[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 60 (Tuesday, April 5, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1965-S1968]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Child Tax Credit
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to address
the Senate on an issue of real importance to our country and to
families in Colorado and all across the United States.
Today, 120 economists wrote an open letter--in the face of the
inflation that we are now facing as a nation, as a result of the
economic growth that we are having coming out of this very deep
recession, and the supply chain interruptions that have caused
inflation, 120 economists sent an open letter saying:
The expanded Child Tax Credit is one of the easiest, most
effective, and direct tools currently at our disposal to help
families deal with the impact of inflation on family budgets.
The exert opinions about the causes of and solutions to
rising inflation are as varied as the authors of this letter,
but we agree on this: the expanded Child Tax Credit is too
small to meaningfully increase inflation across the whole
economy.
That means that that $100 billion a year that the child tax credit
costs to lift half the kids out of poverty isn't going to drive
inflation in a $21 trillion economy. That is one of the points these
economists agreed on.
``[B]ut,'' they wrote, ``it will make an important difference for
family budgets, especially families in the bottom half of the income
spectrum. Monthly Child Tax Credit payments are a proven success at
helping families keep up with the everyday costs of keeping a family
afloat.''
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
the open letter signed by 120 economists.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Open Letter From Economists: Extend the Expanded Child Tax Credit To
Help Families Keep Up With Rising Costs
The cost of everything from food and fuel to housing and
clothes is going up at the fastest pace in decades. Families
need relief. The expanded Child Tax Credit is one of the
easiest, most effective, and direct tools currently at our
disposal to help families deal with the impact of inflation
on family budgets. A recent analysis by Moody's found that
inflation is costing the average family $296 per month, with
lower-income families being hit even harder. Each $250 to
$300 monthly child tax credit payment can offset the toll
inflation is taking.
The expert opinions about the causes of and solutions to
rising inflation are as varied as the authors of this letter,
but we agree on this: the expanded Child Tax Credit is too
small to meaningfully increase inflation across the whole
economy, but it will make an important difference for family
budgets, especially families in the bottom half of the income
spectrum. Monthly Child Tax Credit payments are a proven
success at helping families keep up with the everyday costs
of keeping a family afloat. With inflation causing those very
costs to rise, the Child Tax Credit is even more important
now to help families meet their basic needs.
Partial list of signers
Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research; Nina
Banks, Bucknell University; Chris Benner, University of
California Santa Cruz; Alan Blinder, Princeton University;
lndivar Dutta-Gupta, Georgetown Center on Poverty and
Inequality; Teresa Ghilarducci, The New School for Social
Research; Darrick Hamilton, The New School for Social
Research; Samuel Hammond, Niskanen Center; Elaine Maag, Urban
Institute/Tax Policy Center; Ioana Marinescu, University of
Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice; Manuel
Pastor, University of Southern California; Bob Pollin,
University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Organizations listed for identification purposes only;
views should be attributed to the individual, not the
organization, its trustees, or funders.
Full list of signers (118)
Alan Aja, Randy Albelda, Mona Ali, Elizabeth Ananat, Eileen
Appelbaum, Kate Bahn, Dean Baker, Nina Banks, Chris Benner,
Eli Berman, Alan Blinder, Peter Bohmer, Elissa Braunstein,
Howard Chernick, Israel Chora, Kimberly Christensen, Jennifer
Cohen, Steve Cohn, Amy Crews Cutts, Sheldon Danziger.
Matthew Darling, Stephanie Didwania, Peter Dorman, Laura
Dresser, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Gary Dymski, Alison Earle, Todd
Easton, Kevin Egan, Luciana Etcheverry, Doyne Farmer, Deborah
M. Figart, Daniel Finn, Nancy Folbre, John Gallup, Teresa
Ghilarducci, Fabio Ghironi, Jacob Goldin, Neva Goodwin, Ulla
Grapard.
Mitchell Green, Erica Groshen, Robin Hahnel, Darrick
Hamilton, Leah Hamilton, Samuel Hammond, Douglas Harris,
Martin Hart-Landsberg, Marianne Hill, Emily Hoffman, Dorene
Isenberg, Sarah Jacobson, Fadhel Kaboub, Haider Khan, Mary
King, Tim Koechlin, Andrew Kohen, Jeanne Koopman, Edith
Kuiper, Ronald Lee.
