John,

We’ve got an urgent opportunity to expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC), but Congress needs to hear from you.

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan included a provision that expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and made the full credit available to families with the lowest incomes for the first time in its history. The CTC and other pandemic assistance caused child poverty to fall by 46% in 2021, with the Black child poverty rate dropping from 16.9% to 8.1% in just one year and the Hispanic child poverty rate falling from 14.7% to 8.4%. The CTC alone lifted 716,000 Black children and 1.2 million Hispanic children out of poverty.¹

When Congress allowed the expanded CTC to expire at the end of 2021, all that progress eroded. The number of poor children more than doubled, from 4 million in 2021 to 9 million in 2022. Now 19 million children are left out of receiving the full credit because their families earn too little income.

Child poverty isn’t an inevitability, it’s a policy choice. Congress now has the opportunity to fix this egregious error by attaching an expansion of the Child Tax Credit focused on children in the lowest-income families to the upcoming stopgap spending bill. Send a letter to your members of Congress demanding they expand the Child Tax Credit in the funding bill being negotiated right now.

Raising children is expensive. Brookings Institution reports that an average middle class family will spend $310,605 raising a child to adulthood.² We all benefit from the investments parents make in the youngest generation, and as society we should shoulder some of the responsibility to ensure all have the support they need to reach their full potential.

The current structure of the Child Tax Credit is upside down. A parent with two children needs to make over $27,900 in order to receive the full CTC — they’d need to work full time at twice the current federal minimum wage to get the full CTC.³ Many parents and caregivers cannot work full time because they have important responsibilities in their families and communities, or have chronic health conditions or disabilities themselves.

And due to historical and ongoing racial discrimination, Black, Indigenous, and Latino people are over-represented in the lowest paying jobs. This results in nearly half of Black children, 4 in 10 Indigenous children, and 1 in 3 Latino children receiving less than the full credit — if they receive a credit at all — purely because their families’ incomes are too low.⁴

Congress is working to finalize a tax package to attach to an upcoming stopgap spending bill, and this is an important opportunity for lawmakers to make the right policy choice for our nation’s children and families — by prioritizing enhancements for the CTC for the 19 million left out of the full credit. With business lobbyists pushing hard for tax breaks, join us to send a strong message to Congress that their top priority must be reducing child poverty to ensure all children can achieve their fullest potential.  

Click here to send a direct message to your members of Congress today to urge them to pass an expanded Child Tax Credit that helps as many of the 19 million kids currently left out of the full benefit as possible.

Thank you for all you do,

Deborah Weinstein
Executive Director, Coalition on Human Needs

¹ Child Poverty Fell to Record Low 5.2% in 2021
² It’s getting more expensive to raise children. And government isn’t doing much to help.
³ Lapse of Expanded Child Tax Credit Led to Unprecedented Rise in Child Poverty
⁴ Any Year-End Tax Legislation Should Expand Child Tax Credit to Cut Child Poverty