Child Tax Credits and Stipends

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Trump and Harris Embody a Stark Partisan Divide on Fighting Poverty

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The two presidential candidates can both point to records of pushing poverty rates down, but their approaches could hardly be more different.Follow the latest updates on the Harris and Trump campaigns.The presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump presents the sharpest clash in antipoverty policy in at least a generation, and its outcome could shape the economic security of millions of low-income Americans.As the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 threatened to decimate the economy, Mr. Trump signed a large stimulus package that included substantial aid for the poor. When President Biden and Ms. Harris took office in 2021, their administration pushed more big aid expansions through Congress as part of their pandemic-recovery plan, driving the poverty rate still lower.But if the two candidates’ responses to that extraordinary period had elements in common, the lessons they took from it were very different.In the pandemic-era programs, now mostly expired or reduced, Ms. Harris and other Democrats found reinforcement of their faith in the government’s power to ameliorate hardship. If elected, she would seek to sustain or expand many of them, including subsidies for food, health care and housing, and revive a change to the child tax credit that essentially created a guaranteed income for families with children. Those policies helped temporarily cut the poverty rate by more than half from prepandemic levels.She backs a $15 federal minimum wage, which Republicans have fought, and is a vocal supporter of programs like subsidized child care and paid family leave meant to help balance work and family.Mr. Trump says little about his role in pandemic-era poverty programs, which many Republicans view as having been excessive and fraud-ridden. Instead, he touts his 2017 tax cuts, which he credits for boosting the economy and reducing poverty to a prepandemic low, and he has vowed to extend them when they expire next year. Most of the direct benefit from those cuts went to corporations and the wealthy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Care Policies Take Center Stage in Harris’s Economic Message

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    The Democratic nominee says she wants to make raising a family more affordable. But she has provided few details on her proposals.The “care economy” — a broad set of policies aimed at helping parents and other caregivers — was the great unfinished work of President Biden’s domestic agenda. Vice President Kamala Harris has made it a central aspect of her campaign to succeed him.Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, has spoken frequently on the campaign trail about making it more affordable to raise children. She chose a running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, whose signature policy accomplishments include the creation of a paid family leave program.In the first major economic speech of her campaign, she proposed restoring an expanded child tax credit and called for a new $6,000 benefit for parents of newborns. She also laid out policies that aim to reduce housing costs, such as providing up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers.In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination on Thursday, Ms. Harris said she would not let conservatives end programs like Head Start that “provide preschool and child care for our children.”But Ms. Harris has not yet offered specific proposals on child care, paid family leave or early childhood education. That has surprised some progressive policy experts, and brought flashbacks of the Biden administration’s inability to enact more sweeping policies.Mr. Biden also initially made the care economy a central piece of his domestic policy agenda, putting it alongside proposed investments in roads and bridges, domestic manufacturing and green energy. His aides often argued that care was a form of infrastructure — that affordable child care, like highways, was essential to a well-functioning economy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Harris and Trump Offer a Clear Contrast on the Economy

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    Both candidates embrace expansions of government power to steer economic outcomes — but in vastly different areas.Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump flew to North Carolina this week to deliver what were billed as major speeches on the economy. Neither laid out a comprehensive policy plan — not Ms. Harris in her half-hour focus on housing, groceries and prescription drugs, nor Mr. Trump in 80 minutes of sprinkling various proposals among musings about dangerous immigrants.But in their own ways, both candidates sent voters clear and important messages about their economic visions. Each embraced a vision of a powerful federal government, using its muscle to intervene in markets in pursuit of a stronger and more prosperous economy.They just disagreed, almost entirely, on when and how that power should be used.In Raleigh on Friday, Ms. Harris began to put her own stamp on the brand of progressive economics that has come to dominate Democratic politics over the last decade. That economic thinking embraces the idea that the federal government must act aggressively to foster competition and correct distortions in private markets.The approach seeks large tax increases on corporations and high earners, to fund assistance for low-income and middle-class workers who are struggling to build wealth for themselves and their children. At the same time, it provides big tax breaks to companies engaged in what Ms. Harris and other progressives see as delivering great economic benefit — like manufacturing technologies needed to fight global warming, or building affordable housing.That philosophy animated the policy agenda that Ms. Harris unveiled on Friday. She pledged to send up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance to every first-time home buyer over four years, while directing $40 billion to construction companies that build starter homes. She said she would permanently reinstate an expanded child tax credit that President Biden temporarily established with his 2021 stimulus law, while offering even more assistance to parents of newborns.She called for a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries and for new federal enforcement tools to punish companies that unfairly push up food prices. “My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules,” she said, adding: “We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Poverty Rate Soared in 2022 as Aid Ended and Prices Rose

