The Child Tax Credit

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Ohio, Senator Brown, for his remarkable leadership in getting us to this point with the child tax credit and with the earned income tax credit for childless families which, thanks to his leadership, we have been able to triple.

But I think we are here today on a really, really momentous matter. When I think back to the days when I was the superintendent of schools in Denver, most of the kids in my city were kids of color and most were living in poverty, and many of their families were working two or three jobs. And no matter what they did, they couldn't get their kids out of poverty.

Today, now, I travel the State of Colorado, a State that has got very rural areas and very urban areas. If I had to summarize the last 10 years of my townhalls--10 or 11 years--it is very easy to do it. No matter what county I am in, people say: We are killing ourselves, and no matter what we do, we can't afford some combination of housing, healthcare, higher education, early childhood education--if there is any childhood education. We can't save. We feel like our kids are going to live a more diminished life than the life we lived.

That is the anecdotal reflection of an economy that, for 50 years in this country, has worked really well for the top 10 percent of Americans and not for anybody else. The result of that is, today, the United States is 38th out of 41 industrialized countries, in terms of childhood poverty.

The poorest people in our society are our children. The poorest generation in the United States of America are our children, which is scandalous.

Senators Brown, Booker, Warnock, and then-Senator Harris, before that, and I came together to try to address it and to say that we don't have to accept this much childhood poverty as a permanent feature of our economy or a permanent feature of our society. We can actually fix this by making three changes to the child tax credit: to increase the amount and make it fully refundable, so that for the first time in our country's history the poorest kids have the benefit of it; and to have it paid out on a monthly basis, so that when parents and grandparents are at the end of the month trying to make the rent or buy a few more groceries or pay for a little bit more childcare, they are able to do it in real time.

I am sure my colleagues on the floor today spent time meeting with people in their States over the recess. I did. I met mostly moms, but parent after parent after parent, who said to me: For the first time in my life, I was able to buy back-to-school clothes, and I didn't bankrupt my family. Buying back-to-school clothes was not a catastrophe for my family. My kid was able to go to school in a new shirt.

One mom in Colorado Springs said to me that she bought a bicycle for her son so he could take himself to school and participate in afterschool programs that he wouldn't have otherwise been able to participate in, because he could take himself there and bring himself back.

She said that he had burst a tire in this new bicycle and that she was able, because of the child tax credit, not to buy the cheap tire that she would ordinarily buy that would break next week--as she said-- but to buy a tire that the kid could rely on. She said, ``That is what being poor in America is like; you have to pay a tax on everything,'' because you can't buy a decent pair of shoes and you can't buy a decent tire for a bike.

This is a reason why 450 economists have written to the administration saying we should be making this permanent. And I believe we should be making it permanent. They have also pointed out that it is very important for people to hear that this is pro-work. The countries that have child allowances like this actually have a higher percentage of people in the workforce than we do, because people can use that allowance to pay for a little extra childcare so they can stay at work. They can use that allowance to help pay to fix a car so they can stay at work. This is a pro-work policy.

Just as importantly, childhood poverty costs our country $1 trillion a year. We have been told by Columbia University that we are going to see an 8x annual return as a result of cutting childhood poverty in half this year, which this policy does, as opposed to spending money just to mitigate the effects of childhood poverty.

So there is every reason in the world that we should make this permanent, that we should extend it. In my view, we can't afford not to, and that is why we are here today.

I want to thank my colleague from New Jersey, Senator Booker, somebody I have known since he was mayor of Newark and I was the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, and we were working together to try to lift up kids in our respective communities. There have been many times when I have been on this floor and I have said that we are treating America's children like they are someone else's children, that only a country that didn't care about their kids would treat our kids the way we have.

But, finally, we are not. Finally, we said: We are not going to tolerate this. And a lot of that has to do with the Senator from New Jersey's leadership.

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