Parents overwhelmingly used that extra tax credit money on household essentials like rent and food, according to surveys. While that might sound upside down, as Parrott puts it, the credit is an income-based benefit - so the more you make, the more you get. But married couples making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year do get the full child tax credit of $2,000 per child. Parrott says that means when the pandemic relief ended, millions of families lost out on this credit for their kids because they didn't make enough money. "That's because the children who need it the most get the least, while higher income children get more." "We sometimes talk about the child tax credit as being an upside down policy," she says. Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says it was a big factor in initially reducing the poverty rate. In 2021, Congress increased the amount of the credit as part of the American Rescue Plan and expanded eligibility to include millions more low-income families. The surge happened as record inflation was rising and a lot of pandemic relief was running out, but Census officials and other experts say a key was the child tax credit. The latest figures put it at 12.4%, the same as the overall poverty rate. Just a year ago, child poverty hit a historic low of 5.2%. Census Bureau's annual data on poverty, income and health insurance released Tuesday. has risen dramatically in the year since pandemic benefits ran out - and the child poverty rate has more than doubled, according to U.S.
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