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child poverty
Congress, Don’t Repeat the Mistakes of the 2017 Tax Cuts
The new House bill would disproportionately benefit the well-off—and harm the financial well-being of millions of working Americans, including Black women like me.
Jun 08, 2025
In early 2018, I remember sitting at my kitchen table, trying to make sense of how the 2017 Trump tax law was supposed to help families like mine.
I’d read headlines promising “middle class tax relief.” But when tax season rolled around, there was little relief to be found—especially for me, a Black woman navigating caretaking for elderly parents and a demanding career. My refund was smaller, my deductions had vanished, and the math simply didn’t add up.
It was clear then, as it is now: the Trump tax cuts weren’t designed with people like me in mind.
Let’s be clear: The 2017 Trump tax cuts failed Black women—and millions of others—the first time around. They widened inequality, rewarded the wealthy, and ignored the economic realities of everyday families.
Now as more GOP tax cuts for the rich move through Congress, history is poised to repeat itself. The bill would disproportionately benefit the well-off—and harm the financial well-being of millions of working Americans, including Black women like me.
Instead, lawmakers should embrace the “Black Women Best” framework and take a different path. Coined by Janelle Jones, the principle is that when Black women are thriving, then the economy is truly working for everyone.
For example, when the 2017 tax cuts were passed, most of the benefits went to wealthy, white households. Had lawmakers considered the financial realities of Black women, who are typically underpaid, they could have made a package better designed for all those who need the most help—not just Black women, but everyone struggling to make ends meet.
Refundable tax credits like the Child Tax Credit (CTC) are one of the most direct ways the government supports working families. When structured fairly, they give families a much-needed financial boost.
The 2017 tax law increased the CTC from $1,000 to $2,000 per child. But many families receive far less because it restricted the refundable part of the credit for those with modest earnings. That left out many of the lowest-income families—including 45% of Black children (double the share of their white peers)—whose parents didn’t earn enough to qualify.
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act, which temporarily restructured the CTC to make it larger and fully refundable. For the first time, all the families at the bottom received the full credit. The results were stunning: Child poverty hit record lows.
But that progress was short-lived. The expanded credit has not been renewed, and child poverty shot right back up.
This time around, the House temporarily boosted the CTC to $2,500. But limits on the refundable portion would be continued, meaning 17 million of the lowest-income children in America will still be left out.
Using the “Black Women Best” framework would make those expanded benefits permanent—not just because it’s the right thing to do for Black families, but because it lifts up the entire economy.
But instead, in this way and others, the bill favors the already wealthy.
Another significant example is the bill’s deduction for income people receive from “pass-through” businesses. Rather than pay a corporate income tax, these business owners pay taxes on their profits through their personal taxes. The 2017 tax law created a 20% deduction for this kind of income—and now lawmakers want to permanently increase it to 23%.
Increasing this deduction means Congress is giving handouts to those already holding the keys to wealth. A Treasury report showed a jarring 90% of the people who received this benefit were white. Only 5% of the benefits went to Hispanic taxpayers—and just 2% to Black taxpayers.
Let’s be clear: The 2017 Trump tax cuts failed Black women—and millions of others—the first time around. They widened inequality, rewarded the wealthy, and ignored the economic realities of everyday families. Repeating those mistakes in 2025 would be more than negligent—it would be a deliberate choice to uphold a broken system.
But there’s another way. When Black women thrive, everyone wins. It’s time for our tax code to reflect that truth.
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Trump Adviser Who Loves Corporate Giveaways Says He Has 'Doubts' About Child Tax Credit
"Trump's economic adviser is openly trashing a tax cut for working families that lifted millions of children out of poverty," said a spokesperson for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris' campaign.
Aug 28, 2024
An outside economic adviser to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said this week that he has "doubts" about the Child Tax Credit, a program that Democratic lawmakers and President Joe Biden expanded in 2021—briefly slashing the nation's childhood poverty rate in half.
Heritage Foundation fellow Stephen Moore, a co-author of the far-right Project 2025 agenda, said in a C-SPAN appearance on Monday that the Child Tax Credit (CTC) "worries" him because "we can't just keep giving people money"—an argument that he doesn't seem to apply to wealthy individuals and profitable corporations.
Moore proceeded to trot out a well-worn and debunked right-wing case against the credit and other benefits for lower-income households, saying that "if we keep just passing out free money to people, you're going to discourage people from working."
Watch:
Q: Does the child tax credit help children?
