Child poverty is on the rise

When the COVID pandemic cast its dark cloud over the United States, there was an unexpected silver lining: Child poverty was all but wiped out.

Sadly, though, that great achievement didn't last. Census Bureau figures released in September show that in 2022, the percentage of America's children living in poverty had jumped dramatically and is now higher than before the pandemic took hold.

That high level of child poverty should not be acceptable, especially not in our advanced, industrialized nation. Children in the United States should have a decent standard of living. They deserve to grow up with a reasonable chance of becoming healthy, happy and productive adults.

We — representatives in Washington, voters, citizens — should act now to return to the strategies that we know lifted millions of children out of poverty, at least for a while. We need to look back only two years to see what can be done.

The first full year that we struggled through the disruptions of COVID, 2021, turned out to be a great year in terms of reducing the number of children living in poverty. The year before, 9.7% of America's children lived in poverty, according to the federal Supplemental Poverty Measure. In 2021, that percentage fell dramatically, to 5.2%. Millions were lifted out of poverty.

The reason is obvious: The improvement was due to emergency measures by the federal government to ease the financial burdens caused by the pandemic. Leading the list was the enhanced version of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) program, designed to help parents deal with financial problems caused by disruptions to schools, child-care programs and jobs. The new tax credit program gave parents a yearly tax credit of up to $3,600 per child, some of which could be paid upfront monthly rather than waiting for taxes to be filed the next year.

Other emergency relief programs — stimulus checks, increased unemployment insurance, increased Supplemental Nutrition Insurance Program (SNAP) payments — also helped cut the child poverty rate to 5.2% nationally.

But as the pandemic eased, Congress allowed the enhanced CTC and other emergency measures to end. At the same time, extra federal funding for child care is ending and Medicaid coverage is shrinking. It doesn't help that inflation is driving up the costs of food and nearly everything else.

Census Bureau figures for 2022 show that as those programs ended, the child poverty rate in the U.S. more than doubled, to 12.4% — representing about 9 million children. We successfully lifted millions of children out of poverty, only to plunge them back in. We saw what we needed to do, but then we stopped doing it.

Those numbers are not just statistics. The past has made it painfully clear that living in poverty negatively affects children in many ways. They are more likely to have poor nutrition and health problems. They often struggle in school and participate in few activities. Poverty increases the chances that a child will be homeless or a victim of abuse or neglect.

After one year of marked improvement, the U.S. is back to having one of the worst percentages of child poverty among all the world's democracies with market-based economies. It doesn't have to be this way.

What are our priorities? Surely helping children to have minimally decent lives — and chances for better futures — should be high on our lists. There may be legitimate discussions about minor adjustments to the Child Tax Credit program, but there should be no question that reducing child poverty is a goal all Americans support.

What happened in 2021 should make us determined to alleviate child poverty. We now know that we can do it, we know how, and we know that as a nation, we can afford it. What we can't afford is to let millions of America's children continue to live in poverty.

Opinion editor's note: See the Star Tribune Editorial Board's Oct. 8 editorial for information on Minnesota's new child tax credit.