For a few fleeting months in 2021, it looked like President Joe Biden was making great strides in his promise to even the playing field for more Americans.
Even before his inauguration, he laid out a $1.9 trillion vision that called for bigger stimulus checks, more aid for the unemployed, the hungry and small businesses. As part of his American Rescue Plan proposal, Biden wanted to increase the child tax credit and make it available to more lower-income families, as well as help make child care more affordable. And he called for greatly expanding subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans and reinstating pandemic paid sick and family leave benefits.
With the Democrats in control of both chambers and the White House, Biden felt he could push for big steps he said were needed to address immediate needs. But it also would put in place – if even temporarily – many unprecedented social supports that party leaders had been trying to institute for years and might, they hoped, be hard to unravel.
In mid-March of that year, Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that mirrored much of what he had proposed with a few notable changes, including leaving out the paid sick and family leave provision and an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“This plan is historic,” he said that month. “Taken altogether, this plan is going to make it possible to cut child poverty in half. Let me say that again – it’s significant, historic. It will cut child poverty in half.”
And it did – for a year.
On Tuesday, the Census Bureau reported that the child poverty rate skyrocketed from a record low 5.2% in 2021, when families were receiving the enhanced child tax credit and third round of stimulus checks, to 12.4% last year. What’s more, the share of children in poverty is roughly back to where it was prior to the pandemic in 2019,…
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