Senator Michael Bennet | Official U.S. House headshot
Senator Michael Bennet | Official U.S. House headshot
Video of the Subcommittee Hearing Available HERE
Washington, D.C. — In case you missed it, Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, Chair of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee Subcommittee on Taxation and IRS Oversight, championed the success of the Child Tax Credit since its inception 25 years ago and called on Congress to restore the expanded tax credit during the subcommittee’s first hearing this Congress.
On the success of the Child Tax Credit, Bennet said:
“Over its history, this tax credit, which is the single largest federal expenditure in kids, has made it easier for families to afford rent, groceries, child care, and the thousands of other expenditures that come with raising a child in America. At its best, the Child Tax Credit has lifted nearly two million children out of poverty and demonstrated that we don’t have to accept, in the wealthiest country in the world, one of the highest levels of child poverty in the industrialized world as a permanent feature of our democracy.”
Pushing back on claims that the Child Tax Credit disincentivizes parents from working, Bennet said:
“I think, just based on the conversations I’ve had with moms, mostly, in Colorado, that some of these critics are living in an imaginary world — a world where a mom who’s making $2,000 a month as a janitor, who already can't afford the $1,300 a month for a two-bedroom apartment and $900 a month for childcare. In this imaginary world, she quits her job paying $2,000 a month because she starts receiving $250 a month from the Child Tax Credit. In reality, parents can’t afford to work because it’s too expensive to pay for child care in America. That’s not just my opinion, I hear it every single day in Colorado.”
“The problem in America is not that people won’t work. The problem in America is that we’ve had an economy for fifty years that has grown for the very wealthy and has not grown for everybody else, including when we’ve had periods of economic growth.”
“Having been the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, a school district where most of the kids are kids living in poverty in this country... I will assure you that the people in that school district are working. They're working two and three jobs in many cases. They're not lazy… They're working at jobs in the richest country in the world that pay them so little, that no matter how hard they work, they cannot lift their kids out of poverty.”
On the need to address child poverty in the United States, Bennet said:
“We are living in a world now where we are the richest country in the world and have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. We don’t have to accept that.”
“I do believe that there is a bipartisan consensus in America, that we don't need to cut any more taxes for the people at the very top and expect that it's going to trickle down... And I think people are ready to turn the page on that trickle-down economics in all respects... And I'm going to continue to fight for that because I think it's the right thing for the American people [and] the right thing for the people of Colorado.”
Background:
The Child Tax Credit was first created as a part of the 1997 Taxpayer Relief Act, and has been expanded several times with bipartisan support. Bennet authored the 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which reached 62 million children and helped cut poverty by half. During the hearing, the subcommittee heard from University of Michigan Associate Professor Katherine Michelmore, Ph.D., Center for Law and Social Policy President & Executive Director Indivar Dutta-Gupta, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility Kevin Corinth, Ph.D., and American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow and Rowe Scholar Angela Rachidi, Ph.D.
Original source can be found here
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