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BY JHUMPA BHATTACHARYA, SAADIA MCCONVILLE and STACEY RUTLAND
| It’s been a rough year for feminists. As if the erosion of reproductive rights and a pandemic that’s taken a massively uneven toll on women’s careers and mental health weren’t enough, we’re now poised to lose out on legislation that would have a tremendous impact in building gender equity within our society. This latest setback is due to the failure of 51 of our senators to support President Biden’s Build Back Better bill—the latest addition being West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
In a confounding move, Manchin decided to derail the bill in a Fox News appearance Sunday night, stating he will vote against it. In a Senate controlled by Democrats by the slimmest of margins (Vice President Kamala Harris’s deciding vote in an otherwise 50/50 party split), Manchin’s announcement has effectively killed this legislation.
Manchin’s cable news decree will have a devastating effect on millions of Americans, and especially on women. The Build Back Better bill is a policy crafted to support everyday people: the extension of the expanded child tax credit (CTC) projected to cut child poverty by 40 percent, paid leave, free preschool, subsidized childcare. While these items would benefit society as a whole, they would have an outsized positive impact on supporting women in the workforce given the disproportionate amount of care work we do.
It’s been reported that Manchin’s demands of the White House include stripping BBB of its CTC provision, because he believes parents entering the third year of a global pandemic are more concerned with taking drugs than taking care of their kids. This is not only an exercise in extreme cynicism, but a demonstration of how Joe Manchin’s views on people living in poverty are anti-Black, xenophobic and out of touch with the truth.
Families have overwhelmingly spent CTC money on basic needs like putting food on the table and paying the electricity bill, and this year’s payments have had an outsized positive impact on Black and brown children—because they are more likely to live in poverty due to systemic injustice. Experts say the benefits of the policy that sends up to $300 a month per child to nearly every parent in the country far outweigh the cost, with 400 economists urging the Biden administration to permanently expand the policy, stating it would “yield tremendous immediate and long-term benefits.”
(To read more, click here.)
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