This week, tax policy received a lot of attention in the election campaign.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance floated the idea of ​​more than doubling the amount of tax credits families can receive from the government per child.

“I would like to see a child tax credit of $5,000 per child, but of course you have to work with Congress to see how possible and feasible that is,” Vance said. said on CBS‘s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“President Trump has long been a public advocate for a higher child tax credit, and I think he wants it to apply to all American families,” he added, regardless of their income.

Vice President Kamala Harris made the child tax credit the focus of her campaign speech in Maryland on Thursday.

The Harris campaign says it would restore COVID-era policies, and families with newborns would receive a $6,000 tax credit in the first year. And her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, signed a bill state child allowance in Minnesota, which provides eligible families with up to $1,750 per child in addition to the federal credit.

Here is a brief guide to the child tax allowance and possible changes in the coming months.

A story with a dramatic twist

For more than a quarter of a centuryAmerican families received money from the federal government for each child.

Under President Clinton in the late 1990s, the child tax credit gave middle- and high-income families $500 per child in the form of a non-refundable tax credit. The amount and rules for which families qualify have changed in each presidency since then—currently, eligible families can up to USD 2,000 per child.

A huge, dramatic change occurred that, although it was only in effect for a short time, is still making political waves.

At the height of the pandemic in 2021, Congress made significant changes to the child tax credit as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. “It increased the tax credit, it made it available to low-income families regardless of their income or tax liability, and it made it available to families on a monthly basis,” explains Ashley Burnsidea senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, known as CLOSE.

During that period, people could receive up to $3,600 per year per child. Because families didn’t have to earn a certain amount to qualify, 19 million children from low-income families became eligible for the first time, Burnside says.

For example, for each child aged five or younger, some families received $300 per month deposited directly into their bank accounts.

The impact was profound – child poverty fallen in half“Parents spent their payments on the monthly expenses – groceries, rent, bills – that help families meet their basic needs,” Burnside explains. citing surveys Her organization helped low-income families during this time. “When families received these monthly payments, the food insecurity rate for households with children decreased.”

When the expanded credit ended, poverty rates rose again. The researchers found that “families reported having a harder time covering their monthly expenses, such as rent and bills, and affording more expensive nutritious foods,” Burnside says.

Of course, there were many other aid programs at the same time, notes Anna AizerEconomics professor at Brown University. She and her colleagues worked to tease out the impact of this period of a nearly universal, fully refundable child tax credit in a work program. Article published in JuneThey concluded that the child tax credit “is likely to improve children’s health and well-being in the short and long term, with larger effects for poor children and more modest or no effects for non-poor children.”

“If we really want to reduce child poverty, we know how to do it,” Aizer tells NPR.

CLASP’s Burnside agrees. “I think a lot of people in America, both legislators and voters, feel that poverty is something that we just can’t control — that’s just bound to happen in our society,” she says. “But the reality is that as a nation, we make policy decisions every day that cause poverty to exist and skyrocket for more families. And if we don’t invest in something like a child tax credit, that’s one of our decisions that allows child poverty to continue to exist.”

Bipartisan support, usually

Congress recently came close to increasing the child tax credit, but several key Republican senators opposed the measure and it did not become law. Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, was not present for the vote on the bill and said in the CBS interview that it was “a sham vote” and would have failed anyway.

professor Mariely Lopez-Santana of George Mason University says Republicans’ blockade of recent efforts to expand the bill belies their bipartisan history. “I think it’s entirely possible that Republicans welcome a child tax credit because it fits their agenda” and because Vance is spreading the message that his party supports families, she says.

Even though Republicans generally don’t support spending that much on social programs, “this is a tax credit, and when it comes to supporting different kinds of social programs, Republicans have actually supported tax spending.” López-Santana believes political polarization in a presidential election year has slowed policies that would otherwise have broad support.

The attention being given to this issue and its bipartisan history is encouraging to CLASP’s Burnside. “It gives me hope that both sides of the aisle are talking about this and that — because of the (2021) expansion — voters and families are seeing the value of such policies,” she says.

The details of any future expansion are important, notes economist Aizer. The most important thing about the COVID-era expansion, which had such a dramatic impact on child poverty, is that it reached the lowest-income families, and financial investments in poor children pay off throughout their lives in terms of their health and well-being, she says.

Vance said on CBS that he was in favor of a tax credit that was the same for all families regardless of their income. “We don’t want a different policy for higher-income families, we just want a family-friendly child tax credit,” he said.

“I’m not sure we have evidence that expanding it to the highest-income households will produce the same benefits,” Aizer says. “But it would be really expensive, and if you spend the money on that, there’s something else you’re not spending it on.”