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    The increase in poverty reversed two years of large declines. Median income, adjusted for inflation, fell 2.3 percent to $74,580.Poverty increased sharply last year in the United States, particularly among children, as living costs rose and federal programs that provided aid to families during the pandemic were allowed to expire.The poverty rate rose to 12.4 percent in 2022 from 7.8 percent in 2021, the largest one-year jump on record, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. Poverty among children more than doubled, to 12.4 percent, from a record low of 5.2 percent the year before. Those figures are according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the impact of government assistance and geographical differences in the cost of living.The increases followed two years of historically large declines in poverty, driven primarily by safety net programs that were created or expanded during the pandemic. Those included a series of direct payments to households in 2020 and 2021, enhanced unemployment and nutrition benefits, increased rental assistance and an expanded child tax credit, which briefly provided a guaranteed income to families with children.Nearly all of those programs had expired by last year, however, leaving many families struggling to stay ahead of rising prices despite a strong job market and improving economy. Overall poverty now looks much the way it did in 2019, with the notable difference that financial hardship has declined among Black households, reflecting higher incomes in recent years.The Share of Children in Poverty More Than DoubledThe poverty rate for those under 18 rose to 12.4 percent last year.

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    Share of each age group living in poverty
    Note: Data are the supplemental poverty rates, which adjust for geographic differences. The rates also include wage income, taxes and the fullest account of government aid.Source: Census BureauBy Karl RussellOne pandemic program that did not expire was a temporary freeze in Medicaid terminations, a move that allowed the program to cover more Americans than ever. Because of that program, the share of Americans without health insurance matched a record low last year of 7.9 percent. But states are unwinding that temporary coverage, and the uninsured rate has probably increased in recent months.The increasing cost of living added to the challenge last year. The poverty threshold, which is based on the cost of essential items like food and housing, rose sharply: A family of four living in a rental home was considered poor under the supplemental measure if the family’s income was less than $34,518 in 2022, up from $31,453 in 2021.Higher prices didn’t just hit the poor. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, fell 2.3 percent in 2022, to $74,580, as the fastest inflation since 1981 overwhelmed the impact of increased employment and rising wages.“People are working hard,” said Margaret O’Conor, who runs Common Pantry, a small food bank in Chicago. “They’re just not making ends meet, the cost of living is too much.” Rent in particular has soaked up a lot of people’s extra earnings.Common Pantry, like many food banks, had demand explode during the pandemic and then recede in 2021, when people received stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and the child tax credit, among other assistance. Then, as those programs lapsed, demand began to climb again.“2022 just threw us,” Ms. O’Conor said. “We were not expecting it. I don’t think any food pantry was really expecting it.”The White House, in a blog post previewing the report, argued that more recent data “tell a more optimistic story.” Inflation has cooled in recent months, while the job market has remained strong and wages continue to rise.The hot job market has had clear benefits for those able to take advantage of it. Many workers, especially in low-paying industries like hospitality and retail, experienced significant wage gains in 2022. Supersized unemployment benefits and other cash payments allowed workers to hold out for higher-paying jobs. Income for the poorest 20 percent of households — excluding tax credits and some other government benefits — rose 4.3 percent last year, adjusted for inflation. Income gains also outpaced inflation for the least educated workers.Those effects were more pronounced for women. The share of working women who were employed full time for the whole year reached 65.6 percent, the highest level on record — which also allowed real earnings to fall less for women than they did for men.The story was not as rosy for Americans over 65, for whom the poverty rate rose to 14.1 percent, despite an 8.7 percent cost-of-living increase in Social Security payments. Labor force participation among older people remains depressed, as many lost jobs and have had a difficult time re-entering the workplace.“People became more isolated, experienced significantly more health problems,” said Jess Maurer, the executive director of the Maine Council on Aging. “Older people had a harder time coming out of the pandemic, coming back into the community.”Inequality, as measured by the gap in pretax income between the richest and poorest 10 percent of households, narrowed, as most of the decrease in median incomes came from those at the middle and top of the wage distribution. Racial gaps also shrank, as white households lost ground to inflation, while inflation-adjusted income was little changed for other racial and ethnic groups.The “official” poverty rate — an older measure that is widely considered outdated because it excludes many of the government’s most important anti-poverty programs, among other shortcomings — was nearly flat last year, at 11.5 percent, reflecting the offsetting forces of higher prices and increased earnings of low-wage workers. By that measure, the poverty rate for Black Americans was 17.1 percent, the lowest rate on record.U.S. Poverty Increased Last YearThe supplemental poverty rate — which accounts for the impact of government programs — increased to to 12.4 percent last year, surpassing the official poverty rate, which was 11.5 percent.

