Cash for Kids Comes to the United States
On a weekday evening in early July, Jim Lysen, a retired health-clinic director, and Ed Fallon, a grandfather and veteran, ignored the pouring summer rain as they knocked on the front door of a townhouse in an affordable-housing development on the banks of the Androscoggin River in Lewiston, Maine.
“I am a volunteer with the Maine People’s Alliance, and we’re making sure people know about the child tax credit,” Lysen said. “That’s another stimulus payment?” a grandmother named Eileen Pelletier asked, as Lysen and Fallon provided her with a damp fact sheet. “It was part of a stimulus package,” Lysen told her.
A few doors down, a sullen teenager answered, telling Fallon that there were multiple kids in the home. “Did you get the stimulus checks?” Lysen asked. “No,” the teenager said, a good indicator that the family would miss out on the child-tax-credit money too. “Do you know about the CTC?” The kid shrugged before closing the door.
The initiative Lysen and Fallon were there to promote is a technical change to a federal tax expenditure that is also the most radical expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society. Beginning this week, the IRS will start sending monthly, no-strings-attached cash payments to an estimated 65 million children living in low- and middle-income families, potentially slashing the country’s child poverty rate by
