"Several strands of research over the past twenty years have helped form a consensus among leading academics that cash income spent by parents can reduce disadvantages for children significantly. The research has partly been based on experiments when some poor groups have suddenly had access to more money than others, due, for example, to increases in the generosity of federal social programs."
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Foster Care
Lucina Kayee, executive director of Atlas of Blackness, testifies about her experiences in the foster care system in front of a panel of U.N. human rights experts at the Minneapolis Urban League building in North Minneapolis on Tuesday.Ben Hovland | MPR News
GOChildhood Poverty
Foster Care
Even if you restructure the prison system, even if you abolish the prison system, you will still have child welfare, and child welfare — like every system — adapts. In Los Angeles, the largest group of people who are on death row come from the foster care system.
GOChildhood Poverty
Foster Care
Photo Sarah Whiting Article by Paula C. Neeley How does a group of Black, trans, queer, and disabled foster youth improve their corner of the world? By just doing it. Lucina Kayee, 25, created Atlas of Blackness as a grassroots, multimedia organization that mentors Black foster youth. Kayee, who is a two-time cancer survivor with Lupus, envisioned an organization that blends her love of research, the arts, and history to document Black foster youth stories in a healing way. “As somebody who is disabled and chronically ill, I wanted to create something that would be sustainable without me being there,” she says.
GOChildhood Poverty
Academic Articles/Reports
Social Security’s role in lifting millions of Americans out of poverty has been widely documented. However, the national focus on the program’s income assistance for senior citizens has obscured the fact that Social Security is also one of the federal government’s largest antipoverty programs for children. It serves more children than such programs as Supplemental Security Income (SSI),3 and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). In 2014, there were 3.2 million children under age 18 directly receiving Social Security income benefits either as the surviving dependent of a parent or guardian who had died, the dependent of a disabled worker, or the dependent of a retiree. Many of these children come from the nation’s most economically vulnerable households. As a result, Social Security is often the only financial safeguard protecting them from the harmful effects of poverty.
GOAcademic Articles/Reports
Childhood Poverty
More than 183,000 people in the United States died in 2019 largely because of poverty. That’s as many lives as claimed by Alzheimer’s disease, accidents, strokes, and diabetes, and 10 times the number of homicides that year.
GOChildhood Poverty
Housing Insecurity
Rituals USA has supported Hearts of Gold for some time, since the charity is based next door to the Rituals office. Rituals has donated Soulwear and make-up for its holiday gift sets for the women in the shelters and is looking at ways to work with Hearts of Gold in future, especially to support their Sustain pillar (more on that later). This summer, Rituals is exploring kindness, something that Hearts of Gold offers to women and children in abundance, and so we took the time to speak with Deborah about her mission. The charity started with no specific mission except “the goal to provide assistance in whatever form and do whatever it took to get a mom and her children through today’s challenges. Sometimes that meant a warm coat. Sometimes that meant a warm meal. Sometimes that meant the warmth of a smile and a listening, non-judgmental ear,” says Deborah. Over time, Hearts of Gold evolved to have a board of directors and three clear objectives: Stabilize, Support, and Sustain. “At Hearts of Gold, our goal is to meet the mom “where she is” in her life and to help her to navigate the path to a reimagined future where she and her children can stand on their own, be self-sufficient, get off of public assistance and break the cycle of homelessness for her and her family and, therefore, generations to come”.
GOHousing Insecurity
Childhood Poverty
Deborah Koenigsberger is the owner of the French-inspired boutique, Noir et Blanc; the founder and CEO of the nonprofit, Hearts of Gold; and the passion behind its resale boutique store, The Thrifty HoG. She is a successful businesswoman who has made time to help those in need. We thought that, in her role as a black business owner and community leader, Deborah would have a unique perspective on the pandemic, economic meltdown, and the massive call for social justice building in America. A steadfast optimist, Deborah put her interview with us in this context: These difficult times provide us a unique opportunity. She says that at this moment in history, people are listening. Over the past few months, Deborah has been able to speak to a wide range of people, engage in new fundraising opportunities, and circulate her message. She explains how right now, our society has a special chance to better itself. We have the opportunity during the lockdown to stop, notice, and care . . . we have time to listen to each other.
GOPolitics
On Capitol Hill, Goldman lacks the instant recognition of other New York lawmakers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — or even, for that matter, George Santos. But in 2019 and 2020, Goldman earned acclaim as Democrats’ lead counsel during the first impeachment of former President Donald Trump. He became a cable news fixture as channels replayed clip after clip of the stone-faced prosecutor interrogating Trump officials. Goldman parlayed that exposure into a seat in Congress when redistricting opened up a new Brooklyn-based district in 2022. He conquered a crowded primary, and walked to victory in the general election.
