[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 56 (Thursday, March 25, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1841-S1845]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CONFIRMATION OF ADEWALE O. ADEYEMO
Mr. BROWN. Madam President, before we hear from Senator Booker and
Senator Bennet and Senator Warnock on one of the best things this
Senate has done in my career, that being the extension of the child tax
credit and the earned income tax credit, I just want to say a few words
about someone we just voted on at the Department of the Treasury who is
so, so important, Adewale Adeyemo, who will be Janet Yellen's--one
exemplary Treasury Secretary--Chief of Staff. He is a terrific public
servant.
Senator Cortez Masto, the Presiding Officer, and I were talking a few
minutes ago about the importance of the Treasury Department in so many
things from the child tax credit, to the pension bill, to so many
things that we do that matter--getting the $1,400 checks out and making
sure our tax system is fair.
Senator Bennet and I serve together with Senator Cortez Masto and
others on the Committee on Finance. What that means and what we are
trying to do on that committee is to take away the 50-percent-off
coupon from corporations that shut down production in Reno or in
Boulder or in Cleveland or in Newark and move overseas. They get,
essentially, a 50-percent-off coupon on their taxes. We need to close
those loopholes. We need a Treasury Secretary, and we need Adewale
Adeyemo, who will make a huge difference in our work there.
So I thank Senator Schumer and those on both sides of the aisle for
finally confirming him today and getting him to work.
I yield to Senator Bennet, who, I think, is going to start or, maybe,
Senator Booker.
Less than 2 weeks ago, President Biden signed the American Rescue
Plan into law. He ushered in some of the most transformative economic
policies to come out of Washington in generations.
By expanding access to and eligibility for the child tax credit and
the earned income tax credit, the American Rescue Plan is going to lift
10 million kids above or closer to the poverty line and put money in
the pockets of 17 million American workers across the country.
I want to start out by noting that both the income--low-income and
middle-income families and workers potentially qualify for these
credits, and they will be issued periodically via check and direct
deposit. American workers should know this was a profound change that
will benefit you.
American workers also have to know that they won't have to wait until
next year. You won't have to start to see advanced payments of these
credits 6, 7, 10 months down--you will see them as early as July. And
because of the changes that we made, if you didn't previously qualify
because you didn't have a high enough income, you could be eligible
now.
I am so proud to be here today alongside Senator Brown, Senator
Bennet, Senator Warnock, the Presiding Officer, who are in large part
responsible for this powerful lifeline to the American people and,
critically, for our children.
Senator Bennet, Senator Brown, Senator Warnock, thank you. You are
champions who have been fighting in and out of the Senate and
understand not just the economic urgency but the moral urgency to
address poverty. And that is really what we are all here to talk
about--the urgency of the crisis of poverty and specifically child
poverty.
In America, this is unacceptable. In the wealthiest Nation on the
planet Earth, the question of poverty is not one of inevitability; it
is one of policy choice. It is not if we can do something; it is will
we do something.
Tonight, I am going home to Newark, driving very soon, where I have
lived over the past 20 years. I am proud to call Newark home. I am
proud to be a part of a community of people who take care of each
other. I am proud to be part of a community that is rich with dignity,
rich with activism and intellect and engagement.
But we are also a community, like so many others in America, that
still struggles. According to the last census, the median income for
the census track that I live in was about $14,000 per household, and
that was before the dual public health and economic crises of the COVID
pandemic.
And in my community, like many others, urban and rural, across
America, adults aren't the only ones struggling; our kids are too. In
fact, the poorest age group in America is our children, with one in six
American kids living in poverty. It is nothing less than a moral
obscenity that the richest Nation in the world should have the highest
rates of child poverty in the developed world.
For adults, poverty has a technical definition. It is a federally
defined guideline--an amount of annual income that you fall under that
also takes into account how many people are in your household.