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    Share of the population living in poverty
    Note: The supplemental rate adjusts for geographic differences. It also includes wage income, taxes and the fullest account of government aid.Source: Census BureauBy Karl Russell“There has really been this resurgence in terms of the labor market fortunes of Black workers, particularly Black male workers,” said Michelle Holder, an economist at John Jay College in New York. “The most important element for people in my community is can we get a job, and if we can get a job, can we keep a job? And right now, both things look pretty darn good.”But those unable to work, or unable to work full-time, faced a one-two punch of higher costs and lost benefits in 2022 — problems that have continued this year. Increased federal nutrition benefits, one of the last vestiges of pandemic aid efforts, expired last spring. Factoring in the loss of benefits, real income fell for the poorest households in 2022, and inequality rose.“Tight labor markets are incredibly powerful, they’re really important, but they’re not sufficient,” said Elisabeth Jacobs, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.When a high-risk pregnancy forced Amber Summers to leave her job in rural Southern Illinois in 2021, the expanded child tax credit provided a lifeline. The $250 monthly payments helped cover her mortgage and allowed her son, now 9, to play Little League Baseball for the first time.“It was financial stability and stress relief for our family,” she said.But when the payments lapsed at the end of 2021, the family’s finances quickly unraveled — especially after Ms. Summers’s husband, Tim, contracted Covid and lost his job as a cook. And while both of them have since returned to work, neither is receiving full-time hours, and they are falling further behind on their bills. Opportunities for better-paying jobs are limited in their area.“The child tax credit helped pull our family out of poverty for such a short period of time,” Ms. Summers, 32, said.Congress passed the expanded child tax credit as part of the American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s pandemic-relief package, in early 2021. But while other Covid-era relief programs were always intended to expire once the emergency passed, supporters hoped to make the expanded child credit permanent.That didn’t happen. Faced with united opposition from congressional Republicans as well as some conservative Democrats, Mr. Biden dropped his effort to extend the program at the end of 2021; a renewed push failed again last year. The rise in poverty in 2022, social policy experts said, was the inevitable result of that decision.“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,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.Correspondingly, the highest increases in poverty were in the South, where research has shown the child tax credit had the greatest effect, and among Alaska Natives and American Indians, for whom the poverty rate rebounded to 23.2 percent.Critics of the child tax credit and other pandemic aid have argued that the rapid rebound in poverty after the programs’ expiration is evidence that the progress made against poverty in recent years was, in effect, artificial. Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, argued that programs that offer incentives to work — such as the earned-income tax credit and the standard child tax credit — have led to more sustainable gains.“Yes, this alleviated child poverty, but it didn’t really do a whole lot to encourage self-sufficiency,” he said.Progressives take a different lesson: Government programs succeeded in lifting millions of people out of poverty. An analysis by researchers at Columbia University on Tuesday found that child poverty would have been nearly 50 percent lower in 2022 if the expanded tax credit had remained in place. The programs might also have had longer-run benefits, they argue, but ended before those effects could be seen.“The last few years just illustrated in an incredible way the power of effective government intervention,” said Arloc Sherman, a vice president at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research organization. “The last couple years, through a plunge in poverty and what is now a record single-year increase in poverty in 2022, have shown that poverty is very much a policy choice.”Margot Sanger-Katz More

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    Economic Aid, Once Plentiful, Falls Off at a Painful Moment

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    Food insecurity is rising again as relief provided by President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package wanes.PORTLAND, Ore. — For the better part of last year, the pandemic eased its grip on Oregon’s economy. Awash in federal assistance, including direct checks to individuals and parents, many of the state’s most vulnerable found it easier to afford food, housing and other daily staples.Most of that aid, which was designed to be a temporary bridge, has run out at a particularly bad moment. Oregon, like states across the nation, has seen its economy improve, but prices for everything from eggs to gas to rent have spiked. Demand is growing at food banks like William Temple House in Northwest Portland, where the line for necessities like bread, vegetables and toilet paper stretched two dozen people deep on a recent day.“I’m very worried, like I was in the first month of the pandemic, that we will run out of food,” said Susannah Morgan, who runs the Oregon Food Bank, which helps supply William Temple House and 1,400 other meal assistance sites.In March 2021, President Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion aid package aimed at helping people stay afloat when the economy was still reeling from the coronavirus. In addition to direct checks, the package included rental assistance and other measures meant to prevent evictions. It ensured free school lunches and offered expanded food assistance through several programs.Those programs helped the U.S. economy recover far more quickly than many economists had expected, but they have run their course as prices soar at the fastest pace in 40 years. The Federal Reserve, in an attempt to tame inflation, is rapidly raising borrowing costs, slowing the economy’s growth and stoking fears of a recession. While the labor market remains remarkably strong, the Fed’s interest rate increases risk slamming the brakes on the economy and pushing millions of people out of work, which would hurt lower-wage workers and risk adding to evictions and food insecurity.Several factors have driven prices higher in the last year, including a shift in spending toward goods like couches and cars and away from services. Supply chain snarls, a buying frenzy in the housing market and an oil price spike surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine have also contributed. While gas prices have fallen in recent months, rent continues to rise, and food and other staples remain elevated.Another factor fueling inflation, at least in small part, is the stimulus spending that helped speed the economy’s recovery and keep people out of poverty. More money in people’s bank accounts translated into more consumer spending.While the extent to which the rescue package fed inflation remains a matter of disagreement, almost no one, in Washington or on the front lines of helping vulnerable people across the country, expects another round of federal aid even if the economy tips into a recession. Lawmakers have grown increasingly concerned that more stimulus could exacerbate rising prices.In the meantime, the progress that the Biden administration hailed in fighting poverty last year has faded. The national child poverty rate and the food hardship rate for families with children, which dipped in 2021, have both rebounded to their highest levels since December 2020, according to researchers at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Two in five Americans surveyed by the Census Bureau at the end of July said they had difficulty paying a usual household expense in the previous week, the highest rate in two years of the survey.What is happening at the William Temple House is emblematic of the economic situation. Demand for food is swelling again, and officials here blame rising prices and lost federal aid. The people seeking help come from a wide variety of backgrounds: parents, retirees struggling to stretch Social Security benefits, immigrants who speak Mandarin, college graduates with jobs.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5Inflation F.A.Q.What is inflation? More

