Since child-allowance payments stopped, researchers calculate that most of the gains made against child poverty in America have been reversed
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskRather than being supplements to the safety net, food banks such as The HopeLine have become something like stopgaps. The world’s richest country has done an especially poor job at looking after its youngest. Among industrialised countries, America has consistently ranked among the worst for its child-poverty rate. The reason for this is no real mystery: the welfare state does not redistribute much to the poorest families.
For Ms Maharjan, who kept making her long trips to the Bronx, the monthly cash was enough to go from scraping by to begin “investing” in her children. “That helps a lot, especially for minimum-income people like me,” she says. She looks crestfallen as she remembers that the payments stopped in December—after Democrats, by failing to agree on much of the president’s agenda, could not approve an extension.
The early assessments were rosy. Scholars at Columbia University developed a monthly measure of child poverty that is much speedier than the official annual data. Between June 2021 and July 2021 their estimates registered a large drop in the child-poverty rate—from 15.8% to 11.9%. Put another way, the number of children in poverty fell by 40%. That was the result of all covid-related relief programmes, but the monthly payments alone drove a 25% drop in poverty in their first month.
Rather than revel in a rare policy victory, America has instead managed to snatch defeat from its jaws. “We have had such a high rate of poverty because we’ve essentially treated America’s children like they are someone else’s children,” says Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator from Colorado, a longtime champion of a policy derided as Utopian until the pandemic hit. Mr Bennet has had a bittersweet experience: watching an idea he fostered become reality, but only briefly.
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