Child Tax Credit Failure Reaffirms Young People’s Pessimism About Government
Students, nearly 50% of whom qualify for free and reduced-priced lunch, take in grim message as Congress kills measure that cut child poverty in half.
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Everyone’s worried about U.S. kids right now. Schools are reporting widespread mental health struggles in their post-pandemic classrooms.
“Perhaps it’s the cell phones?” we wonder. “And the TikTok?”
Sure, screens — and how kids engage with them — are part of this story. And yet, and especially, America tolerates relatively high levels of child poverty compared to peer nations. Nearly 50% of U.S. students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch subsidies because of their families’ low incomes. And yet, as has become custom, Congress recently missed a bipartisan opportunity to do something about this shameful, persistent American problem.
To explain this latest congressional stumble, we need some history. In 2021, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan cut U.S. child poverty rates nearly in half by significantly expanding the country’s child tax credit. Critically, the expanded credit was administered in monthly payments, giving families a steady stream of new resources instead of a once-annually infusion at tax time. As Dr. Shantel Meek and I put it in a February 2022 analysis, “[M]easured against its goal, the expansion of the child tax credit is one of the great policy successes in recent memory. Few other big federal ideas have so suddenly achieved precisely what they intended.”
But the measure expired after one year, and several efforts to reinstate it have floundered in Congress.
Then, this year, a bipartisan group of House representatives drafted a compromise measure giving progressives a partial reinstatement of the expanded credit in return for a handful of corporate tax breaks prized by conservatives. The bill passed with strong bipartisan support in the House, but lost steam in the Senate — at least partly because of conservative concerns that it might help President Biden in an election year. “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — may allow checks before the election — means that he can be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” Sen. Chuck Grassley. (R-Iowa), told The Washington Post.
Whatever else you think is causing young Americans’ pessimism these days, it pales in comparison with the impact of this sort of cynicism. Put aside the hand wringing about culture wars and polarization and “woke” indoctrination embedded into K–12 history curricula. U.S. kids don’t distrust Congress because their schools tell them an honest account of America’s complicated past. They distrust Congress because, when confronted with a tested policy solution to a substantive problem that affects their lives, elected representatives dither and find politically expedient excuses.
Make no mistake: the case for providing cash support for families with young children is empirically airtight. Researchers have known since at least the 1966 publication of the famous Coleman Report that families’ socioeconomic resources significantly shape children’s educational performance and outcomes. Studies suggest that increases in family income produce better developmental, academic and life outcomes for children. As a policy matter, regular cash transfers to families like the Biden Administration’s expanded child tax credit —known as “child allowances” — appear to be a particularly efficient way to pull children and families out of intergenerational poverty.
At this point in the waves of evidence, conservatives sometimes argue that, sure, perhaps there’s a case for investing more funding in low-income families, but only if we apply conditions and require that it be spent on particular things. Won’t families “waste” new resources unproductively? But this, too, is cynical and baseless political posturing: analysis showed that families overwhelmingly used their expanded child tax credit dollars on urgent, eminently reasonable necessities.
And yet, here we are, stuck. Legislative failures like these are the operational definition of a failing democracy. When democracies struggle to do simple things that we know would improve citizens’ — especially children’s — lives, they’re undermining their main institutional selling point. If representative government cannot accurately represent the public’s interest by identifying and addressing its problems, why bother with the messiness of organizing our political lives this way?
U.S. kids are not alright. But it’s not just because they’re living in an information sphere increasingly shaped by technology. Without a shift to a more pragmatic approach to these problems, that trust will only continue dropping — however well legislative sclerosis serves conservatives’ short-term political needs.
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Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America's Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.
