The LuLac Edition #5, 008, October 18th. 2023

WRITE ON WEDNESDAY

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This week we look at childhood poverty and a possible way to improve that problem.

CHILD POVERTY REDUCTION BILL HAS MUCH POTENTIAL

It remains a sad truth that while the United States still maintains the position as wealthiest country on earth (despite rapid gains by China), we let entirely too large a percentage of our children live in poverty. Sen. Bob Casey has been a champion for programs to help children out of poverty pretty much for his entire career, so his latest effort, as reported by staff writer Bill O’Boyle in Tuesday’s paper, certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Casey (D-Scranton), joined with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) to introduce the Child Poverty Reduction Act in the Senate, with U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) offering a companion bill in the House of Representatives.

The goal sounds ambitious: Cut child poverty in half in five years. But it is hardly out of reach. As the story noted, when congress briefly expanded the Child Tax Credit, child poverty dropped by nearly half between 2020 and 2021, from 9.7% to 5.2%. Proponents of a more robust child tax credit have argued for years that it is one of the quickest ways to reduce the child poverty rate, and those results certainly appear to bolster that opinion.

We do have a nit to pick with Casey’s presentation in announcing the effort. He said that the child poverty rate has more than doubled from between 2021 and 2022. The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest data has the rate at 12.4%. Yes, that is more than double the 5.2% historic low, but that low was the result of the temporary tax credit expansion. With the expansion eliminated, it seems fairer to compare the increase to the rate pre-expansion, which as noted was 9.7%. Measured this way it’s not “more than doubled.”

But it’s still a deeply troubling increase, and Casey is correct in trying to focus attention on a trend that should be unacceptable to people of all political stripes. Alas, it rarely seems an issue for too many in the U.S. Congress, where a government shutdown is currently being threatened primarily by a handful of hardline Republicans —who, it’s worth pointing out, would get paid during a shutdown even as hundreds of thousands of government employees went without an income.

The interesting thing about the proposal — full text available at casey.senate.gov — is that it doesn’t mandate specific efforts to actually cut the child poverty rate. It sets up mechanisms to track the rate more accurately, and establishes different resources to help review and disseminate strategies to reduce it.

We worry that this could become more bureaucratic red tape rather than effective action against child poverty. But by attacking the problem from a different angle — focusing more on what the numbers really are and on what brings them down, rather than trying to get more money appropriated through a divided Washington — it has a lot of potential.

Done right, it should dramatically increase public and government attention on a problem too often swept into dark corners of the D.C. sausage-making machine. By setting a specific — and, we believe, attainable — goal (cutting the rate in half in five years), it should keep the country on a steadier course to finding permanent ways to tackle a problem that, as noted at the start, really shouldn’t exist in this nation.

 TIMES LEADER