An historic proposal: President Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief plan includes a Child Tax Credit expansion that would lift 9.9 million children above or closer to the poverty line.

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Of the 9.9 million children lifted above or closer to the poverty line, 2.3 million are Black children, 4.1 million are Latino children, & 441,000 are Asian American children.

Under current law, 27 million children are left out of receiving the full Child Tax Credit. Roughly half and Black and Latino children receive less than the full amount because their parents make too little money. The Biden plan recognizes this flaw.

COVID-19 and its economic fallout highlighted and widened a range of fault lines — of income, race, education, and occupation — in our economy and society generally.

Children in low-income families have been particularly hard hit. Between 8 and 12 million children live in a household where the children didn’t eat enough because the household couldn’t afford it, according to Census data collected from November 25 to December 7.

These same children also have a higher risk of losing school instruction time due to the pandemic.

These are exactly the children the Biden proposal would help the most. While not a panacea, providing additional income through a policy boosts not only children’s school performance but also their life prospects.

Picture A single mother of a toddler, who earns $10,000 a year providing in-home care to older people (with work hours that fluctuate significantly from month to month), now receives a Child Tax Credit of $1,125. Under the Biden plan, she’d receive $3,600, a gain of $2,475.

The Child Tax Credit expansion would provide important help to people in a myriad of jobs that pay little and often have fluctuating schedules, including people caring for the elderly, driving buses, cooking and serving meals, and doing many other kinds of important work.

The Biden plan’s Child Tax Credit Expansion is urgently needed to help millions of low-income families repair the damage from COVID-19 and its economic fallout.

The Biden Child Tax Credit expansion proposal is an historic emergency Step 1 as part of this COVID package. It will become the child poverty reduction landmark it needs to be for poor children when it is subsequently made permanent – the sooner the better.

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