For kids, poverty is defined by what they experience every single
day, by what happens to them. It is growing up being more likely to
deal with food insecurity, not knowing where your next meal will come
from or when it will come. It is facing housing insecurity. A quarter
of kids living in poverty will have gone through an eviction before
they turn 15 years old.
Kids in poverty have worse health outcomes, worse educational
outcomes, and are more likely to become entrapped in our broken
criminal justice system. And kids who grow up in poverty are more
likely to be poor as adults.
Study after study has shown how children who live in poverty have
higher levels of stress hormones. The stress of poverty literally
affects their brains. It inhibits brain development. It is violence
against the brain of a child.
One child poverty expert described the stress hormones that are
constantly released in kids growing up in poverty as similar to the
feeling that an adult would get after a car crash--every single day.
This is violence.
We know that when a child experiences poverty, there are lifelong
psychological and physiological effects they carry with them. Study
after study after study has borne this out.
[[Page S1842]]
For kids, poverty is literally dangerous for their development,
dangerous for their health, and they could have permanent and lasting
damage to their brains.
The cruelty of this crisis is that no parent would ever choose that
for their child. Poor parents do not choose for their kids to
experience the daily trauma of poverty. They do not choose to condemn
their kids to a life of worse education outcomes, worse health
outcomes.
What we must understand is that child poverty is not a choice that
low-income parents make. It is a failure of our country to take
collective responsibility for the well-being of American children. This
is a moral sin. It is not a sin to be poor but a sin to tolerate such
poverty in our communities.
Almost 2 weeks ago, Congress and President Biden made the choice to
do something about this American sin, this unacceptable reality, this
moral obscenity--the violence happening to so many children. They did
something about it; we did something about it in the American Rescue
Plan. And now we are calling on our--really, we are on our way for a
year to cut child poverty in half; for Black children more than in
half, 52 percent; for Hispanic children, by 45 percent; for Native
American children, by 62 percent.
That is millions of kids across the country who will not face the
violence of poverty. In New Jersey, that is 89,000 kids and their
families who are not just going to be lifted out of poverty but will be
given the opportunities and the freedoms that come with being able to
build a life and a future beyond without the trauma that comes with
poverty.
That is why we are together here this afternoon--because lifting kids
out of poverty is not just about ending a crisis but about beginning a
new American tradition of giving every child what every child should
have in America as a birthright. It is about creating freedom and
liberty from the oppression of poverty. We have the power to do this.
We have the tools to do it, and we know it makes good economic sense to
get kids and adults out of poverty.
I love what James Baldwin wrote. He said: ``Anyone who has ever
struggled with poverty knows how . . . expensive it is to be poor.''
Well, that is also true for our country. Whether we realize it or not,
child poverty is expensive for all of us, costing our country $1.1
trillion every year. But investing in ending poverty benefits us all.
Every dollar spent on combating child poverty saves this Nation $7 down
the road; $1 invested saves us $7 later. Other countries, our peers,
have made thes kinds of investments in children and families and have
reaped rewards that we are denying ourselves.
Expanding the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and
making them permanent are proven, data-driven, evidence-based, result-
apparent ways to respond to some of the most morally and economically
urgent challenges of the United States of America. These are the kinds
of investments in our people that will change life trajectories and
have a ripple effect for generations yet to come.
If you give the child--a child firmer ground on which to grow, they
will blossom and reap a harvest beyond our imagination. But if you
punish them in the trauma, in the violence of poverty, you decimate not
just their destinies but all of our destinies.
I am so grateful to have champions that are here today alongside me
in this effort, and, together, I know this is a crisis we are going to
meet, and this crisis we can overcome. I am proud of the work we have
done. Now we should make those changes to the earned income tax credit
and the child tax credit permanent.
I am proud to pass the microphone and the moment on to a great
champion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, one
of the original authors of the legislation that was pulled from for our
recovery plan, and that is the Senator from Ohio, Sherrod Brown.
Mr. BROWN. Thank you, Senator.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Warnock.) The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, thanks to Senator Booker. I will be very
brief. I want to hear from Senator Bennet, and I know that the
Presiding Officer is going to switch chairs and be out here speaking on
this.