Trump 2024 economic advisor: I have some doubts about it. We can’t just keep giving people money. The child tax credit discourages people from working pic.twitter.com/BwmxH0yJMe
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 28, 2024
Moore, whom Trump once selected for a seat on the board of the Federal Reserve, is an outspoken champion of further slashing the corporate tax rate. The Washington Post reported last year that Moore personally urged Trump to support reducing the corporate rate from 21% to 15%, a change that would hand the nation's 100 largest companies an annual tax break of nearly $50 billion.
Additionally, the Project 2025 agenda that Moore helped craft would cut taxes for households making more than $10 million a year while raising taxes on the typical family of four, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Center for American Progress (CAP).
"Project 2025's new tax bracket system," wrote CAP's Brendan Duke, "represents an enormous shift of the tax burden from wealthy tax filers to middle-income tax filers."
Project 2025 also calls for tax reform that "eliminates most deductions, credits, and exclusions," without specifically mentioning the CTC.
While the Trump campaign has unconvincingly sought to distance itself from Project 2025 as it becomes increasingly clear that the U.S. public widely opposes it, Moore has described the agenda as a "dream scenario."
"Donald Trump and his Project 2025 allies are hellbent on raising taxes on working families, while promising handouts to their billionaire donors."
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris' campaign seized on Moore's C-SPAN appearance on Wednesday, saying in a statement that "Trump's economic adviser is openly trashing a tax cut for working families that lifted millions of children out of poverty."
"Donald Trump and his Project 2025 allies are hellbent on raising taxes on working families, while promising handouts to their billionaire donors," said Joseph Costello, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign. "In stark contrast, Vice President Harris is fighting to cut taxes to put thousands of dollars back in the pockets of working families."
Moore's comments on the CTC came roughly two weeks after Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump's running mate, expressed support for more than doubling the tax credit, which in its current form provides up to $2,000 per child annually to families that qualify.
But last month, Vance skipped a vote on legislation that would have expanded the CTC, opting instead to visit the U.S.-Mexico border for a photo-op.
"If JD Vance sincerely gave a whit about working families in America, he would have shown up," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said of Vance in a statement earlier this month. "Bottom line, the guy's a phony."
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Expanded Child Tax Credit Would Give Boost to 6 Million Poor Children
Ample research indicates that providing additional income to families with low resources yields significant, lasting benefits for young children’s health, education, and future earnings.
Mar 20, 2024
The House-passed bipartisan tax bill would expand the Child Tax Credit for 16 million children in families with low incomes—including 5.8 million young children (under age six)—in its first year, bringing them up to or closer to the full $2,000-per-child amount that children in higher-income families receive. The Senate should pass it without further delay.
Young children of all races and ethnicities would benefit from the bill’s Child Tax Credit expansion. Overall, the expansion would deliver a larger credit to 1 in 4 children under age six. It would benefit even larger shares of Black, Latino, or American Indian or Alaska Native young children, whose parents are overrepresented in low-paid work and may face more limited economic opportunities due to historical and ongoing discrimination and other structural barriers.
Looking at these children under six, we estimate that:
- 39% of all Black;
- 37% of all Latino;
- 34% of all American Indian or Alaska Native;
- 16% of all white; and
- 15% of all Asian children of these ages would benefit.
The expanded Child Tax Credit would provide meaningful support to families. Consider, for example, a married couple with a kindergartner, a toddler, and a newborn. One parent earns $30,000 as a cashier while the other parent stays home to care for their children. The expansion would boost this family’s credit by $1,275 in the first year, helping them afford groceries, utility bills, and other necessary expenses.
Ample research indicates that providing additional income to families with low resources yields significant, lasting benefits for young children’s health, education, and future earnings. The Senate has an opportunity to help 1 in 4 children under age six. Lawmakers should act quickly to pass the bipartisan tax package.
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Census Data Show Poverty Is a Policy Choice
The substantial weakening of welfare state programs that had protected families from economic deprivation in 2021 resulted in poverty increases across all major racial and ethnic groups last year.
Sep 13, 2023
Economic relief measures enacted in response to the pandemic strengthened the U.S. social safety net and made a historic dent on poverty in 2021. New Census Bureau data show that the expiration of these key programs caused a significant increase in poverty last year, with the number of children in poverty more than doubling.
Bold policy initiatives such as economic impact/stimulus payments and the expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) helped to shelter millions of people from poverty during a time of social and economic uncertainty at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, the Census Bureau’s most accurate measure of poverty—the Supplemental Poverty Measure—showed that poverty declined by more than 30% between 2019 and 2021, reaching a historic low of 7.8% in 2021. During the same three-year period, child poverty declined by more than half, reaching a historic low of 5.2% in 2021. Importantly, gains during this period were observed across all racial and ethnic groups.