Margaret Levenstein, Catherine Lynde, Elaine Maag, Arthur
MacEwan, Ioana Marinescu, Thomas Masterson, Gabriel Mathy,
Aine McCarthy, Elainre McCrate, John Miller, Kyle Moore,
Katherine Moos, Sucharita Mukherjee, Michele Naples, Julie
Nelson, Reynold Nesiba, Joseph Nowakowski, Stephen Nunez,
Jennifer Olmsted, Lindsay Owens.
Lenore Palladino, Elizabeth Palley, Manuel Pastor,
Francisco Perez, Chiara Piovani, Robert Pollin, Bina Pradhan,
Kelsey Pukelis, Morgan Richards-Melamdir, Yana Rodgers,
Leopoldo Rodriguez, Stephen Roll, Giacomo Rondina, Lygia
Sabbag Fares, Max Sawicky, Peter Schaeffer, Juliet Schor,
Elliott Sclar, Stephanie Seguino, Tim Smeeding.
Mary Stevenson, Samuel Stolper, Diana Strassmann, Kay E.
Strong, Chris Tilly, Zdravka Todorova, Mariano Tarras,
Dietrich Vollrath, Mark Votruba, David Weiman, Mark Weisbrot,
Thomas Weisskopf Jeannette Wicks-Lim, Kathryn Wilson, Rachel
Wilson, Brenda Wyss, Yavuz Yasar, Andrew Zimbalist.
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, this is no surprise to me. I was for the
child tax credit before we had COVID because for the last 50 years, as
I have said before on this floor, we had an economy that has worked
really well for the top 10 percent of Americans and basically hasn't
worked for anybody else.
We have some of the lowest economic mobility in the industrialized
world. We have got some of the greatest income inequality in the
industrialized world.
[[Page S1966]]
Stunningly--stunningly--in the last two economic downturns, economic
inequality has only gotten staggeringly worse in this country because
of the massive asset inflation that has benefited the wealthiest people
in the economy who are in the position to make money on their money or,
in the case of a lot of people, on real estate. In Colorado, it is
making it harder and harder and harder for working people to find a
place to live.
And I can tell you that our kids pay the highest price from this.
I was the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools before I was in
this job. A majority of kids were kids of color; a majority of kids
were kids living in poverty. And their families were working--contrary
to what some people around here think, their families were working two
and three jobs. The problem wasn't that their families weren't working.
It wasn't that they weren't working hard. They were killing themselves,
and no matter what they did, they couldn't get their kids out of
poverty, and that is not a consequence of anything that is their fault.
They are doing everything they can. For that matter, their kids are
doing everything they can--going to schools that ought to do a better
job for the kids living in poverty all over this country.
And some people think that we have to just accept this as a
fundamental aspect of our economy or our democracy or our society; that
somehow the United States of America is such a failure as a community
that we have to accept being 38 out of 41 industrialized countries in
terms of childhood poverty; that we are willing to permanently accept
the idea that the poorest people in our society are our children.
I think there is something we can do about it. I know there is
something we can do about it. I know there is a lot of skepticism about
the Federal Government's ability to do anything well. I share that
skepticism sometimes.
We fought two wars in the Middle East that lasted for 20 years, that
cost about $5.6 trillion--seems like a set of bad decisions.
We have cut taxes on the floor of this body by $8 trillion since
2001. Almost all of the benefit 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 has been staggering to watch--it has been staggering to watch
people stay here at the end of a legislative year, at the end of a
Congress, and burn the midnight oil to make sure that we can extend the
tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country and for the largest
corporations in America.
That is how you know it is 2 o'clock in the morning in the U.S.
Senate. It is when we have to extend tax cuts for the richest people in
this country during a time of devastating income inequality that is
perpetuated by the economic cycles that we continue to have.
But last year, Mr. President, as you know, because you were a big
part of this, we did something different. We adopted the expanded child
tax credit; we adopted the expanded earned income tax credit. Those
bills were Bennet-Brown and Brown-Bennet, respectively--my friend
Sherrod Brown from the great State of Ohio.
And here on this, ahead of tax day, I wanted to come down to the
floor just to give you a little report, kind of a book report, a status
report on what has happened.
And what I want to tell you is it worked. It worked. It worked. We
discovered we didn't have to live in a society that was 38 out of 41
industrialized countries. We discovered that we didn't have to accept
the world where the poorest people in our country were our children.
We benefited 61 million kids in the United States--90 percent of the
children in Connecticut, 90 percent of the children in Colorado, and 90
percent of the children all across this country directly benefited from
a bill we passed here.
