Starting in July, RoDena Lloyd’s five children were lifted out of poverty by the Biden administration’s expansion of the child tax credit (CTC), which delivered cash infusions to families across America.
But at the end of December, the CTC expired and Congress has thus far not extended it.
By late January, 3.7 million U.S. children were plunged back into poverty, according to a recently released Columbia University report.
Lloyd, a home health aide who lives with her children, ages 4 through 11, and her disabled husband, Adrien Sr., in Morton, Delaware County, said they’d again fallen below the poverty line — around $42,000 for a family of seven: “The money went away, and now there’s a big hole.”
With the stipend, which had amounted to around $250 to $300 a month for each of the children, Lloyd, 34, was able to buy more nutritious food, pay for the older kids to play sports, and get all of them new shoes.
Since the flow of money stopped, however, Lloyd said she’s begun raiding the savings accounts she’d set up for the children to pay bills.
“We were climbing out of a bad place,” she said, “and now we’re right back in it.”
The Biden administration had anticipated that the expanded CTC would be so popular that Congress would automatically renew it for 2022 and beyond.
That it didn’t happen “is a tragedy, a self-inflicted wound,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, director of the Georgetown University Center on Poverty and Inequality.
During his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Joe Biden referenced the CTC as he listed his goals for the nation: “Let’s … raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and extend the Child Tax Credit, so no one has to raise a family in poverty.”
Between July and December 2021, the Internal Revenue Service paid out monthly CTC payments at an annual rate of $3,000 per child ages 6 to 17, and $3,600 per child under 6, reaching more than 61 million children, the Columbia report said.
“It was a historic achievement,” said Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, a Washington-based nonprofit that helps low-income Americans. “It’s almost unthinkable we’d push them back into poverty, but that is what’s happened.”
According to Columbia, the monthly child poverty rate increased 41% — from 12.1% in December to 17% in January, the highest rate since the end of 2020.
One in four Black children in the United States lived with a monthly income below the monthly poverty line in January, an increase of more than 600,000 Black children from the month prior and a 30% rise.
Latino children, of whom 1.3 million fell into child poverty during that period, saw a 43% rise.
