Lafleur Duncan found 2021 to be the most challenging year of the pandemic so far. Both her husband and her 14-year-old son got sick with covid-19. Her son, who is asthmatic, was hit “the hardest,” she said.
“One day, all his shoes could fit him, then all of a sudden he just blew up,” said Duncan, a 53-year-old independent contractor living in Brooklyn.
Growth spurts are a fact of life for teens, but for the Duncans, it introduced another layer of financial strain. Since the start of the pandemic, the only regular income they could rely on was her husband’s part-time work as a chef.
Duncan’s son grew taller and gained weight, and because of his asthma, he continued remote learning longer than his classmates. This meant Duncan was tasked with buying new clothes and shoes for her son to wear, and more groceries to keep up with her son’s appetite, she said.
Duncan is positive that she wouldn’t have been able to provide for her son this year had it not been for one pandemic-era policy: the expanded child tax credit, which gives parents up to $300 every month for each child under 6, and $250 for each child between 6 and 17.
“It really helped. It stopped a lot of holes along the way,” Duncan said about the monthly checks. “And it is still doing that today.”
It may be the last week that parents like Duncan receive the credit, which started being disbursed directly into millions of families’ bank accounts in July.
The future of the expanded tax credit is in the hands of the Senate, where it is part of President Biden’s Build Back Better spending bill. If passed, the spending bill would ensure that the supplemental aid is extended for another year.
But if the Senate doesn’t pass the legislation, Dec. 15 could be the last day the government makes those payments — leaving parents like Duncan scrambling for remedies.
Before the American Rescue Plan expanded the program, the child tax credit was given out annually, and fewer households were eligible for it. This included lower-income families who did not make enough to get the full tax credit or received no payment at all. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, this affected 27 million children, including “roughly half” of all Black and Latinx children and those living in rural areas.
The American Rescue Plan increased the CTC from $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child for children ages 6 and up, and from $2,000 to $3,600 for children under the age of 6, according to the White House.
More families can access the credit than before, too, and advocates of the program say the monthly payments are easier for families to manage than one larger annual sum. By expanding the benefit to more families, the White House says the CTC could cut the country’s child poverty rate in half.
But conservative lawmakers and policy analysts say the program is too costly to be sustainable — and that it could discourage parents from working.
Rachel Greszler, a research fellow at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, said conservatives feel strongly that the monthly payments should be linked to parents having a job or searching for work (the CTC does not require this).
She pointed to one analysis from the University of Chicago that found CTC expansion could lower workforce participation among parents, resulting in “deep child poverty” not falling at all.
With many employers saying they are struggling to find workers to fill open positions, “none of the policies [passed] should be ones that discourage people from working,” Greszler said.
Critics of the CTC also point to the cost of the program. While the benefit is scheduled to sunset after next year, Republicans and moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) are evaluating the CTC and other components of Biden’s bill as though they will be permanent.
“Where does that money come from?” said Greszler, who suggested that today’s children may have to foot the bill for such social spending when they get older.
But supporters of the CTC argue that isn’t the case.
Kris Cox, deputy director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that the money used to pay for the CTC will come from increased tax enforcement on corporations and the country’s highest earners — which is not reflected in the bill’s Congressional Budget Office score.
The Treasury Department said this kind of enhanced enforcement on the wealthy could net an additional $400 billion, which would make Biden’s spending plan “fully paid for.”
Cox said such a policy would place the United States more in line with other wealthy nations. Not only does the United States have much higher rates of child poverty than its peer countries, the amount of money the country spent on family benefits relative to its GDP was lower than most of its peers. According to the American Psychological Association, children who live in poverty experience a variety of concerning outcomes, including increased hunger, illness, and impaired social and emotional development.
With the current CTC making 90 percent of families eligible for direct cash support, the program is the closest the United States has come to a universal child benefit policy, according to Quartz.
Cox said countries that have these benefits don’t see dramatically lower work participation than the United States does. And during a pandemic and ongoing economic instability, the CTC has played an important role in helping to stabilize a family, she added.
In her research, she has seen that the monthly sums are too small to replace a steady income, but are enough to help cover basic expenses. Direct cash payments also give families flexibility in figuring out what their needs are, she said.
“At a time when there’s some uncertainty, the child tax credit payments provide some financial stability to families who have to keep a roof over children’s heads, put food on the table and make sure the electricity keeps running,” said Cox.
And because Black and Latinx families experience higher rates of poverty, the CTC could play an important role in narrowing child poverty gaps between White families and communities of color, she said: “The racial equity implications of the expanded child tax credit are also extremely important.”
Early data shows the CTC may already be having a major effect: The Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy found the payments may have reduced child poverty rates by as much as 28 percent in October compared with what they would have been that month without the expanded credit.
For Melissa Boyles, the payments have been nothing short of a “godsend.”
Boyles, 63, gained custody of her 15-year-old granddaughter this past year after Boyles’s daughter-in-law and son died.
Although she considers herself lucky to have her grandchild, the change came at a stressful time. Boyles and her husband, both disabled and unable to work, had recently lost their eligibility for food stamps just as another person came into their household, she said.
The extra $250 they received monthly this summer helped Boyles feed and clothe her granddaughter, Boyles said, and ensured she could do things like go to homecoming or the occasional football game: “Those are important memories to a kid.”
If the CTC ceases or becomes a once-a-year payment again, Boyles doesn’t see how she’ll be able to support her grandchild.
“This is not about our work ethic; we have worked hard our entire lives,” Boyles said. She said she knows many other grandparents who are in her situation.
A resident of Clarksburg, W.Va., Boyles said she has attempted to reach Manchin directly to tell him her story, but said she hasn’t been able to.
“People are struggling,” she said. “Maybe [lawmakers] need to get out and really talk to some people, and see the reality of what’s going on.”