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    Covid, inflation and a loss of aid crimped American incomes in January.

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    Soaring coronavirus caseloads, rising prices and a falloff in government aid combined to take a bite out of Americans’ incomes in January.After-tax income rose just 0.1 percent last month, the Commerce Department said Friday. That was the slowest growth since June. Adjusted for inflation, after-tax income fell 0.5 percent, the sixth consecutive monthly decline.Incomes were affected by the spike in coronavirus cases associated with the Omicron variant, which kept millions of employees home from work in January. Earlier data from the Labor Department showed that total hours worked fell early in the month, despite continued job growth.January was also the first month since mid-2021 in which parents did not receive payments under the expanded child tax credit, which expired at the end of last year. Income from government programs fell 1.3 percent last month.Yet despite the crimp in incomes, Americans continued to spend. Consumer spending rose 2.1 percent in January. Even after adjusting for inflation, spending was up 1.5 percent.Spending on goods was particularly strong, continuing the pandemic-era pattern that has put pressure on global supply chains. But spending on services also rose modestly, suggesting that the Omicron wave did not derail the recovery on the services side of the economy. More

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    Cash Aid to Poor Mothers Increases Brain Activity in Babies, Study Finds

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    The research could have policy implications as President Biden pushes to revive his proposal to expand the child tax credit.WASHINGTON — A study that provided poor mothers with cash stipends for the first year of their children’s lives appears to have changed the babies’ brain activity in ways associated with stronger cognitive development, a finding with potential implications for safety net policy.The differences were modest — researchers likened them in statistical magnitude to moving to the 75th position in a line of 100 from the 81st — and it remains to be seen if changes in brain patterns will translate to higher skills, as other research offers reason to expect.Still, evidence that a single year of subsidies could alter something as profound as brain functioning highlights the role that money may play in child development and comes as President Biden is pushing for a much larger program of subsidies for families with children.“This is a big scientific finding,” said Martha J. Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted a review of the study for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, where it was published on Monday. “It’s proof that just giving the families more money, even a modest amount of more money, leads to better brain development.”The payments will continue until the children are at least 4 years old, and the researchers plan further tests.via Lauren Meyer/Baby’s First YearsAnother researcher, Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard, reacted more cautiously, noting the full effect of the payments — $333 a month — would not be clear until the children took cognitive tests. While the brain patterns documented in the study are often associated with higher cognitive skills, he said, that is not always the case.“It’s potentially a groundbreaking study,” said Dr. Nelson, who served as a consultant to the study. “If I was a policymaker, I’d pay attention to this, but it would be premature of me to pass a bill that gives every family $300 a month.”A temporary federal program of near-universal children’s subsidies — up to $300 a month per child through an expanded child tax credit — expired this month after Mr. Biden failed to unite Democrats behind a large social policy bill that would have extended it. Most Republicans oppose the monthly grants, citing the cost and warning that unconditional aid, which they describe as welfare, discourages parents from working.Sharing some of those concerns, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, effectively blocked the Biden plan, though he has suggested that he might support payments limited to families of modest means and those with jobs. The payments in the research project, called Baby’s First Years, were provided regardless of whether the parents worked.Evidence abounds that poor children on average start school with weaker cognitive skills, and neuroscientists have shown that the differences extend to brain structure and function. But it has not been clear if those differences come directly from the shortage of money or from related factors like parental education or neighborhood influences.The study released on Monday offers evidence that poverty itself holds children back from their earliest moments.“This is the first study to show that money, in and of itself, has a causal impact on brain development,” said Dr. Kimberly G. Noble, a physician and neuroscientist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who helped lead the study.Dr. Noble and colleagues from six universities recruited a thousand mother-infant pairs within days of the babies’ birth and randomly divided the families into two groups. One group received a nominal $20 a month and another received $333.Using electroencephalograms, or EEG tests, to evaluate the children at age 1, the researchers found that those in the high-cash group had more of the fast brain activity other research has linked to cognitive development than those in the low-cash group. The differences were statistically significant by most, but not all, measures and were greatest in parts of the brain most associated with cognitive advancement.The payments will continue until the children are at least 4 years old, and the researchers plan further tests.Researchers are still trying to determine why the money altered brain development. It could have purchased better food or health care; reduced damaging levels of parental stress; or allowed mothers to work less and spend more time with their infants.The question of whether cash aid helps or hurts children is central to social