GOPolitics
Washington, D.C. – Congressman Dan Goldman (NY-10) today joined Congressman Jimmy Gomez (CA-34) and Congressmembers Rahida Tlaib (MI-12), Joaquin Casto (TX-20), Andy Kim (NJ-03), Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), Rob Menendez (NJ-08), as well as advocates from Paid Leave for All, National Alliance for Caregiving, and Moms Rising to hold a press conference launching the Congressional Dad’s Caucus. “The Congressional Dads Caucus will work to highlight the many challenges American families are facing, and bring the lived experience of Congressional parents to bear in addressing them,” Congressman Dan Goldman said. “As a father of five children, I’m proud to serve as a founding member of the Caucus, and look forward to elevating some of the many creative policy solutions for working families like comprehensive paid family leave, expanding the Child Tax Credit, increasing access to child care, and expanding early childhood education.”
GOIn the crowded and accomplished field vying to represent the newly drawn 10th Congressional District, two candidates stand out: Dan Goldman, who served as lead counsel for the Democrats in the first Trump impeachment trial, and Representative Mondaire Jones. Mr. Goldman, a former federal prosecutor, has lived in Lower Manhattan for 16 years. His uncommon experience, particularly his knowledge of congressional oversight and the rule of law, could prove especially valuable in Congress in coming years. “I have been on the front lines leading the fight in Congress against Donald Trump and his Republican Party and trying to protect and defend our democracy and our institutions and our rule of law,” he said in an interview with the editorial board.
GOFood Insecurity
Food banks will not be able to keep up with the need Republicans are hoping to create Republicans are gearing up for a new round of attacks on food assistance, part of their nonstop search for ways to stigmatize poor people. Rep. Dusty Johnson has introduced a bill that would expand the age range of the able bodied adults without dependents who are already subject to work requirements to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. That’s just the beginning of the planned efforts to kick people off of food stamps—but it’s bad enough.
GOChildhood Poverty
IN THE PAST few years, abolition movements—for prisons, police, and gender—have moved from the intellectual fringe to the mainstream of American public life. Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond would like to add one more item to the list of things to be abolished: poverty. He has his work cut out for him. In his new book Poverty, by America (2023), Desmond reports that more than one in nine US citizens (42.5 million people) live under the poverty line. Hiding behind the dry statistics is an abundance of suffering that can be hard to comprehend. Poverty means hunger, homelessness, addiction, untreated ailments and mental illnesses, months spent without heat or water or electricity, plus humiliations large and small at the hands of everyone from police officers and landlords to social workers and government officials. As if the physical hardships and insults weren’t enough, Desmond writes, “poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed.”
GOChildhood Poverty
In the united states, a staggeringly wealthy country, one in nine people—and one in eight children—is officially poor. Those figures have fluctuated only slightly over half a century, during which scholars and journalists have exhaustively debated the reasons for the lack of progress. Training their attention on the lives of the dispossessed, researchers have identified barriers that keep people at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing its rungs, and offered arguments that usually play out along ideological lines. According to conservatives, the most significant obstacles are behavioral: family breakdown and debilitating habits such as dependency and idleness, exacerbated, they believe, by the receipt of government handouts. According to liberals, the real problems are structural: forces such as racism and deindustrialization, which, they contend, have entrenched inequality and prevented disadvantaged groups from sharing in the nation’s prosperity.
GOChild Tax Credit
Webinar
New evidence on child tax credits at the federal level has shown “stunning” results in lifting children out of poverty throughout the country and a state-level policy could continue that momentum, benefiting a broad range of families, panelists including ITEP State Policy Director Aidan Davis said in a February 8 webinar.
GOChild Tax Credit
State Level
One thing everybody knows about child rearing is that it’s expensive: The total cost for a child’s first 18 years is more than $230,000, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. To ease the squeeze, Congress enacted the federal child tax credit (CTC) in 1997. In 2021, an expanded version of the CTC benefited more than 36 million households. Today 12 states have their own versions of the CTC. Of the 10 states with the heaviest tax burdens, as identified by the Tax Foundation, six have some form of tax credit for child or dependent care: California, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut and Maine.
GOChild Tax Credit
State Level
In May 2022, Gov. Phil Scott signed the child tax credit, H.510, into law. Since then, the $40 million package — $32 million of which funds the tax credit directly — has been set aside to offer tax cuts to qualifying parents and guardians with young children. Vermonters who have young children and make less than $125,000 of annual income — including those who make no income at all — are eligible to receive $1,000 per child in a refundable tax credit for the 2022 filing year. Filers who make up to $175,000 are eligible for partial credit.
GOChildhood Poverty
Child Tax Credit
Academic Articles/Reports
The US Congress temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide economic assistance for families with children. Although formerly the CTC provided $2,000 per child for mostly middle-income parents, during July-December 2021 it provided up to $3,600 per child. Eligibility criteria were also expanded to reach more economically disadvantaged families. There has been little research evaluating the effect of the policy expansion on mental health. Using data from the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey and a quasi-experimental study design, we examined the effects of the expanded CTC on mental health and related outcomes among low-income adults with children, and by racial and ethnic subgroup. We found fewer depressive and anxiety symptoms among low-income adults. Adults of Black, Hispanic, and other racial and ethnic backgrounds demonstrated greater reductions in anxiety symptoms compared to non-Hispanic White adults with children. There were no changes in mental health care use. These findings are important for Congress and state legislators to weigh as they consider making the expanded CTC and other similar tax credits permanent to support economically disadvantaged families.