I am so appreciative of the Presiding Officer, who won his election
just in--on January 5. He was declared the winner--I don't know.
Georgia elections are a little different from those of us from other
places, and as soon as he was named the winner of that election, he
came here and has been in the Senate about 6 or 7 weeks now and is
already a leader on this fight that Senator Booker talked about in the
child tax credit and the earned income tax credit.
I have been here long enough to remember when the earned income tax
credit was--people just didn't know much about it, including our
constituents.
I used to, when I was a Member of the House, I would ask
accountants--CPAs and public accountants--to volunteer their time a
couple of Saturdays a month for the 2 or 3 months before April 15. They
would volunteer their time, and we encouraged people to sign up for the
earned income tax credit, and people making $20,000 or $25,000 a year
with kids would often get $2,000 or $3,000 in a tax refund, in real
dollars back, because they benefited from the earned income tax credit.
So what Senator Bennet and I have worked on for a number of years is
to continue to expand the earned income tax credit and now a big
expansion of the child tax credit. Senator Bennet has led on that
issue, on that expansion, and we worked together with Senator Booker
and now Senator Warnock to make a huge difference.
When I voted from this chair on January--I am sorry, on March 6, we
had been in session all night. We had voted time after time after time.
It was a partisan vote.
I mean, partisanship is not what Senator McConnell and my Republican
colleagues say it is. Something that is partisan or nonpartisan is what
the voters think, and the voters overwhelmingly support the earned
income tax credit, the child tax credit, and the whole American Rescue
Plan Act, and it will make such a huge difference in peoples' lives.
But I remember after that vote--it was 1 o'clock in the afternoon. I
was walking out of the building to drive back to Ohio. I drive every
week or a young man drives with me every week back home. And a reporter
stopped me and said: What do you think? I said: This is the best day of
my political life because we--what we did, as Cory Booker said, we are
cutting the child poverty rate in half.
In my State--and I don't think Colorado or Georgia is much different.
In my State, 92 percent of children in my State--92 percent of children
will benefit from the child tax credit and their families often also
benefit from the earned income tax credit. What is not to love about
that?
That is why, like, 40 Democratic Senators are signing a letter to the
President of the United States, asking--we have done this for a year,
this expansion to the child tax credit and the earned income tax
credit. We should do it permanently, and that is what--that is the
mission that the four of us Senators sitting in this room have, is to
make sure this is permanent because we know there will likely be good
economic growth next quarter, the quarter after, in large part, because
of what we have done with this rescue act. There will be strong
economic growth, but I want to make sure that growth is shared by
people at the bottom.
And it so often isn't. We have seen for 20 years--30 years we have
seen executive compensation explode upward. We have seen profits up. We
have seen worker productivity is up, but workers' wages are flat. That
is why, in the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, we are
working so hard to make sure that we provide more housing for people so
that people have safe, affordable, accessible housing in this country
because, too often, they don't. That committee is called the Senate
Banking Committee around here. It is officially Banking, Housing, and
Urban Affairs, but for years it is all about banking and Wall Street
and very little about housing and urban affairs. We are changing that.
We are changing that, in part, because this body, under Senator
Bennet's leadership and others--this body is actually going to do the
right thing, as Cory Booker said, and make sure that America's children
have greater opportunities than they have had in the past. That is why
I am thrilled to be a part of this effort.
[[Page S1843]]
I yield to my friend from Colorado, Senator Bennet.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado is recognized.
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, thank you very much for being a part of
this effort, and I want to thank my colleague from Ohio for his
extraordinary leadership from the very beginning on both of these
bills. He led on the EITC bill, and I was very grateful to have the
chance to be with him on that, and I on the child tax credit, and he
was my partner from the very beginning on that, as was Senator Booker
and Senator Harris, before she became Vice President Harris.
I have only been here for 11 years, Mr. President, and you have been
here a shorter time than that, and I never thought this day would come.