New poverty data for 2022 show that all these gains in poverty reduction have now disappeared. More than 40 million people in 2022 fell below the poverty line, an increase of over 15 million (see Figure A). The substantial weakening of welfare state programs that had protected families from economic deprivation in 2021 resulted in poverty increases across all major racial and ethnic groups last year, further deepening the disadvantages of historically marginalized individuals and families.
Families with children were disproportionately affected by the expiration of the enhanced Child Tax Credit and other relief measures. The supplemental child poverty rate more than doubled between 2021 and 2022, marking a significant regression in child welfare with nearly 9 million children falling below the poverty line. In 2021, the expanded CTC had helped lift close to 3 million children from poverty. In 2022, the expiration of the CTC and other economic security initiatives meant that over 5 million more children were counted as poor relative to the year before. Poverty also continued to affect children of color unevenly, with Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaska Native child poverty rates more than twice as high as their white, non-Hispanic peers.
To isolate the role of government benefits and taxes in reducing poverty, Figure B shows the number of people in poverty on a pre- and post-tax-and-benefit basis. There was essentially no change in overall poverty on a pre-tax basis, with the number of people in poverty hovering between 78.2 to 78.4 million. In contrast, post-tax-and-benefit poverty counts rose sharply between 2021 and 2022, in line with the removal of the expanded CTC and economic impact payments.
Figure B also demonstrates that rising prices played little-to-no role in the large increase in poverty. While high inflation curtailed many families’ incomes in 2022, labor market gains completely offset inflation at the bottom of the income distribution, as household pre-tax incomes through the bottom 30th percentile changed little between 2021 and 2022. Overall pre-tax poverty did not change last year, and poverty only increased using a broader measure of economic hardship that includes post-tax income.
There is also reason to think that the magnitude of the poverty increase was substantially larger than these figures suggest. Census models estimating the mechanical reduction in poverty due to the Child Tax Credit significantly understate the size of payments received by families near poverty thresholds in 2021. As a result, poverty in 2021 may have been lower than we thought, raising the measured magnitude of the poverty increase in 2022.
Although the strong labor market of 2023 will surely help to improve living standards and reduce poverty, it will nevertheless fall short of undoing the damage of letting key social assistance programs expire. Today’s data indicating a sharp increase in 2022 reveal how much poverty the country tolerates is a policy choice.
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US Child Poverty Rate More Than Doubled in 2022 Thanks to Manchin and GOP
"Joe Manchin's legacy includes artificially manufacturing child poverty for no reason other than his callous disregard for human beings," said the Debt Collective following the release of new Census data.
Sep 12, 2023
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and congressional Republicans faced fresh backlash on Tuesday after the U.S. Census Bureau released
new data showing that the nation's child poverty rate more than doubled in 2022 compared to the previous year, thanks in large part to the expiration of the boosted Child Tax Credit.
The expanded CTC, an American Rescue Plan (ARP) policy that sent eligible families up to $300 per month for each child and eliminated the original CTC's regressive phase-in, helped push the U.S. child poverty rate to a record low of 5.2% in 2021.
But the program expired at the end of that year after Manchin (D-W.Va.), who supported the ARP, opposed an extension, baselessly claiming that some parents would use the money on drugs instead of their children. (Survey data showed that most families, including those in West Virginia, used the money to buy food and help with rent, along with other essentials.)
"Joe Manchin's legacy includes artificially manufacturing child poverty for no reason other than his callous disregard for human beings," the Debt Collective wrote on social media.
Congressional Republicans, who unanimously opposed the ARP, also rejected calls to support an extension of the boosted CTC, part of a broader pandemic-era safety net that is now collapsing.
The result of the program's expiration, as predicted, was a devastating surge in child poverty. According to the new Census Bureau data, the child poverty rate rose to 12.4% in 2022—the largest single-year increase on record.
The overall U.S. poverty rate also increased, rising from 7.8% in 2021 to 12.4% last year. More than 37 million people in the U.S. lived in poverty in 2022, the Census Bureau said.
"Today's stunning rise in poverty is the direct result of policy choices—including Congress' decision to allow the successful Child Tax Credit expansion to expire," said Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "Policymakers should expand the Child Tax Credit this year and reverse this troubling trend."
