Equalizing the Child Tax Credit for Babies: How the 2023 American Family Act Treats Infants
This policy memo identifies how inadvertent inequities in payment timing for newborns arose in current law and in some prior versions of proposals for permanent expansion. It explains how the 2023 American Family Act—a proposal relevant to the forthcoming 2025 federal tax debate—would deliver monthly Child Tax Credit benefits to all eligible newborns moving forward.
State Child Tax Credits and Child Poverty: A 50-State Analysis
This report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University on behalf of Share Our Strength details state options on how to use state Child Tax Credits to dramatically reduce child poverty.
A Step in the Right Direction: The Expanded Child Tax Credit Would Move the United States’ High Child Poverty Rate Closer to Peer Nations
The United States has one of the highest rates of child poverty among wealthy democracies. The expanded Child Tax Credit would move the U.S. child poverty rate closer to the mainstream: from 31st to 24th among the 34 advanced democracies with comparable data.
A Lifetime’s Worth of Benefits: The Effects of Affordable, High-quality Child Care on Family Income, the Gender Earnings Gap, and Women’s Retirement Security
CPSP and the National Women’s Law Center demonstrate how investing in child care is an investment in women’s lifetime economic security. Robert Paul Hartley, Columbia School of Social Work faculty affiliate of CPSP, provides evidence that investing in high-quality and affordable child care support for families could increase women’s lifetime earnings and retirement savings.
Inflation Inequality Leads to Three Million More People in Poverty
Recent research shows that prices have risen more quickly for people at the bottom of the income distribution than for those at the top—a phenomenon dubbed “inflation inequality.” In this brief, we utilize an adjusted inflation index that accounts for inflation inequality across the income distribution and re-estimate recent trends in poverty and income inequality from 2004 to 2018 and find that inflation inequality significantly accentuates both the incidence of poverty and income inequality.
Fighting Poverty With Jobs: Projecting the Impacts of a National Subsidized Employment Program
In this joint report by the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality and the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, we consider a policy proposal for a national subsidized jobs program and find that it would reach millions of U.S. workers left behind in today’s economy, reducing the poverty rate among participants by nearly half.
The Case for Extending State-level Child Tax Credits to Those Left Out
In a joint report with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy we find that expanding the Child Tax Credit at the state level could lift millions of children out of poverty and help families who benefited little or not at all from the 2017 federal expansion of the Child Tax Credit.