I never thought we would see this day.
Before I came to the Senate, I was the superintendent of the Denver
Public Schools. That is a large urban district in Colorado. Most of the
kids are kids of color and most of the kids are kids living in poverty,
and parents are working two and three jobs, many of them. No matter
what they do, they can't get their kids out of poverty. No matter what
they do, no matter how hard they work, they are not paid enough to get
their kids out of poverty.
Over the last 11 years, I have had the great privilege of traveling
the State of Colorado, and it is a diverse State. Politically, it is a
diverse State. We have urban areas and rural areas, and we have got
some of the most dynamic economies and business environments in the
country, and therefore on the planet. And yet, if I had to summarize
those townhalls, it is really easy. It is people who are coming and
saying: Michael, we are working really hard, but no matter what we do
we can't afford housing, healthcare, higher education or early
childhood education. We can't save. We think our kids are going to live
a more diminished life than the life that we would, and we are already
living less of a good life than our parents did.
And that is the anecdotal reflection of an economy that, for the last
50 years, has worked really well for the top 10 percent of Americans
but has not worked for the bottom 90 percent. The bottom 90 percent is
all of America, and their wages have been flat. We have seen income
inequality grow through two recessions, the great recession and now the
COVID recession, and the gaps between more affluent families and poorer
families have only grown as a result.
And everywhere I went this year--I went to all 64 counties of
Colorado during COVID--I heard the same thing: Give us a little bit of
hope.
That is what the American Rescue Plan is going to do. It is going to
give people just a little bit of hope, make it a little bit easier for
people to buy groceries for their families or to pay the rent at the
end of the month, pay their mortgage, set up a savings fund for their
kids' college education.
That might sound like an obvious thing for us to want to do, but
Washington, for years, has done exactly the opposite of what we are
doing in this plan. Washington has passed one regressive tax cut after
another saying they were cutting taxes for the middle class. That was a
complete smokescreen. Since 2000, they have cut--listen to this--$5
trillion of taxes. Almost all of that has gone to the wealthiest people
in the country, when we have got the worst income inequality that we
have had since 1928. It doesn't make any sense.
Can you imagine if the mayor of Atlanta went to his citizens and
said: We are going to borrow a bunch of money from the Chinese. We are
going to borrow more money than we ever have before. And you say: Well,
that kind of worries me. What are you going to use that money for? Are
you building infrastructure and roads and bridges? No. Are you going to
invest in our schools? No. Our sewers? No. Mental health, something we
need desperately across this country? No. Healthcare? No.
What are you doing with the money? You are borrowing $5 trillion,
what are you doing with the money?
We are going to give it to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in
Atlanta and hope that somehow it is going to trickle down to everybody
else. That is how you write a bill, which is the Trump tax bill, where
42 percent of the benefit of that bill--it was a $2 trillion bill--42
percent went to the top 5 percent of Americans, to the people who
needed it least.
This is exactly the opposite of that. Sixty percent of our bill--I am
not going to give you a lot of numbers, but 60 percent of our bill, the
majority of our bill, goes to people making $50,000 or less. And as my
colleagues have said, we are cutting childhood poverty in half this
year as a result of what we are doing, and 90 percent of American
children are going to benefit from what we are doing. That is about as
broad-based as you can get. It is progressive in the sense that the
greatest benefit is going to the poorest kids because the credit means
the most to the people making the least, but if you are making u to
$150,000 as a couple, you are going to have a benefit for your kids.
You will get the full tax credit for your kids.
So let me describe it a little bit, and then I will talk about the
earned income tax credit, and then I am going to take over for the
Presiding Officer, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
Most families under this change to the law are going to receive $250
a month per child. That is $300 a month for kids under the age of 6. It
is fully refundable. What does that mean? Well, there was a view about
this tax credit before that said that you had to make a certain amount
of money before you could be eligible for the tax credit because there
was a theory that, you know, if you got the tax credit, you wouldn't
work.