If Congress had kept the expanded CTC in place last year, Parrott noted, 3 million additional kids would have been kept out of poverty, "preventing more than half of the 5.2 million increase in the number of children in poverty last year."
"The child poverty rate would have been about 8.4% rather than 12.4%," Parrott said.
Elise Gould and Ismael Cid-Martinez of the Economic Policy Institute echoed Parrott's assessment, saying in a statement that "if policymakers were willing to maintain the pandemic-era CTC expansions, a much smaller share of children would be living in poverty."
"More ambitious—but economically sustainable—expansions of our generally stingy welfare state could essentially eliminate poverty completely," they added. "We know this vision isn't politically realistic in the short run, but the policy lessons of 2020 and 2021 should not be lost with today's report."
In his
response to the new data, President Joe Biden placed the blame for the child poverty increase entirely on Republican lawmakers, not mentioning that Manchin's opposition was ultimately decisive in the evenly divided Senate in 2021.
"Today's Census report shows the dire consequences of congressional Republicans' refusal to extend the enhanced Child Tax Credit, even as they advance costly corporate tax cuts," Biden said. "We cut child poverty by nearly half to record lows for all children in this nation largely by expanding the Child Tax Credit. Last year, Congressional Republicans insisted on raising taxes on families with children. The rise reported today in child poverty is no accident—it is the result of a deliberate policy choice congressional Republicans made to block help for families with children while advancing massive tax cuts for the wealthiest and largest corporations."
Shortly after the Census Bureau published its data, Semafor reporter Joseph Zeballos-Roig asked Manchin whether he's had second thoughts about opposing an extension of the CTC boost now that its expiration has produced a record increase in child poverty.
"It's deeper than that, we all have to do our part," Manchin replied. "The federal government can't run everything."
The West Virginia senator said he had yet to see the new poverty figures.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said in a statement that the new Census data "is just completely heartbreaking and deeply disappointing."
"It's also a specific choice," Fetterman added. "A spike in child poverty like this didn't need to happen. Congress had the chance to extend these programs that would keep our children fed and boost working families out of poverty. But it didn't. It's shameful. In the richest country in the world, no child should have to go through this. And now it's on us to fix this problem that shouldn't have been created in the first place."
This story has been updated to include a statement from Sen. John Fetterman.
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House Progressives Revive Legislation to 'Cut Child Poverty by Nearly Two-Thirds'
"Poverty is a policy choice," Rep. Rashida Tlaib argued. "The End Child Poverty Act will create a universal child assistance program and ensure that every child has the resources they need to reach their full potential."
Apr 06, 2023
A trio of progressive U.S. lawmakers on Thursday reintroduced legislation that advocates say would slash the nation's child poverty rate by nearly two-thirds.
Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Jesús "Chuy" García (D-Ill.) revived the End Child Poverty Act, which was first introduced by Tlaib and then-Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) in February 2022.
If passed and signed into law by President Joe Biden, the legislation would replace the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the child provisions in the Earned Income Tax Credit with a Universal Child Benefit paying families $393 per month per child.
People's Policy Project, a progressive think tank and one of five organizations supporting the bill, estimates that the legislation would reduce U.S. child poverty by 64% and deep child poverty—defined as living in a household with a total cash income below 50% of its poverty threshold—by 70%.
"Poverty is a policy choice," Tlaib said in a statement. "The End Child Poverty Act will create a universal child assistance program and ensure that every child has the resources they need to reach their full potential."
"The expanded Child Tax Credit lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty and cut child poverty in nearly half, but now that it has expired, too many families are struggling to make ends meet," she added. "In the richest country in the history of the world, no family should have to choose between keeping a roof over their head and putting food on the table to feed their children."
Federal data released last year showed the U.S. child poverty rate nearly halved from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, thanks largely to the CTC expansion included in the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief package signed by Biden in March 2021. The CTC expansion expired at the end of 2022.
Omar said: "In the midst of a devastating pandemic, President Biden and Democrats in Congress took dramatic action to help families in my district stay afloat—expanding life-changing benefits like Medicaid and SNAP, and expanding the child tax credit to finally benefit the most vulnerable among us. This action alone cut child poverty nearly in half."
"It is a tragedy that we let the child tax credit expansion expire," Omar continued. "I am thrilled that Minnesota plans to expand the state's child tax credit, but Congress must take federal action to address child poverty and help millions of families afford basics like food, rent, childcare, and healthcare."
A fact sheet released by Tlaib's office stated that because the program would be universal and include no income phase-ins or phase-outs, children in the U.S. would be "automatically enrolled at birth, and every family would receive a monthly payment for every child they are currently caring for" until the age of 18.
