October 11, 2016

Hillary Clinton Releases Plan to Help Children in Deep Poverty

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While Donald Trump is doing his best to immolate the Republican Party, Hillary Clinton is…making proposals to assist people in need. Boring! This is, however, the kind of thing we typically expect from presidential candidates, and Clinton’s new proposal is on a subject that’s been close to her heart for her entire career: helping children.

In particular, she’s proposing a two-part change in the child tax credit. First, instead of kicking in at $3,000, it would kick in at $0. This would help people in the deepest poverty. Second, for families with children four and under, it would max out at $2,000 instead of $1,000. The chart below shows what families would get per child compared to the current CTC (in blue):

The mainstream press pretty clearly couldn’t care less about this, and I suppose that’s hardly surprising given the Hindenburg-like dimensions of the meltdown of one of America’s two major parties. Still, surely it deserves a little bit of attention?

UPDATE: My original chart was wrong. The current child tax credit starts at $3,000 and increases by 15 percent of income until it maxes out. The Clinton credit starts at $0 for children of all ages, but increases more steeply for children four and under. Apologies for the error.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

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