‘How Do You Put A Price On That?’: Bob Casey Strongly Advocates For Expanding Child Tax Credit

4 months ago

During Senate floor remarks on Wednesday, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) spoke about the bipartisan tax bill that was later rejected by Senate Republicans.

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Transcript

00:00Thank you, Mr. President. I'm grateful to be here on the floor today and to join

00:05with our colleague from Oregon, who has led this fight as the Chairman of the

00:10Senate Finance Committee, to bring us to this moment where we have the chance to

00:15vote on a bipartisan bill that I'll mention what happened in the House

00:21in a couple of minutes. But this bill addresses some of our

00:26long-term challenges. One of them is addressing our low-income housing

00:31shortage. The bill also enables our businesses to continue to invest in

00:36research, development, and manufacturing. The bill eliminates fraud. The bill

00:42reduces the deficit, and for me, most importantly, invests in America's

00:48children by expanding the child tax credit. That's why groups from across the

00:54spectrum have lined up to endorse the bill. Groups like the National

00:57Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the

01:02Children's Defense Fund, and so many other groups support this bill that will

01:07grow our economy, reduce poverty, and reduce the deficit. The House overwhelmingly

01:13passed this bill by a vote of 357 to 70. This happened back in January, so now

01:22we're hoping for a similar result in the United States Senate. I hope that the

01:28Senate, in a similar bipartisan fashion, will pass this bill. We know that, for

01:34example, just with regard to one provision in this bill, the child tax

01:39credit provision, in 2021, Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan, which

01:46had as one of its features an enhanced version of the child tax credit. I've

01:52often said we took the child tax credit in 2021 and we turbocharged it to help

01:58families in a much more substantial way. By passing that legislation in 2021, for

02:06six months, and only six months, unfortunately, but for six months, we cut

02:12child poverty in half, according to the Census Bureau. So after all the years of

02:18work, decades of work, to reduce child poverty, helping to set the stage for

02:23that reduction in child poverty, in 2021, we finally, we finally found the solution

02:30to substantially reduce childhood poverty and give our children the

02:34freedom from poverty. And that solution was the child tax credit, in

02:41addition to other investments in children. I want to thank Senator Brown,

02:46my colleague from Ohio, who's seated next to me here today, for his years of work

02:51on this, laboring in the vineyards long before this was popular and long before

02:56it had a chance to pass. And I want to thank his work and Chairman Wyden's work

03:01to bring us to this moment. I am one of eight children. My parents had eight

03:08children. I'm right in the middle. And I often think about how difficult that was

03:13for a mom and a dad to raise that many children. My mother passed away last

03:18August, August of 2023. We'll be coming up on August the 11th, the one-year

03:25anniversary of her passing. And I was thinking today that what if my mother

03:31was the, not only the mother of eight children, but what if she didn't have a

03:35husband? Or what if she didn't have a, we didn't have a household income that

03:41allowed us to be economically secure. We never went without food or went without

03:46a meal. We never had to worry about that in my life. But what if that wasn't the

03:50case? What would my life have been like if my mother faced the same challenges

03:55that so many families face today? We had the full measure of economic security

04:03when I was growing up. So back in October of 2021, after we had passed the

04:10American Rescue Plan, which contained that enhanced child tax credit, I met

04:14another mother in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, in the eastern,

04:18southeastern corner of our state. This, this was a mom also of eight children,

04:25just like my mother. But she was a single mom. And she gave us a sense of what it

04:31meant to have that child tax credit in place. Her name was Crystal. And she said

04:36that the extra child tax credit payments gave her the ability to spend more time

04:41with her children and to let her, to allow her children to do more school

04:46activities for the first time. How do you put a price on that? How do you put a

04:50price on the opportunity a child has because their mom or their dad or their,

04:55the person taking care of them, has a little extra money in a month? First of

05:01all, to buy food, which was often the number one utilization of the child tax

05:06credit, the enhanced version of it, or to pay for rent or childcare or so many

05:10expenses of raising children. Why did it take us so long to finally say that

05:16raising children is really difficult? And we should, we should give families a

05:20chance to do that in a more substantial way. Why is it that every time we have a

05:26tax debate in Washington, year after year, 40 years now, in my, by my

05:31recollection, every time we have a tax debate, the most powerful people in the

05:36country benefit disproportionately, and the most powerful corporations on the

05:41planet Earth benefit disproportionately. Why is it that families raising children

05:47have always been left behind? We finally broke that cycle in 2021. The big guys

05:52got nothing from, from that. We finally said, you've had enough. It's time to help

05:57children, time to help those families raising children. But how do you put a

06:02price on a, on a parent being able to pay for a school activity that that child

06:09would benefit from? Maybe they, they have a chance to join a math club or to join

06:15a science club or to play a sport or to be in the band. Whatever it is, how do you

06:20put a price on that? That lost opportunity because of, because a mom or

06:26a dad or someone taking care of that child didn't have an extra hundred

06:29dollars or whatever it costs to, to pay the fee to be in that school activity.

06:35How do you put a price on, on having a couple hundred dollars more a month to

06:40pay for food? It is incalculable. But we know that because of what we did in 2021,

06:47we began just by way of one step, but we began to change substantially the

06:54trajectory of these children's lives. Millions of them, tens and tens of

07:00millions across the country. So we have a chance to do that again in a similar

07:05fashion, not exactly how we did it in 2021, but in a similar fashion. This bill

07:11doesn't fully revive the, the version of the child tax credit that we enacted in

07:162021. We should do that next year when we have a big tax debate in 2025, the

07:21most, in my judgment, the most important tax bill of our lifetime coming up in

07:2525. But this bipartisan bill that we're trying to get passed will make millions

07:31of children more economically secure, more secure, closer to what my family had

07:37when we were growing up. This year it'll give benefits to 16 million American

07:43children whose families are either in poverty or near poverty. Half a million

07:48just in Pennsylvania. Half a million children who are near poverty, in poverty,

07:55or near poverty in Pennsylvania. For example, a single parent with two kids

07:59who earns $22,000 a year as a child care worker would

08:03gain $675 this year. How do you put a price on that? The benefits to

08:10that family just in this year. Research shows that when the child tax credit was

08:16expanded in 2021, families used that money on essentials like food and

08:20housing and clothes and so much else. In 2021, those payments lowered the

08:26distress that a lot of families felt, the parents felt, and especially among

08:33single mothers. No mother should have to worry about how she will put food on the

08:38table. My mother never had that worry, even though she had eight children. She

08:42never had that worry because of our circumstances. No mother should be

08:47concerned about or burdened by worrying about buying her kids new clothes for

08:53school or keeping a roof over their head. So we have the power in one vote to move

09:01this bill forward and act it into law to help millions of children and millions

09:06of families across the country. So I encourage all of our colleagues in both

09:11parties to stand with those children, stand with those families, and vote yes

09:16on this tax bill. Thank you very much and I yield the floor.

‘How Do You Put A Price On That?’: Bob Casey Strongly Advocates For Expanding Child Tax Credit

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