"This universal child benefit proposal would dramatically simplify our nation's child benefit system and provide financial security for all families when they have a child," said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project.
Tlaib contended: "The End Child Poverty Act would cut childhood poverty by nearly two-thirds. It is exactly the type of bold action our party should be championing to finally address child poverty in this country and make sure families aren't going hungry in one of the wealthiest countries in the world."
"It is a tragedy that we let the child tax credit expansion expire."
Noting the "442,000 children living in poverty in Illinois," García said that "this crucial legislation provides financial security for families living paycheck to paycheck."
"We must continue to work towards reducing child poverty," he added, "and ensure every family has the opportunity to thrive in this country."
The reintroduction of the End Child Poverty Act comes a little over a month after 30 million people across the United States had their family's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program food benefits slashed, despite high prices driven by corporate greed and inflation and experts' warnings about a looming "hunger cliff."
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The Case for a Child-Centered Energy and Climate Policy
Jun 21, 2016
Children suffer the most from fossil fuel burning.
Fossil fuel combustion and associated air pollution and carbon dioxide (CO2) is the root cause of much of children's ill health children today as well as their uncertain future. There are strong scientific arguments, as well persuasive economic ones, for reducing the world's dependence on energy generated by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, diesel and gasoline.
These include the 7 million adult deaths per year attributed to ambient air pollution, most of it from fossil fuel burning. Less recognized is the huge and largely silent toll on children's health and development from both air toxics and climate change.
Children, whose bodies and brains are especially vulnerable to harm as they develop in utero and in the first years of life, bear a disproportionate burden of disease from both air pollution and climate change. Exposure to toxic air pollutants released during fossil fuel combustion contributes to low birth weight, cognitive and behavioral disorders, asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Climate change is linked to increases in heat-related disease, malnutrition, infectious disease, physical trauma, mental health issues and respiratory illnesses.
While air pollution and the adverse health impacts of climate change affect us all, they are most damaging to children, especially the developing fetus and young child and particularly those of low socioeconomic status, who often have the greatest exposures and least amount of protection.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one-third of the global burden of disease is caused by environmental factors, and more than 40 percent of that burden is borne by children under the age of five. Likewise, nearly 90 percent of the global burden of disease caused by climate change is borne by the youngest inhabitants of our planet, with the bulk of that burden falling on people who live in developing countries.
Children in low-income communities in the U.S., as well as globally, suffer most due to disproportionately high exposures to polluting sources, which are more likely to be built in or near the neighborhoods in which they live. The poor are also more likely to live in areas vulnerable to drought and flooding exacerbated by climate change.
Harm from these exposures is magnified by other factors associated with poverty, such as poor nutrition, inadequate social support and psychosocial stresses associated with poverty and racism. Even in the United States, the world's most prosperous country, the child poverty rate is an astounding 22 percent.
Every day that we refuse to act compounds these problems. Inaction perpetuates the health damage from toxic air pollutants and delays and reduces our ability to thwart the increasingly severe consequences of climate change. And it carries long-term consequences for each and every new child conceived.
Exposure in utero and in early childhood to toxic emissions, famine, flooding and other disasters not only increases the risk for neurodevelopmental and mental health problems, stunting, respiratory and other health problems manifest in infancy and childhood, but also for heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cancer in adulthood.
Finally, a growing body of evidence suggests that early-life exposures to air pollutants, nutritional deprivation, and stress may impact the health of future generations, possibly by altering the regulation of genes involved in disease pathways.
Estimates of the economic costs are limited, but indicate the magnitude of potential benefits of action. The economic cost of preterm births attributable to airborne particulate matter in the U.S. was estimated to be over $4 billion/year in 2010. The estimated monetary cost of the health impacts attributable to air pollution from existing coal plants in the U.S. in 2010 exceeded $100 billion a year. The WHO has estimated that by 2030, the global cost of climate change from deaths and diseases (just from diarrhea, malnutrition, malaria and heat stress) will be $2-4 billion per year.
Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels would undoubtedly achieve highly significant health and economic benefits for children worldwide, both immediately and well into the future—vastly improving the health and well-being of generations to come. Knowing this, we have a moral imperative to enact child-centered energy and climate policies that address the full array of physical and psychosocial stressors to which children are subjected due to fossil fuel combustion.
To do less than we can to protect them from preventable harm is nothing short of neglect. As their guardians and protectors, we must act responsibly.
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