We always have a choice

One of many moments that broke my brain during the haze of bad “post”-pandemic decisions was when the U.S. let the expanded child tax credit expire at the end of 2021. My brain was further broken when I learned how the child tax credit worked before its expansion under the American Rescue Plan Act, and realized that we, as a country, decided that that was the system we would rather have.

Before the expansion and now, post-expansion, families need to reach an income threshold before they would qualify for the child tax credit. That means low-income families, those who need the credit the most, do not qualify. “About one-third of children were excluded from the full credit, including over half of Black and Hispanic children, as well as 70 percent of kids raised by single moms,” Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox.

The American Rescue Plan re-tooled the child tax credit so that a) there was no income threshold, b) families would receive either $3,000 or $3,600 per child, based on age, instead of the previous $2,000 cap, and c) instead of one lump sum with their tax refunds, payments were sent out monthly. 

In terms of poverty alleviation, the expanded program worked. It worked so well. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the program lifted 10.6 million people out of poverty and made 17.5 million people less poor; 5.5 million children were lifted above the poverty line and 6.4 million children were less poor. In simpler terms: the expanded program cut child poverty in half. Pediatricians who work with malnourished kids told NPR that they saw the difference the program was having on the families they serve.

We had a program that was getting money into the hands of people who needed it the most and was actually moving the needle on poverty and we… let it expire. 

The pandemic laid bare that, as much as powerful people like to shrug their shoulders and say “that’s the way things are,” “we have no choice,” the truth is we do have choices. Americans dealing with layoffs, furloughs, and unemployment saw European countries were just paying people to stay home. People with disabilities saw the work-from-home accommodations they’d been fighting for suddenly become available for almost everyone overnight. Everything about the way we live—our healthcare system, housing, transportation (my kingdom to bring back streetcars!)—none of it was inevitable. Someone, somewhere made a decision.

Some powerful people are still operating on old reflexes. Employers (including Epic Systems) continue to push people to return to offices in the name of “company culture.” UW System (Ooops, sorry, guess it’s the “Universities of Wisconsin”) President Jay Rothman didn’t think twice about spending $480,000 on a rebrand, as if branding were the source of any of the university system’s problems. Meanwhile he’s also pushing austerity measures, especially at campuses serving working-class kids. And it took several months and at least 20,000 Palestinian deaths—mostly children—for Sen. Tammy Baldwin to break free of the U.S.’s reflexive, unquestioning support of Israel and join calls for a ceasefire.

We know where these reflexes come from. When it comes to poverty, we have this pervasive argument that we can’t just give poor people money because they’ll waste it. The cold hard truth is that when you put money in the hands of people who need it the most, they spend it on basic necessities, like food. We see, again, and again, studies that find the actual reason poor people are poor is not because they’re irresponsible but because they don’t have enough money. Or, more correctly, because their employers refuse to pay them enough for their labor. 

To be clear, there is still a child tax credit. Our tax dollars are still going to this program. But people who earn less than $30,000, the people who earn the least and need it most, may only qualify for partial credit, if they qualify for any credit at all. We chose to keep spending tax dollars to provide financial help to people who do not need it instead of saving money and cutting child poverty in half. Low-income families also pay taxes but they receive fewer benefits than everyone else.

In his book Poverty By America, Matthew Desmond (also the author of Evicted and a UW-Madison alum) argues that the U.S. doesn’t have bad policy toward the poor because we actually believe that they don’t work hard or are bad with money. I believe he’s overestimating the empathy and underestimating the delusions of people who make jokes about working at McDonald’s. We know they would melt down during dinner service but I think many honestly believe they would immediately become the heir apparent of the fast food kingdom. In my experience, a lot of people genuinely believe that poor people are lazy and irresponsible

But Desmond’s larger point is that we don’t actually address poverty because everyone else benefits from the system as it is. Look at the mortgage interest deduction, especially in the context of homeownership becoming further out of reach for most Americans. People who can afford a $750,000 home (or second home!) do not need to write off their interest payments, certainly not at the expense of other taxpayers. But no one with any political power questions it because they benefit from it.

If you’re a dollars and cents kind of person, you should know it costs the US about $500 billion (yes, with a b, billion), or about 4% of GDP every year, to address the impact of child poverty on the back end. If you’re in favor of cutting taxes or giving money to middle-class and wealthy people, you should support saving money by throwing poor people a bone once in a while. But we don’t. 

Maybe it’s just because this country does hate poor people. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to keep everyone in line if poverty is so dire. If we actually had a safety net, if sticking your neck out didn’t put you at risk of losing everything, we might get some breathing room, form communities, and get involved. If our basic standards of living didn’t feel so precarious, we might even get some ideas about how we want this world to be, and make it happen. 

This election year, when someone tells you we had no choice, we have to do what we’ve always done, know they either suffer from a profound lack of imagination and/or initiative, or they are lying. Our present was shaped by history, but it was never inevitable. Other choices could have been made. Other choices can be made.

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