We cut childhood poverty nearly in half. We cut hunger by a quarter
for families with kids during a pandemic, which feels like a worthy
thing to have done. We did it without adding a single bureaucrat to the
Federal Government. We did it without adding one more Federal Agency.
We proved we could do it.
And then we didn't extend it at the end of the year. And now,
predictably, childhood poverty is shooting up in the United States of
America. Hunger is shooting up in the United States of America.
I was on the phone with the leaders of the food banks across Colorado
who have done such an incredible job during this recession and during
the last recession making sure people are fed. I have visited some of
those food banks. I know that people are saying to me that there are,
you know, two-thirds of the people who are showing up were people who
didn't show up before we had this catastrophe of COVID.
But guess what is getting longer now, as a result of our failure to
extend the child tax credit. It is the lines in these food banks. It is
the people coming to get food for their kids instead of being able to
go to the grocery store with the dignity of the expanded child tax
credit.
There is a shred of good news here that I wanted to just speak about
for a second because this will be my chance to do it, and I just want
to remind people that as families file their tax returns, they will
receive the second half of their child tax credit, which is worth up to
$1,800 per child. That is still available. It is not coming in a
monthly form anymore. It is not coming into your bank account anymore
in that automatic way, but when you file your tax returns, you will
receive it.
And the other thing, because of the EITC work that we did--the earned
income tax credit work--workers without children will receive the
expanded EITC, which we tripled last year--we tripled last year.
We finally decided we are not going to tax people into poverty
anymore in this country, which is what we were doing before we expanded
that.
So I wanted to remind families to claim their child and dependent
care tax credit as well.
We expanded that last year to a maximum of $4,000 per child, and in
my view we have to continue to come down here and fight to make these
credits permanent. And it is my goal for us to end childhood poverty in
this country.
I think cutting it in half--that was an exciting thing. It has been a
long time around here--decades, generations--generations since we have
seen a reduction in poverty in this country like the reduction in
childhood poverty we saw last year, generations since we have seen a
reduction in hunger like we saw last year.
And the good news is, we now know that it is a fact that we can do
it. There are a lot of countries in the world that have an expanded
child tax credit or child benefit like the child tax credit, and in all
those countries, fewer of their kids live in poverty.
And their workforce participation rates are actually higher, which
doesn't surprise me at all, based on the stories I heard from families
about what they were spending the child tax credit on, which was
everything that had to do with their kids, from buying back-to-school
clothes to paying for a bicycle so a young man in Colorado Springs
could stay at school late so he could have extracurriculars that he
otherwise wouldn't have had the ability to achieve, so that his mom
could stay at work for a few more hours so she could provide for the
family.
There is literally no data in America or anywhere else that doesn't
support the idea that this is a pro-work policy, the child tax credit.
We didn't have any trouble, as I said earlier, extending the $8
trillion of tax cuts that we have cut for the wealthiest people in this
country since 2001.
For that money, we could have extended the child tax credit for 50
years. We could have doubled it for 25 years, and we could have ended
childhood poverty in the United States of America. I guarantee you that
would have been a better investment than sending money to people who
need it least in our economy.
I would say to my own party that I am really grateful that we passed
this last year, but I am deeply, deeply disappointed that we couldn't
come together and extend it.
I am deeply, deeply disappointed that we haven't fulfilled our
promise to reverse the Trump tax cuts for the richest people in
America. It doesn't make any sense. It is completely upside down, but
that is where we find ourselves.
I wish I could express how different it felt at the end of the year
when it was
[[Page S1967]]
kids, many of whom were living in poverty and their families who were
getting, on average, $450 a month--when the lights were going out on
them, and we just went home. We just went home. There was nobody
burning the midnight oil here to make sure that the kids got the
benefit of this.
And, by the way, even if you don't believe that living in a society
where the poorest people are your kids and that it ought to be a
purpose of a nation to lift kids who, through no fault of their own,
find themselves in poverty; who, through no fault of their own, find
themselves living in a country where we have less economic mobility
than almost any other industrialized country in the world and therefore
don't have the opportunity to rise that generations had before them--
and, hopefully, generations that will come after them--and that are
attending a system of education in this country because of the lack of
early childhood education in the United States, because of the lack of
quality K-12 education in this country, because of the incredible
expense of higher education--who are attending a system that is
actually reinforcing the income equality we have rather than liberating
people from their circumstances.
