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Manchin also wants to impose work requirements on the program, which combined with that $60,000 cut-off could mean that grandparents raising children, or disabled parents, or students with young children wouldn’t get the help. One of those grandparents raising a grandchild lives in West Virginia. Melissa Boyles is 62 and disabled, as is her husband Michael, who has had multiple strokes and reduced lung function. She has a question for Manchin: “Why should my granddaughter be punished because of my disability?”
“She needs clothes. She needs things for school. She needs shoes for her feet. She needs food in her belly,” Boyles told The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell. That’s what the $250/month child tax credit (CTC) she’s received for her granddaughter has helped pay for—food, a new bed, and a few nice things that makes life easier for young teenage girl, like a second-hand dress to wear to homecoming and a bit of cash to spend while hanging out with her friends. Or a winter coat, in the case of 72-year old Sandra Westrand’s 9-year-old grandson in Spokane, Washington. That’s what she’s going to spend this month’s payment on.
Because of the CTC expansion to all families, even those who make too little to file tax returns were able to receive the boost for the last half of this year. Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the COVID-19 relief bill, provided those funds—even to families in which parents or guardians can’t work. That’s what Manchin has a problem with, though he apparently doesn’t have a problem with keeping money flowing to military contractors, even when the Pentagon says it doesn’t need their weapons.
Manchin is facing opposition in the Senate on this cut. “No. no. no. Just no on it.” That’s Sen. Sherrod Brown, hero, to reporters Tuesday, according to Politico. “It’s too important. I’ve had conversations with Manchin about it. Manchin wants to scale back the top and we can get major savings if that’s what he wants to do. We’ve already compromised on this, we wanted 10-year permanence. And now we’re looking at 3-4 years.”
“‘If they want to bring down the eligibility for families making $200, $300, $350, $400K, I’m fine with that,” Brown said. “But the fact is this has been the most effective, quantifiable, provable answer to child poverty that we’ve done in a generation. Comparable to what the Affordable Care Act did. Why would we scale that back?”
That’s a good question, when we can afford to give the Pentagon even more money than it asked for and twice as much as we’d be spending on everything else in this bill—including kids’ winter coats.
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