Why voters bear some blame for the jump in child poverty

If you could get free money from the government and all you had to do was ask—assertively—you’d do it, right?

In the real world, it’s not nearly that simple, as a closely watched gauge of poverty in the United States recently revealed.

In its annual report on the well-being of Americans, the Census Bureau reported an unprecedented jump in poverty rates, including child poverty. The portion of Americans living below the poverty threshold rose from 7.8% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022. The child poverty rate soared from 5.2% to 12.4%. (Technical note: Those numbers include cash assets plus non-cash factors such as tax incentives and medical expenses.)

America didn’t enter some kind of dreadful economic crisis in 2022. But something important did change: COVID-era stimulus programs ran down or expired. This simple chart tells the story:

The overall poverty rate in 2022 was a bit higher than it was in 2019, the last year before COVID. The child poverty rate was a bit lower than in 2019. On the whole, not much difference. But for two years, something happened that sharply lowered the poverty rate, especially for kids.

Isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t we make that permanent?

That was Democrats’ hope when they included a temporary expansion of the child tax credit in the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the first big bill President Joe Biden signed after taking office. That measure put a lot of extra money in the pockets of lower-income parents. Among other things, it raised the tax subsidy from $2,000 per child to as much as $3,600, depending on age. It raised the cutoff age from 16 to 17. And it made the tax credit partly refundable, meaning you could get some of it as a government check on a month-to-month basis instead of waiting to claim the whole thing the following year when you file your taxes.

Nearly 40 million families benefited from this provision. Census officials and other experts say that single program is the biggest reason poverty rates plummeted, hitting the lowest levels on record in 2021.

Then, the expanded child tax credit expired. And the poverty rates boomeranged right back to where they were before.

Many Democrats want to make the more generous version of the child tax credit permanent—and they hoped that including a temporary program in that 2021 stimulus bill would give voters a taste of something they would demand more of. Once millions of families saw how valuable and easy to claim the expanded tax credit was, they’d insist that Congress make it permanent.

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But that didn’t come close to happening. Biden proposed expanding the new credits for four years, as part of his “build back better” (BBB) legislation. But there was no groundswell of voter support for a continuation of the benefit, and Biden’s BBB plan died at the end of 2021. The child tax credit reverted to its former, less-generous form, with little public protest.

Democrats clearly misjudged the public appetite for a benefit they thought would be a runaway policy hit. An October 2021 Morning Consult poll found that 61% of registered voters said they received the new tax credit payment, yet only 50% of voters approved of it. So some portion of voters actually disapproved of a government benefit that they chose to receive and that put money in their pockets.

The same poll found 38% opposed the expanded benefit and 11% unsure. Among Independent voters, who tend to decide close elections, only 44% approved, with 39% opposed and 17% unsure. The expanded tax credit was popularish, but there was certainly no voter mandate to keep it going.

Ordinary people with busy lives can certainly be excused for not dropping everything to board buses to Capitol Hill so they can roar through the halls of Congress demanding a permanent extension of an arcane social-welfare benefit. It’s also likely many people who benefited from the measure were only vaguely aware it would expire at the end of 2021, or had no idea at all. Democrats didn’t help by larding Biden’s BBB program with dozens of wish-list programs, making it hard to know what mattered and what didn’t.

But voters who want the government to serve their interests do need to speak up when it matters. The US political system seems captured by special interests and unresponsive to regular citizens. Yet Democrats demanding action on abortion rights are getting results, and Republicans worried about illegal immigration had their day under President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021. Sometimes the system responds, and the fact that Democrats passed even a temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021 showed there are ways to pry open the door.

Most Americans don’t want the poverty rate to go up. But they don’t go too far out of their way to help push it down, either.

So nothing much changes.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.

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