Democrats Are Pushing to Make the Stimulus Package’s Historic Anti-Poverty Measures Permanent

“We can change America.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)Stefani Reynolds/Getty

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Last week, President Biden signed into law historic anti-poverty measures as part of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package. Now, Senate Democrats are pushing to make the temporary provisions from the American Rescue Plan into permanent fixtures.

The law gives most families a $3,600 tax credit for each child under age 6 and $3,000 for children aged 6 to 17. “Though framed in technocratic terms as an expansion of an existing tax credit, it is essentially a guaranteed income for families with children, akin to children’s allowances that are common in other rich countries,” wrote the New York Times’ Jason DeParle. Columbia University researchers project that the provision could cut child poverty in half. In its current form, the provision lasts only a year.

Yet even before the stimulus package was signed into law, some Democrats voiced support of extending the benefit indefinitely. Speaking on MSNBC on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed, “I’ll do everything I can to make it permanent.” He added, “That’s one of the most important things we can do. We can change America, if we make them permanent.”

The stimulus package also expands the federal nutrition program for low-income women and children, enhancing monthly vouchers for fruits and vegetables from $9 for children and $11 for women to $35 for both. In a press conference on Sunday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand called for the increases to be extended indefinitely.

Gillibrand previously called to permanently extend another provision, which expands sick leave benefits for workers. “One of my goals is to make paid leave permanent,” she told Yahoo Finance. “We are still the only industrialized country in the world without access to paid leave and most workers do not have access.”

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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