policy. Progressives argue that poor children need an income floor, citing research that shows even brief periods of childhood poverty can lead to lower adult earnings and worse health. Conservatives say unconditional payments erode work and marriage, increasing poverty in the long run.President Bill Clinton changed the Democratic Party’s stance a quarter-century ago by abolishing welfare guarantees and shifting aid toward parents who work. Though child poverty subsequently fell to record lows, the reasons are in dispute, and rising inequality and volatility have revived Democratic support for subsidies.There are a variety of public and private programs underway in the United States to measure the effects of a guaranteed income on poor families, and many other rich countries offer broad children’s allowances without condition.The temporary expansion of the child tax credit, passed last year, offered subsidies to all but the richest parents at a one-year cost of more than $100 billion. Representative Suzan DelBene, Democrat of Washington, said the study strengthened the case for the aid by showing that “investing in our children has incredible long-term benefits.”Greg J. Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, who was one of nine co-authors of the study, said he hoped the research would refocus the debate, which he said was “almost always about the risks that parents might work less or use the money frivolously” toward the question of “whether the payments are good for kids.”But a conservative welfare critic, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, argued that the study vindicated stringent welfare laws, which he credited with reducing child poverty by incentivizing parents to find and keep jobs.“If you actually believe that child poverty has these negative effects, then you should not be trying to restore unconditional cash aid,” he said. “You certainly don’t want to go in the business of reversing welfare reform.”Economists and psychologists once dominated studies of poor children, but neuroscientists have increasingly weighed in. Over the past 15 years, they have shown that poor children on average differ from others in brain structure and function, with the disparities greatest for the poorest children.EEG tests have found differences in electrical activity. Magnetic resonance imaging, or M.R.I.s, have shown differences in the size of the cerebral cortex, especially in areas linked to language development and executive functioning. One study found differences in cerebral cortex size may account for up to 44 percent of the achievement gap between high- and low-income adolescents.As with any group differences, averages do not predict individual outcomes. Many other factors beyond brain features influence cognitive development, and many low-income children thrive.To test the effects of cash aid, Baby’s First Years raised more than $20 million from public and private sources, including the National Institutes of Health. Researchers recruited participants from maternity wards in New York City, Minneapolis-St. Paul and the metro areas of New Orleans and Omaha, randomly assigning them to the high- and low-payment groups.The families had average incomes of about $20,000, below the official poverty line for an average-sized family, meaning those who received $333 a month experienced an income gain of approximately 20 percent. The mothers were told they could use the money as they wished.The researchers predicted that children in the high-cash group would show more high-frequency brain activity than those in the low-cash group and less low-frequency activity. Previous research has found such patterns are associated with higher cognitive skills and fewer attention problems.The results largely conformed to predictions, with the children who received the higher grants showing more of the fast brain activity (though no differences in slow brain activity).The scientists wrote that the money “appeared” to cause the changed brain patterns, though they were less equivocal in interviews. Dr. Noble said the evidence, though strong, was not “airtight,” in part because the coronavirus pandemic allowed them to test only 435 infants.Researchers are still trying to determine why the money altered brain development. It could have purchased better food or health care.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesJohn Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the evidence that cash aid altered brain activity was persuasive and “very important scientifically,” though he added, “We want to see if these differences result in improvements to cognition.”While the size of the recorded differences are modest (about a fifth of a standard deviation), the researchers said they were comparable to those produced by the average school experiment, like giving children tutors. While those services are often hard to administer, they added, cash can be distributed on a mass scale.Katherine Magnuson, a co-author of the study who directs the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, said she was surprised that only a year’s worth of aid made a difference. “It shows how sensitive the brain is to environments,” she said.Critics of unrestricted cash aid often warn that families will waste or abuse it. But Lisa A. Gennetian, an economist at Duke University and a co-author of the study, said the results indicated that parents could be trusted to make good decisions. “For one family, that might be food; for another, it might be housing,” she said. Additional research will examine how parents spent the money.Unlike last year’s expansion of the child tax credit, the experimental payments were narrowly targeted to poor newborns, which would make it less costly to replicate and possibly ease conservatives’ concerns about deterring work.One critic of the broader payments, Angela Rachidi of the American Enterprise Institute, said the study suggested the importance of infant bonding. Should the initial results hold up, she said, they could lend support for policies that help mothers spend more time with their newborns, including paid leave.But any cash aid, she said, should be “targeted to those with low incomes, time limited, and not erode work incentives in the long term.” More

