Booker, other senators push to restore Child Tax Credit payments in next spending bill – NJ.com

For Alina McKnight of Newark, a single mother of three, the monthly Child Tax Credit payments she received allowed her to afford school supplies, an internet connection for virtual learning, food, heat and other essentials.

“My children come first in my house,” McKnight said on a virtual roundtable held by the advocacy group New Jersey Citizen Action. “Their wellbeing and their mental health is very important. They need to focus on school, they need to focus on their future. This has been comforting to know there is help out there.”

The expanded Child Tax Credit — $3,600 a year for children under 6 and $3,000 for those 6-17 — expired Dec. 31.

While a one-year extension was part of the 10-year, $1.75 trillion bill that passed the House, it failed to get the votes needed for Senate approval when U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., came out against along with Senate Republicans.

That has led U.S. Sen. Cory Booker and other Senate Democrats to launch a new effort to include an expanded Child Tax Credit in whatever social spending bill does emerge from Congress.

“This is a very scary and uncertain time for all of us,” said Stephanie Dawson of Edison, married with a toddler. “If my family is struggling with the high cost of raising a young child, other families are struggling even more.”

Without the credit, which initially was part of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 coronavirus stimulus law, as many as 257,000 New Jersey children under 18 are danger of dropping below the poverty level or slipping further back into poverty, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive research group.

“This is not about an investment in one child, this is about an investment in our communities,” Booker said. “It gave middle- and lower-income struggling families some of their hard-earned tax dollars back. Our entire nation Is better when you invest your tax cuts in working families.”

Booker, a leading advocate in Congress for the Child Tax Credit, said negotiations are going on now to determine whether the payments will be part of the new legislation.

“We are doing everything we can to get this tax cut extended,” he said. “This is not a fight we’re necessarily going to win.”

The original legislation also expanded health coverage, lowered prescription drug prices, reduced child care costs, provided preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, banned offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean, and acted to combat climate change.

Booker and four other Senate Democrats sent a letter this week to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, urging them to include the extended Child Tax Credit in the final bill, calling it “the biggest tax cut for low- and middle-income families in modern American history.”

“The expanded CTC is a signature domestic policy achievement of this administration, and has been an overwhelming success,” the senators wrote. “After historic progress, it is unacceptable to return to a status quo in which children are America’s poorest residents and child poverty costs our nation more than $1 trillion per year. Raising taxes on working families is the last thing we should do during a pandemic.”

Congressional Democrats are trying to come up with a bill that Manchin will vote for, without losing the backing of others who may abandon their support if certain provisions are excluded, such as increasing the federal deduction for state and local taxes, known as SALT, which was capped has been capped at $10,000.

“We support the president’s agenda, and if there are any efforts that include a change in the tax code, then a SALT fix must be part of it,” Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-5th Dist., Mikie Sherrill, D-11th Dist., and Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., said in a statement last week. “No SALT, no deal.”

In high-tax states like New Jersey, most of which send billions of dollars more to Washington than they receive in services, the deduction cap hurt millions of middle-class homeowners.

Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him at @JDSalant.

Start your day with the latest from Trenton, D.C. and your town. Get the N.J. Politics newsletter now.