That is not the problem. People are killing themselves. They are not
getting paid. And so we say that you get the tax credit from dollar
zero, which means, finally, millions of America's poorest children who
have been completely overlooked--not just overlooked, ignored--are
going to get the tax credit. So millions and millions and millions of
children who were too poor to benefit from what was going on here while
we were cutting taxes for the richest people in America are now going
to benefit from this tax credit, and it will make the biggest
difference for them.
We are the wealthiest country in human history, and yet we have one
of the largest, if not the largest, childhood poverty rates in America.
As my colleague from New Jersey, Senator Booker, said--I lost my train
of thought--wait until I get it back. I am so excited about what we are
doing, I can't believe it.
As Senator Booker said, the largest group of poor people in America
are children. In other words, children have the highest percentage
poverty rates in our country. How can that be? How can we accept that
as a permanent state of things? Well, we are not. Because of Joe
Biden's bill, we are cutting it in half. And we are saying, in the
richest country in the world, it is unacceptable for us to have one of
the highest poverty rates. Other countries have cut their poverty rates
by half, why can't we? Well, today we are.
We also have some of the worst economic mobility rates in the
industrialized world as well, meaning it is hard to move up on the
economic ladder. We used to say we are the land of opportunity.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of other countries where people are able
to get ahead by working hard. We want that to be our country again, and
we want to give poor children a chance here. There is not a single
child who chooses to be born poor.
The Senator from New Jersey quoted James Baldwin. He is one of my
favorite authors, too, about how expensive it is to be poor.
The other thing that we have done in America is we have made it
incredibly hard to be poor, incredibly hard to be poor. And that is one
of the interesting things about this bill. In countries that have child
benefits like this child benefit, they actually have a higher
percentage of people in the workforce than we do. And why is that? It
makes total sense. It makes total sense because if you have got a
little bit of breathing room at the end of every month, you can fix a
car that breaks down, and you can stay on your job. If you can afford
to pay for a little bit of childcare for a few hours in the afternoon,
maybe that lets you stay on the job.
For working moms in particular, I think it is going to really create
the opportunity for them to earn income over the long haul because it
will be easier for them to stay in their jobs than not.
[[Page S1844]]
As I mentioned, nationwide over 90 percent of children are going to
benefit. So, over many nights, late nights often, on this floor, I have
come here with one complaint or another about how we have turned our
back on America's children. I have come here and I have said over and
over again that we are treating America's children like they are
someone else's children, not like they are America's children. And you
know what? In this bill, we treated America's children like they are
America's children, like they really matter to us, like we believe in
their future and the future of our country; that they are filled with
promise. No matter how poor they are, no matter what ZIP Code they live
in, rural or urban, they matter to us. They are visible to us, and we
are going to make them a priority.
This is the biggest reduction in childhood poverty in the history of
our country, and we need to make it permanent. Today, 40 of us sent a
letter to President Biden saying that we are going to work with him to
find a way to make this permanent.
My goal is to end childhood poverty in this country. That is where I
really want to be because then I will know we really are not going to
hold some child's economic circumstances against them, but we are going
to give every child in America the chance to run the footrace with each
other. But 50 percent is pretty good. It is the best thing we have seen
out of Washington in generations.
I want to just mention a few words also about the other bill that
Senator Brown led on the earned income tax credit, which triples that
credit for low-income workers who don't have kids. So these are workers
who don't have kids, who won't benefit from what we are doing in the
child tax credit but will benefit from what we are doing on the earned
income tax credit.
Believe it or not, until now, until we passed this bill, Washington,
DC, was actually taxing people into poverty. In other words, people
were working; they were earning a living; and then they had to pay
their taxes. And then they were in poverty because we were tripling the
tax credit from about $500 to $1,500. That no longer will be true.
We also bring the minimum age down from 25 down to 17, and we lift
the cap for seniors so more people can benefit from this tax credit. In
fact, 17 million people in this country are going to benefit from this
change. There are 300,000 workers in my home State of Colorado. And
these changes are going to transform lives. They are going to give
folks a chance to breathe.
