PENNSYLVANIA — Today, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board highlighted the transformational impacts of President Biden’s Child Tax Credit. The fifth round of payments from the Child Tax Credit tax cut hit bank accounts across the commonwealth this week, injecting up to $300 per child into the wallets of hard-working parents. The editorial board noted that distributing the credit monthly “transformed many families’ monthly budgets.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Child tax credit is an investment in the nation’s future
[…]It goes without saying that the joy of children — their own guileless glee and what they inspire in others — far outweighs all these costs. But more importantly from a public policy perspective, they are absolutely essential to the continuation of our society, economy and culture.
That is why families needed and deserved the federal child tax credit while the COVID-19 crisis was at its worst…
Since July, families have been receiving $300 a month for every child up to 5 years old, and $250 for kids 6 to 17. The credit is available to all families regardless of employment, but begins to phase out at certain high levels of income…
Distributing the credit monthly has turned it into a kind of child allowance that has transformed many families’ monthly budgets. While economists are deeply divided on the full magnitude of the impact, it’s clear that there are fewer families in dire straits than this time last year. But even for middle class families, the credit has given some breathing room — a respite from creeping precarity.
[…]Finally, while there is evidence that some parents are dropping out of the workforce due to the windfall, if they’re using their freedom to spend more time with their children, that’s a positive effect of the policy, not a negative one. Not all socially valuable work is compensated by the market.
We invest in the future all the time in the form of science, technology, the environment, and so on. In the child tax credit, we invest in the actual human beings who will make all those other investments worthwhile.
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