GOChildhood Poverty
Academic Articles/Reports
Black children in the United States are more likely to experience childhood adversity than white children, and these disparities are reflected in differential changes to regions of the brain linked to psychiatric diseases like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to new research led by McLean Hospital, a member of Mass General Brigham. The findings, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, suggest that adversity may act as a toxic stressor to regions of the brain related to threat processing and that this exposure is disproportionately seen in Black children.
GOChild Tax Credit
Childhood Poverty
Reviving CTC
We were nearly homeless when the pandemic struck. I’d tried to pull myself out of poverty so many times by then — I’d even just finished graduate school. But trying to enter the job market as COVID-19 shut down the economy proved difficult. There wasn’t going to be enough money for rent. Fortunately, the COVID-19 relief programs Congress passed — like the stimulus checks and those monthly Child Tax Credit payments — helped me keep our apartment. With this help, I could look for work while homeschooling my daughter. I was even able to put a few dollars into a savings account for the first time in my life, which was a huge relief. My family wasn’t just surviving — we were on our way to thriving. That’s exactly what a safety net is for. But now what’s going to happen?
GOChild Tax Credit
Academic Articles/Reports
Baltimore’s Promise, a non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of Baltimore City’s children and youth, has “identified a series of outcomes that it is striving to achieve in order to create and sustain a Baltimore where children are healthy and educated, and well-equipped to lead productive careers and lives.” [...] “This review builds upon reviews conducted over the past decade in Baltimore and addresses indicators, best practices, and activity in Baltimore City, as well as the funding for programs and interventions for each of the identified outcome areas.”
GOChild Tax Credit
Academic Articles/Reports
A review of the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, analyzing the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.
GOAcademic Articles/Reports
Child Tax Credit
A report on how policy Indexation can enhance poverty reduction, using the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit as an example of how indexing the policy to inflation and the cost of living can result in higher poverty reduction outcomes.
GOChild Tax Credit
Academic Articles/Reports
“This paper reviews the role of the nation’s economic assistance programs as a backstop to the risks associated with unpredictable income, low income, and joblessness, and it identifies the important role of an expanded Child Tax Credit, which provided families with a monthly cash payment between July and December 2021.”
GOChild Tax Credit
Reviving CTC
“The expanded Child Tax Credit was the most impactful anti-poverty program in a generation. Democrats should campaign on bringing it back.”
GOChild Tax Credit
Reviving CTC
“There is one temporary tax provision that has done more good than any of these, and it is designed to help children, not corporations and their shareholders. The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) dramatically for one year in 2021. This temporary expansion pulled 2.1 million children out of poverty that year and helped millions more, according to new Census data.”
GOChild Tax Credit
Reviving CTC
“Prioritizing corporate tax breaks over America’s families would undermine these recent gains and push millions of American children backward into poverty. Congress should not pass up this historic opportunity. When members return to Washington next month, they should put families before wealthy corporations by improving the CTC before even considering corporate tax breaks.”
GOChild Tax Credit
“The number of children in America living in poverty jumped dramatically after just one month without the expanded child tax credit payments, according to a new study. Advocates fear the lapse in payments could unravel what they say were landmark achievements in poverty reduction.”
GOChild Tax Credit
“The monthly child poverty rate increased from 12.1 percent in December 2021 to 17 percent in January 2022, the highest rate since the end of 2020." "The 4.9 percentage point (41 percent) increase in poverty represents 3.7 million more children in poverty due to the expiration of the monthly Child Tax Credit payments." "Latino and Black children experienced the largest percentage-point increases in poverty (7.1 percentage points and 5.9 percentage points, respectively).”
GOChild Tax Credit
“Our findings suggest that the child tax credit will not only act as a tool for decreasing child poverty in the short term, but also as a tool for increasing family social mobility in the long term.”
GOChild Tax Credit
“The fourth monthly payment of the expanded Child Tax Credit kept 3.6 million children from poverty in October 2021. The Child Tax Credit reached 61.1 million children in October and, on its own, contributed to a 4.9 percentage point (28 percent) reduction in child poverty compared to what the monthly poverty rate in October would have been in its absence.”
GOChild Tax Credit
“In 2021, the CTC lifted 5.3 million people out of poverty, including 2.9 million children.”
GOChild Tax Credit
“SPM [Supplemental Poverty Measure] child poverty rates fell 46% in 2021, from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, a 4.5 percentage-point decline.”
GOChild Tax Credit
“The share of children in poverty fell by nearly half in 2021, thanks mainly to a one-year enhancement of the enhanced child tax credit, according to Census Bureau data.”
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