Just like all of you, I want an economy that when the economy grows,
it grows for everybody. It doesn't grow just for the people at the very
top. That is the economy we have had for the last 50 years. Such an
economy is a threat to democracy. You cannot have a democracy if you
don't have an economy where everybody feels like they get ahead. It
won't work. It has never worked in human history, and I think it would
be unreasonable for us to expect it would work here.
It has created a lot of uncertainty and, in many places, a lot of
anger about whether the American Dream still exists for most Americans.
I believe we will be able to dream again here, and we are going to
need, as I said, an economy that works for everybody. That means
investing in our infrastructure. That means having an approach, you
know, to the competition from the Chinese Government that doesn't just
leave us and our industries as collateral damage but creates thriving
supply chains here, high-paying jobs here, and making sure that we own
auto manufacturing here and other kind of manufacturing.
It means having an education system that can prepare people to do the
jobs of the 21st century. That is work we still have to do. It means
making sure that every single high school kid or every single kid that
graduates from high school graduates knowing they can earn not just a
minimum wage but a living wage the day they walk out of their high
school. That is what we need to do.
But, in the meantime, this tax cut for working people and for low-
income people means that people are going to be able to put food on the
table, save a little bit of money, get through this pandemic, make
their lives a little bit better, and give their kids a little bit more
hope.
I am really grateful. I am really grateful that we elected a
President and a Vice President who is not treating America's children
like they are someone else's children but treating them like they are
our children. That is not only the right thing to do for them. That is
the essential thing to do if this democracy is going to survive.
I want to thank the Presiding Officer for all his efforts on this
bill as well since you joined the Senate. I am going to stop there, and
I will come replace you.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). The Senator from Georgia
Mr. WARNOCK. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues--
Senator Brown; Senator Booker; the Presiding Officer, Senator Bennet--
in shining a bright spotlight on the tragedy of child poverty and what
the Senate needs to do and can do to eliminate poverty permanently--
child poverty across our country.
Someone has said that children are the casualties of every age, and
while this is a longstanding problem, the fight could not be more
urgent as countless families work to pull themselves out of the
economic misery caused by a once-in-a-century pandemic. This pain is
felt all across our country.
But as we talk about the issue of child poverty, this is not
theoretical. For me, it is personal. I grew up in public housing. I am
one of 12 children in my family. I am No. 11 and the first college
graduate. I stand here today as a U.S. Senator, but I am the product of
good Federal public policy and good public schools. I know that what we
do in this Chamber makes a difference in the lives of families and in
the lives of all of our children. My life's journey is a testament to
the promise of our country, the greatest country on Earth, when we make
the necessary investments in our youth and enable them to thrive.
As a pastor, I speak to young people all the time, and I often go
back to my hometown of Savannah, GA, and communities all across Georgia
like the neighborhood I grew up in. In my efforts to inspire children
who are struggling, I tell them that your parent's income does not have
to determine your outcome. It is not where you start; it is where you
end up.
Now, that is what I say to them, and I believe it, because they need
to be inspired to give it all that they have got. But the truth is,
when I tell them that their parent's income does not determine their
outcome, that is not based simply on what they do, but on what we do.
That has to be made real through good public policy.
That is why I am so proud to work with my Senate colleagues and I was
so happy to join this U.S. Senate at such a critical time in our
country, and in a moment, when we, buoyed by the people of Georgia who
made a historic choice, our majority enabled us to pass the American
Rescue Plan.
Over the past year, we have seen how the consequences of COVID-19 and
the economic downturn that followed it have both illuminated and
exacerbated so many of the longstanding disparities that have
challenged Georgians, Americans, and people everywhere. We know that
low-income families and children, especially, have not only not been
spared but have, in many ways, suffered more than most. Children are
casualties at every age.
According to data from the Center for American Progress, we know that
nearly one in five children in Georgia was living in poverty last year.