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    Child Tax Credit’s Extra Help Ends, Just as Covid Surges Anew

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    A pandemic benefit that many progressives hoped to make permanent has lapsed in a congressional standoff. Researchers say it spared many from poverty.For millions of American families with children, the 15th of the month took on a special significance in 2021: It was the day they received their monthly child benefit, part of the Biden administration’s response to the pandemic.The payments, which started in July and amounted to hundreds of dollars a month for most families, have helped millions of American families pay for food, rent and child care; kept millions of children out of poverty; and injected billions of dollars into the U.S. economy, according to government data and independent research.Now, the benefit — an expansion of the existing child tax credit — is ending, just as the latest wave of coronavirus cases is keeping people home from work and threatening to set off a new round of furloughs. Economists warn that the one-two punch of expiring aid and rising cases could put a chill on the once red-hot economic recovery and cause severe hardship for millions of families already living close to the poverty line.“It’s going to be hard next month, and just thinking about it, it really makes me want to bite my nails to the quick,” said Anna Lara, a mother of two young children in Huntington, W.Va. “Honestly, it’s going to be scary. It’s gong to be hard going back to not having it.”Ms. Lara, 32, lost her job in the pandemic, and with the cost of child care rising, she has not been able to return to work. Her partner kept his job, but the child benefit helped the couple make ends meet at a time of reduced income and rising prices.“Your children watch you, and if you worry, they catch on to that,” she said. “With that extra cushion, we didn’t have to worry all the time.”The end of the extra assistance for parents is the latest in a long line of benefits “cliffs” that Americans have encountered as pandemic aid programs have expired. The Paycheck Protection Program, which supported hundreds of thousands of small businesses, ended in March. Expanded unemployment benefits ended in September, and earlier in some states. The federal eviction moratorium expired last summer. The last round of stimulus payments landed in Americans’ bank accounts last spring.Relative to those programs, the rollback in the child tax credit is small. The Treasury Department paid out about $80 billion over six months in the form of checks and direct deposits of up to $300 per child each month. That is far less than the more than $240 billion in stimulus payments issued on a single day last March.Unlike most other programs created in response to the pandemic, the child benefit was never intended to be temporary, at least according to many of its backers. Congress approved it for a single year as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, but many progressives hoped that the payments, once started, would prove too popular to stop.That didn’t happen. Polls found the public roughly divided over whether the program should be extended, with opinions splitting along partisan and generational lines. And the expanded tax credit failed to win over the individual whose opinion mattered most: Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who cited concerns over the cost and structure of the program in his decision to oppose Mr. Biden’s climate, tax and social policy bill. The bill, known as the Build Back Better Act, cannot proceed in the evenly divided Senate without Mr. Manchin’s support.To supporters of the child benefit, the failure to extend it is especially frustrating because, according to most analyses, the program itself has been a remarkable success. Researchers at Columbia University estimate that the payments kept 3.8 million children out of poverty in November, a nearly 30 percent reduction in the child poverty rate. Other studies have found that the benefit reduced hunger, lowered financial stress among recipients and increased overall consumer spending, especially in rural states that received the most money per capita.Congress last spring expanded the existing child tax credit in three ways. First, it made the benefit more generous, providing as much as $3,600 per child, up from $2,000. Second, it began paying the credit in monthly installments, usually deposited directly into recipients’ bank accounts, turning the once-yearly windfall into something closer to the children’s allowances common in Europe.Finally, the bill made the full benefit available to millions who had previously been unable to take full advantage of the credit because they earned too little to qualify. Poverty experts say that change, known in tax jargon as “full refundability,” was particularly significant because without it, a third of children — including half of all Black and Hispanic children, and 70 percent of children being raised by single mothers — did not receive the full credit. Mr. Biden’s plan would have made that provision permanent.