(Mr. MARKEY assumed the Chair.) The best predictor of the quality of
your education in this country is your parents' income, to the point of
ruthlessness--to the point of ruthlessness.
I want to mention that Senator Romney, who is a Republican from Utah,
has a very similar bill to my bill to expand the child tax credit. In
fact, it is basically the same bill. He is a little more generous with
kids under the age of 6, and we have a difference of view on pay-fors,
but I think that is a bridgeable difference. And I have no doubt that
in the long term, we will come to a bipartisan agreement in this
Chamber to make the enhanced child tax credit permanent; to decide that
even if you don't care about the kids, which you should, that the
country can't afford this level of childhood poverty, that our
democracy won't be sustained with this level of income inequality. That
is what I believe. That is what I know.
Childhood poverty costs the United States of America $1 trillion
dollars a year. That is why it is not surprising that Columbia
University did a study and found that we get an 8x return--that the
child tax credit would pay back the United States eight times what it
costs. Again, what it costs is $100 billion a year, but childhood
poverty costs us $1 trillion a year.
Instead of accepting the idea that we are going to be at the bottom
of the cellar when it comes to kids living in poverty, what we said
was: No, we are going to cut it in half.
And let me assure you, as a former school superintendent and--well,
as a former school superintendent--the cost of mitigating for childhood
poverty far exceeds the cost diminishing it.
It is an amazing thing to me, on top of everything else that we are
talking about today, that when families are in the grip of the kind of
inflation that they are in the grip of--which costs them somewhere
between $270 to $300 a month, depending on where they live and
depending on who they are--that it wouldn't occur to us that the
easiest thing to do would be just to reinstate what we were doing last
year and allow people to have the benefit of $450 on average to raise
their children, to pay for a little bit of extra childcare, to pay for
a little bit of transportation to fix a car that is broken so they can
stay on the job.
I know there are some colleagues here who think that this policy
disincentivizes work. Even before we passed this last year, every study
that looked at this that I was aware of, with the exception of one
outlier that I think had terrible data--every single one--said that
this was not going to negatively affect work.
And guess what. Now we have had a 6-month experiment in the United
States of America, and every study, including the one by the American
Enterprise Institute, which was a doubter about this policy--and I
think probably still is a doubter about this policy--found that it had
no effect on people's work habits.
The problem in America is not that people don't work hard. That is
not the problem that we have in this country. People are killing
themselves. And it is true that wages are up by about 5.6 percent since
the Biden administration went into office, which is great, awesome. It
is great, but we have had the effects of inflation, and we are a long
way from having an economy that, when it grows, it grows for everybody,
which, by the way, that is what we need to do. That is what we have to
achieve.
This democracy will not survive another 50 years of an economy that,
when it grows, it grows for the top 10 percent, and everyone else's
wages are flat or everyone else is effectively in a recession. There is
no evidence in world history that with that level of income inequality,
that lack of economic mobility, that, over 100 years, you can sustain a
democracy.
And we don't have to do that. We don't have to do that. We can make
it permanent, put it back in place--pay for it, by the way. I believe
we should pay for it by raising taxes on the wealthiest people in the
country, like we said we were going to do by reversing the Trump tax
cuts--the Trump giveaways which were sold as the middle-class tax cut.
They were so smart because they gave people in the lower levels of the
income ladder a little bit, to say: There is your Trump tax cut--so he
could go out to the Mahoning Valley, go out to Youngstown, and tell
people: You got your tax cut. You are welcome.
What he didn't tell them was that 52 percent of the Trump tax cuts
went to the top 5 percent of Americans; that after he left the people
of the Mahoning Valley and Youngstown, an old steel town, and then he
went on to Mar-a-Lago, where people were having a New Year's Eve
dinner, or whatever it was they were having, and the first thing he
said to them was: You are welcome. That was a lot closer to the truth.
You are welcome. You are welcome that I cut your taxes at a time when
income inequality is greater than at any time since 1929. You are
welcome that I cut the corporate rate to 21 percent, even though no one
in corporate America was asking for a 21-percent tax cut. ``You are
welcome'' is what he said.
I said earlier, Mr. President, before you were here, that there are
people in the country that are skeptical of the Federal Government
doing anything well and that I have my own skepticism for the reasons I
said earlier. But there are people in terms of the child tax credit
that said it would never work. You know, 6 months before we did it or 4
months before we did it, I was getting stopped by reporters everyday
asking: Do you think they are really going to be able to do this? Can
the IRS, can the Department of Treasury--can they really administer
this?