Think about that: nearly one in five children in poverty in the middle
of a pandemic. It is tough enough to live in poverty, but it is even
tougher to live in poverty in the middle of a pandemic. What could be
tougher than being a child in poverty in a pandemic?
Another 217,000 of those children live in what we could call extreme
poverty in the United States--stock markets soaring and children
struggling and no relationship between what is happening on Wall Street
and what is happening on their streets. It is our job to make it true
when I say to them that their parent's income need not determine their
outcome.
I don't know about anyone else, but I think that these high rates of
child poverty are unacceptable in the greatest, richest country on the
planet.
[[Page S1845]]
Often, we tell our children to stay on the right road, to stay out of
trouble, and we should--stay focused--but we ought to spread that net
of responsibility.
The truth is, poverty is its own violence. Poverty is a violence that
traumatizes the mind, oppresses the body, and bruises the human spirit,
so that is why the American Rescue Plan is so necessary, so important,
and so historic. I am glad that Senators Booker, Brown, and Bennet--I
feel a little left out, the odd guy out here--I am glad that we were
able to push through, in the American Rescue Plan, a landmark expansion
of two tax credit programs: the child tax credit and the earned income
tax credit.
Now, I am calling on all my Senate colleagues to join us in making
these expansions permanent. By increasing the child tax credit,
thousands of more dollars a year will flow into the pockets of the
children and families who need it most, cutting poverty--child
poverty--nationwide in half.
In Georgia, more than 1 million families with children will benefit
from the increased tax refund, and it will lift more than 171,000
Georgia children out of poverty. Those are my neighbors and yours.
Those are kids around my church and who attend my church.
So I want to be clear. Not only were we able to expand the tax refund
so that more families are getting more money, but we were able to do so
in such a way that it gives families a monthly cash payment providing
greater financial security.
This is going to be a gamechanger for so many families, especially
those who did not previously qualify for the credit when it was used
just to offset taxes already owed to the government. Prior to this
expansion, we had folk who were too poor to get our help. There is
something wrong about that--too poor to get our help. This expansion
corrects that. Now, we are putting dollars directly into the hands of
the families who need it the most.
In the COVID package, we were able to strengthen the earned income
tax credit, nearly tripling the maximum tax refund allowed for
qualifying workers because we have to make sure that childless families
in our communities also have the support they need to pay their rent,
keep food on the table, and more to keep our communities strong.
Taken together, expanding and extending these programs are a major
move toward eliminating child poverty and poverty in general once and
for all in Georgia and all across our country, but it is still not
enough to truly tackle the issue. We have included this in the American
Rescue Plan; now, we must make it permanent. As so often is the case,
the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do. This will not only
help these families, it will help the American economy.
I am just old enough to remember when they started talking about
trickle-down economics. I know some communities where they have been
waiting for decades for that trickle. It hadn't trickled down; it is
trickling up.
The right thing to do is often the smart thing to do. When we help
these families, it is actually good economic policy. Because when you
help poor families with children, they buy things like food, baby
diapers, a coat for their kid, and it helps the American economy.
The right thing to do is the smart thing to do. If Congress can slash
child poverty for 1 year, why wouldn't we or shouldn't we do it once
and for all? And so I urge the Senate to stand up and do this work in
this moral moment in America.
In just a few days, I will go home. I will stand up, and I will
preach on Easter Sunday morning. This year, as it turns out, Easter is
on April 4. It is the anniversary of Dr. King's death. So I will be
thinking about Dr. King as I preach this coming Easter because Dr. King
spent his last birthday, January 15, 1968, in his office, at our
church, among other things, planning the Poor People's Campaign, trying
to organize us and get us ready to stand up against poverty. He spent
his birthday thinking about other people's children because he
understood that his children would not be OK until other people's
children were OK.
April 4 is his birthday. April 4 is also Easter this year. Let's make
these tax credits permanent and resurrect hope and possibility and
promise for all of America's children.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Warnock). The majority leader is
recognized.
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