Child Poverty Rates Are Soaring, Forcing States to Step In With Tax Credits

By Jarrell Dillard and Augusta Saraiva, Bloomberg
Oct. 2, 2023

The end of unprecedented pandemic-era federal benefits for families has sent US child poverty rates soaring, leaving a handful of state governments to step in to fill the gap.

Eleven states have created or expanded a fully refundable child tax credit following the expiration at the end of 2021 of the federal measure, which enabled families to get as much as $3,600 per child. Those national benefits helped cut the child-poverty rate by nearly half to 5.2% in 2021, according to the Census Bureau.

But the rate spiked to 12.4% last year after the program lapsed and a Democratic-led effort to revive it failed. It’s probably gotten worse since: In July, nearly one-fifth of children were living in poverty, close to the pre-pandemic rate, according to a Columbia University tracker, which uses a different method for calculating poverty in order to track it on a monthly basis

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