"A Thrilling Chance To Slash Child Poverty In America" Nicholas Kristof Reports On Joe Biden's Effort To Cut Child Poverty In Half

 

Craig Blankenhorn

"A Thrilling Chance To Slash Child Poverty In America"

By Nicholas Kristof Opinion Columnist, Opinion

A glimpse of America today: Some children attend $70,000-a-year nursery schools, while 12 million kids live in households that lack food.

The United States has long had one of the highest rates of child poverty in the advanced world, but now we have a thrilling breakthrough that hasn’t received the attention it deserves: President Biden has offered a proposal to cut child poverty by half in his $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” — and this is historic.

“The American Rescue Plan is the most ambitious proposal to reduce child poverty ever proposed by an American president,” Jason Furman, a Harvard economist, told me. A couple of decades from now, America will look pretty much the same whether direct payments end up being $1,000 or $1,400. But this will be a transformed nation if we’re able to slash child poverty on our watch.

So the most distressing part of the Republican senators’ counterproposal to Biden was their decision to drop the plan to curb child poverty. That’s the topic of my column today. I see child poverty as a moral stain on our country, and we have a good shot at scrubbing it away. Please read my column and share.