Republicans have been issued a warning over blocking a bill that would help reduce child poverty by a well-known progressive think tank.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has said Senate Republicans taking issue with a bipartisan bill regarding child tax credits threatens to keep millions of children in poverty by injecting "poison pill measures" that are "designed to kill the legislation altogether.
Read more: The Child Tax Credit: Who Qualifies and How to Claim It
In January the House of Representatives passed the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, a bipartisan bill that would enhance child tax credits and bring in tax breaks for businesses, with a 357-70 vote. If it becomes law, the bill would incrementally raise the amount of the credit available as a refund, increasing it to $1,800 for 2023 tax returns, then $1,900 for 2024 and $2,000 for 2025.
According to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, households would see an average tax cut of $680 in the first year. Previous analysis by the CBPP found that around 16 million children would stand to benefit from the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act in its first year, including 3 million children under three years old.
The bill has now moved to the Senate, where it has stalled. GOP Senator Mike Crapo has said the bill focuses too much on "the prior year's earnings provision must be dropped and replaced with actual tax relief," due to the bill's "lookback" provision, which allows families whose earnings decline in a year to use their prior year's earnings to calculate the credit. Newsweek has contacted Crapo for additional comment via his website.
After Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who has spearheaded the bill from the Democratic side, offered to remove the lookback provision, CBPP's Chuck Marr, vice president of federal tax policy, had said Republicans have now decided to "change the goalposts," who he says are now pushing to take child tax credit from immigrant families who file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, not a Social Security number and a stricter refundability cap.
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Utah Senator Mitt Romney has taken issue with the funding of the bill, saying in February: "Once it gets put in place, it's going to end up being another hugely expensive entitlement program, which simply doesn't make sense."
"If enacted, they would result in higher child poverty and make children in families with parents who work for low wages worse off relative to the House-passed bill—and take the credit away entirely from some children who are U.S. citizens, exacerbating poverty and hardship as compared to the current law passed by Republicans during the Trump Administration," Marr wrote in his analysis.
"The changes would virtually guarantee that the tax bill will die in the Senate—which means that 16 million children whose parents work but have low earnings won't get any additional help paying their bills and a half million or more children will needlessly remain in poverty.
"Killing the bill would hurt not only working families but also small and large businesses seeking tax benefits that Republicans have said repeatedly that they support," he continued. "If the House bill dies in the Senate, the only winners are people committing tax fraud—families and businesses would lose."
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Aliss Higham is a Newsweek reporter based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her focus is reporting on issues across the U.S., including ... Read more
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