobs, plus a recognition essential workers cannot be left out. A removal of red tape so that cumbersome paperwork did not keep families from health coverage or food assistance. Help for families to stay housed, rather than easily evicted. And flexible cash through the expanded Child Tax Credit to help cover the costs of raising children.
The Child Tax Credit was a game-changer. Credit amounts increased, with an extra boost for children under 6. Eligibility expanded to include the one-third of children nationwide historically left out. And a once per year tax-time refund transformed into regular monthly payments parents could incorporate into household budgets. From its first payment, in mid-July 2021, the impact was swift. Three million children were lifted from poverty immediately, with effects growing over time.
What did this mean in practice? Family checking accounts rose and families caught up on bills. Countless surveys, plus anonymized credit card and debit card data and cell phone data showed families spent the credit first and foremost on food, as well as children’s clothing, education, and child care. Food insecurity dropped by 25 percent. Families felt better financially, which echoed across indicators that often reveal the tragic elements of poverty-induced stress. Parents stopped selling blood plasma. Children’s emergency room visits went down, as did calls to child abuse hotlines.
Then the payments stopped. Despite robust evidence of its success, Congress failed (and still fails) to agree on a Child Tax Credit continuation and let other pandemic-era policy improvements expire. Bank accounts dropped. Poverty rose. Hunger came back.
The monthly Child Tax Credit was a “blessing” and offered “breathing room” in New York City, “reduced the stress of my children” in Mississippi, and helped “fill in the gaps” in Michigan between what families had and what they needed. Parents told of how the Child Tax Credit gave them the ability to say yes—yes to what their child wanted for lunch, yes to music lessons and summer camp, yes to a Halloween costume, yes to Spider-Man bed sheets. Because though they were not yet able to give their child a room of their own, they could at least give them that.
Families who received it said the Child Tax Credit made them feel like the government cares about them. But they experienced whiplash when the comprehensive and common sense supports introduced during the pandemic vanished, breeding mistrust in government.
What the expanded Child Tax Credit achieved while in place was inspiring. We cannot let the conversation be pulled back down toward despair. Any talk of poverty and policy will undoubtedly resurrect the same tired messages heard for decades—What about “personal responsibility”? What about cost? To borrow Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s pithy, yet accurate, TED Talk title, capturing what so many have cataloged before: “Poverty is not a lack of character, but a lack of cash.” And it is poverty—not the policy solutions for it—that costs us dearly, to the tune of $1 trillion annually, compounded by the immeasurable loss of our children’s dreams and potential.
Imagine the resources generated if we cut child poverty permanently in half. Imagine what we could do if we eradicated it altogether.
We know what to do. We just did it. Our future—and our children—depend on us doing it again.
Megan A. Curran, PhD, is the policy director of the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy and a public voices fellow on racial justice in early childhood with The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.