And the answer is yes, they did. They did a fantastic job. They
didn't get everybody at first. They didn't get everybody at first, and
we knew that would be a problem. We enlisted people all over the State
of Colorado who worked with folks, who worked with working families and
worked with families who are living in poverty, because, remember, this
wasn't just about kids living in poverty.
Ninety percent--90 percent--of America's children benefited from
this. That is why some people have called it Social Security for kids.
Some people have called it universal basic income for kids. I think it
is a good thing because I can tell you that 90 percent of the kids in
Colorado can use the help; because 90 percent of the people in this
country and in my State have not benefited from economic growth the
same way the top 10 percent of Americans have for the last 50 years.
And, as I mentioned--I just want to say again on this floor because
there were people out there saying, ``People are going to drop out of
the workforce,''--it did not happen. It didn't happen in other
countries that have a tax benefit like this, and it didn't happen
during the 6 months that we were here.
I understand that, maybe, we would have a different debate. People
would say: Oh, my God, Michael, all these people dropped out of the
workforce. It didn't work the way you said that it would.
It did work the way I said it would. It did work the way that data
said that it would, and moms and dads--very unsurprisingly to me--who
were working hard to begin with, probably just
[[Page S1968]]
worked harder because now they had the chance to pay for a little extra
childcare. Now they had the chance to fix a car or, as I said, let
their kid go to extracurricular activities so they could stay at work.
And that is what all the studies have shown.
So I suppose one good thing has come out of this, which is--or maybe
it is more than one good thing--it is that we now know that America is
no different than any other place in this respect: that when parents
get a marginal, incremental amount of money, they don't quit their
jobs; they feed their kids. But as a society, we are able to say that
we cut childhood poverty in half and we cut hunger in half--by 25
percent.
What good is it that now there are families that are lined up in soup
kitchens, today, who weren't there 6 months ago because they had the
benefit of the child tax credit?
As I said, parents spent this credit on all kinds of different
things. I mentioned childcare. I mentioned the bicycle for
extracurricular, but, I will tell you, the thing that I heard from
every single parent that I talked to--and there were a lot of them in
Colorado over the last 6 months, over the last 6 months of last year--
was the stress that it had relieved for their family--that grinding
stress of being in a recession, the grinding stress of being in the
middle of a pandemic, the grinding stress of having your kids out of
school or having interrupted schooling, the grinding stress of living
in an economy where people are saying to you, no matter how hard you
work, that somehow it is your fault that you can't give your family
that; and that the decisions that we have made over many years in this
Chamber and in the Chamber across there, and that some of the largest
institutions have made as well, unfortunately, have created real
headwinds for working people and for their families.
We are in the middle here of considering the China COMPETES bill,
which I think gives us a real opportunity to reassess what we have been
doing for the last 40 or 50 years.
Every single thing we set and we told the American people we were
doing in their name with respect to China and its presence in the World
Trade Organization and what China would do as a result of that--none of
that turned out to be true. And when I say ``China,'' I don't mean the
Chinese people. I mean Beijing. And we realize now that they weren't
going to follow the rules of the road. We realize now that they were
engaged in state-sponsored capitalism, and that is very hard to compete
with; and that instead of just privileging the people in our society
who want to make stuff as cheaply as possible in China, maybe we ought
to be thinking about other things, like our supply chain--protecting
our supply chain--or our national security or whether we are creating
good-paying jobs in the United States so that when the economy grows,
it grows for everybody.
We have an opportunity to do that now, and that is what I want. That
is what I really want: It is an economy that, when it grows, it grows
for everybody, because that is the American dream, that is the story we
told ourselves about who we are as a people, and that is the way to
strengthen our democracy. That is what I really want.
In the meantime, what I would like us to do, since we now know how to
do it, finally, is lift half the kids in this country out of poverty so
they have a chance to pursue the American dream themselves. I used to
say that this Chamber treated America's children like they were someone
else's children because of the education system that we have provided
for them. And when we did the child tax credit, I came out here and I
said: I can finally come to this floor and say: We are now treating
America's children like they are America's children.
But, for the moment, that is no longer true, and, for the moment, we
are treating them like they are someone else's children, and we will
rue the day that we did this. We will rue the day that we did this.
This is a pro-work policy. It is a pro-family policy. It is a pro-
democracy policy. We now know it worked, and it worked well. We have
got to fight to make it permanent, and that is what I will do.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.