“What we’ve seen with the child tax credit is a policy success story that was unfolding, but it’s a success story that we risk stoping in its tracks just as it was getting started,” said Megan Curran, director of policy at Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. “The weight of the evidence is clear here in terms of what the policy is doing. It’s reducing child poverty and food insufficiency.”But the expanded tax credit doesn’t just go to the poor. Couples earning as much as $150,000 a year could receive the full $3,600 benefit — $3,000 for children 6 and older — and even wealthier families qualify for the original $2,000 credit. Critics of the policy, including Mr. Manchin, have argued that it makes little sense to provide aid to relatively well-off families. Many supporters of the credit say they’d happily limit its availability to wealthier households in return for maintaining it for poorer ones.Mr. Manchin has also publicly questioned the wisdom of unconditional cash payments, and has privately voiced concerns that recipients could spend the money on opioids, comments that were first reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by a person familiar with the discussion. But a survey conducted by the Census Bureau found that most recipients used the money to buy food, clothing or other necessities, and many saved some of the money or paid down debt. Other surveys have found similar results.For one of Mr. Manchin’s constituents, Ms. Lara, the first monthly check last year arrived at an opportune moment. Her dishwasher had broken days earlier, and the $550 a month that she and her family received from the federal government meant they could replace it.Ms. Lara, who has a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son and whose partner earns about $40,000 a year, said the family had long lived “right on the edge of need” — not poor, but never able to save enough to withstand more than a modest setback.The monthly child benefit, she said, let them step a bit further back from the edge. It allowed her to get new shoes and a new car seat for her daughter, stock up on laundry detergent when she found it on sale and fix the brakes on her car.A line at a Covid testing site in Atlanta on Friday. The child tax benefit is ending just as the latest wave of coronavirus cases is keeping people home from work.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“None of the dash lights are on, which is amazing,” she said.Some researchers have questioned the policy’s effectiveness, particularly over the long term. Bruce D. Meyer, an economist at the University of Chicago who studies poverty, said that whatever the merits of direct cash payments at the height of the pandemic-induced disruptions, a permanent policy of providing unconditional cash to parents could have unintended consequences. He and several co-authors recently published a working paper finding that the child benefit could discourage people from working, in part because it eliminated the work incentives built into the previous version of the tax credit.“Early on, we just wanted to get cash in people’s hands — we were worried about a recession, we were worried about people being able to pay for their groceries,” Mr. Meyer said. Now, he said, “we certainly should be more focused on the longer-term effects, which include likely larger effects on labor supply.”Analyses of the data since the new child benefit took effect, however, have found no evidence that it has done much to discourage people from working, and some researchers say it could actually lead more people to work by making it easier for parents of young children to afford child care.“There’s every reason to believe that in the current labor market, the child tax credit is work-enabling, and no evidence to the contrary has been presented,” said Samuel Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center, a research organization in Washington.Mr. Hammond said the child benefit should also have broader economic benefits. In a report last summer, he estimated that the expansion would increase consumer spending by $27 billion nationally and create the equivalent of 500,000 full-time jobs. The biggest impact, on a percentage basis, would come in rural, mostly Republican-voting states where families are larger and incomes are lower, on average.Some Republican critics of the expanded child tax credit, including Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, have argued that it has essentially done too much to increase spending — that by giving people more money to spend when the supply chain is already strained, the government is contributing to faster inflation.But many economists are skeptical that the tax credit has played much of a role in causing high inflation, in part because it is small compared with both the economy and the earlier rounds of aid distributed during the pandemic.“That’s a noninflationary program,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the accounting firm RSM. “That’s dedicated toward necessities, not luxuries.”For those receiving the benefit, inflation is an argument for maintaining it. Ms. Lara said she had noticed prices going up for groceries, utilities and especially gas, stretching her budget even thinner.“Right now, both of my vehicles need gas and I can’t put gas in the car,” she said. “But it’s OK, because I’ve got groceries in the house and the kids can play outside.”Emily Cochrane More

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    From Cradle to Grave, Democrats Move to Expand Social Safety Net

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    The $3.5 trillion social policy bill that lawmakers begin drafting this week would touch virtually every American, at every point in life, from conception to old age.WASHINGTON — When congressional committees meet this week to begin formally drafting Democrats’ ambitious social policy plan, they will be undertaking the most significant expansion of the nation’s safety net since the war on poverty in the 1960s, devising legislation that would touch virtually every American’s life, from conception to aged infirmity.Passage of the bill, which could spend as much as $3.5 trillion over the next decade, is anything but certain. President Biden, who has staked much of his domestic legacy on the measure’s enactment, will need the vote of every single Democrat in the Senate, and virtually every one in the House, to secure it. And with two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, saying they would not accept such a costly plan, it will challenge Democratic unity like nothing has since the Affordable Care Act.That is largely because the proposed legislation would be so transformative — a cradle-to-grave reweaving of a social safety net frayed by decades of expanding income inequality, stagnating wealth and depleted governmental resources, capped by the worst public health crisis in a century.The pandemic loosened the reins on federal spending, prompting members of both parties to support showering the economy with aid. It also uncorked decades-old policy desires — like expanding Medicare coverage or paid family and medical leave — that Democrats contend have proved to be necessities as the country has lived through the coronavirus crisis.“Polls have shown for a very long time that these issues to support American families were important, and were popular, but all of a sudden they became not a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘must have,’” said Heather Boushey, a member of Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers who has been developing such policies for decades.Democrats say they will finance their spending with proposed tax increases on corporations — which has already incited a multifaceted, big-budget effort by business groups working to kill the idea — and by possibly taxing wealth in ways that the United States has never tried before.“We’re talking about free or affordable child care where no one pays more than 7 percent of their income; we’re talking about universal pre-K programs with two years of formal instruction; we’re talking about two years of postsecondary education,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a former teacher and principal who is vice chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. “This is how you build a strong nation.”To Republicans, who are readying a counteroffensive, the Democratic plans are nothing short of socialism. They say they are concerned that the plan is financially unsustainable and would undermine economic growth, by rendering Americans too dependent on the government for their basic needs.“What are Democrats trying to do to this country?” Representative Bruce Westerman, Republican of Arkansas, asked on Thursday, as the House Natural Resources Committee began drafting its portion of the sprawling bill.Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia said he could not support the bill at its current size. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesTo grasp the intended measure’s scope, consider a life, from conception to death. Democrats intend to fund paid family and medical leave to allow a parent to take some time off during pregnancy and after a child’s birth.When that parent is ready to return to work, expanded funding for child care would kick in to help cover day care costs. When that child turns 3, another part of the bill, universal prekindergarten, would ensure public education can begin at an earlier age, regardless of where that child lives.Most families with children would continue to receive federal income supplements each month in the form of an expanded child tax credit that was created temporarily by Mr. Biden’s pandemic-rescue law and would be extended by the new social policy bill. School nutrition programs, expanded on an emergency basis during the pandemic, would continue to offer more children free and reduced-price meals long after the coronavirus retreats.And at high school graduation, most students would be guaranteed two years of higher education through expanded federal financial aid, geared toward community colleges.Even after that, income supplements and generous work force training programs — including specific efforts to train home health and elder-care workers — would keep the government present in many adult lives. In old age, people would be helped by tax credits to offset the cost of elder care and by an expansion of Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision services.“Many of us feel that this is the biggest opportunity we will have in our careers to do something deeply structural and transformational to our economy,” Representative Donald S. Beyer Jr., Democrat of Virginia, said, “and we should not miss it.”To critics, the legislation represents a fundamental upending of American-style governance and a shift toward social democracy. With it, they worry, would come European-style endemic unemployment and depressed economic dynamism.“There’s always been difference of opinion on the role of government in people’s lives, and the United States has long taken a different approach than Western Europe,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who was chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. “This is clearly designed to take a big step toward the Western European model.”Defenders shrug off such concerns. Representative Robert C. Scott of Virginia, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said the legislation would promote economic growth, with child care subsidies that would get parents back into the work force, education spending to more equitably prepare all Americans to work, and job training to improve labor mobility.“We are making the American economy more dynamic and more globally competitive,” he said.Besides, in the longstanding struggle to balance economic growth against equality and equity, Democrats are ready to shift toward the latter.“The route we’ve taken has led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few people while the rest have just struggled to survive,” Mr. Bowman said. “It’s time to try something else.”“This is how you build a strong nation,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman, a former teacher and principal who is vice chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesIn a mechanical sense, the legislation is not as much of a sea change as the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, or Social Security in the 1930s. Even the Affordable Care Act of 2010 created an entirely new government infrastructure, a federally operated or regulated exchange where Americans could buy private health insurance that has to conform to government strictures on coverage and cost, noted Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.In contrast, the new legislation would largely augment existing programs. Childcare support would come through the Community Development Block Grant to states, cities and counties. Universal pre-K would be secured through block grants and expanded funding to Head Start. Two years of higher education are supposed to become accessible through more generous Pell grants and other existing financial aid programsBut if it passes, Mr. Strain said the legislation could fundamentally change the relationship between the state and its citizens: “Its ambition is in its size.”Most Americans traditionally have seen the federal government’s involvement in their finances once a year, at tax time, when they claim a child credit, get a write-off for the truck they may have bought for their business, or receive a check for an earned income credit, to name a few.That would change profoundly if the social policy bill were enacted. The expanded child tax credit has begun to provide monthly checks of up to $300 per child to millions of families, but is slated to expire in 2022. Its extension for as long as a decade could make it a fixture of life that would be very difficult for future Congresses to take away. The same goes for the Child and Dependent Care Credit, which now offers up to $8,000 in child care expenses but also expires in a year.And the federal government, not private employers, would pay most of the salaries of people qualifying for family and medical leave.“If we get this passed, a decade from now, people are going to see many more touch points of government supporting them and their families,” Ms. Boushey said.One major difference between the social economy that Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats hope to create and the welfare state in Europe is how it would be paid for. Most European countries ask their citizens broadly to fund their social welfare programs, largely through a value added tax, a sales tax levied at each stage of a consumer good’s production.At the president’s insistence, the House and Senate tax-writing committees are to finance the bill’s spending with taxes on corporations and individuals with incomes over $400,000 a year.To that end, the Senate Finance Committee is considering groundbreaking ways to tax wealth, including changing how estates are taxed so that heirs must pay more taxes on inherited assets. The committee is also looking at taxing the accumulated wealth of billionaires — things like homes, boats, stocks and other assets, regardless of whether they are sold — a new frontier of tax policy that would be difficult to achieve. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the Finance Committee chairman, said such measures are the only way to ensure that the superrich must pay their fair share of taxes each year. “I’m going to bring the caucus into that discussion, but I believe billionaires ought to pay taxes every year, just like nurses and firefighters do” out of each paycheck, Mr. Wyden said. More