Earned income tax credit

So you've got the earned income credit that's going up again.

You've got the child tax credit up to $2,200.

The EICs is now going to be over $8,000.

$2,200 per child.

You've got the daycare up to $3,000.

So, you know, there's really three pillars of anti-poverty support or anti-poverty programs in the United States.

There's many of these, right? But like when we're thinking about non-seniors, non-kids, we're looking at Medicaid, we're looking at SNAP, and we're looking at the earned income tax credit.

which boosts the incomes of people with low incomes through the tax code.

So the credit gets bigger, the more you earn, it's a big incentive.

Audit the high income people.

That's where the money is.

But we do a ton of auditing of people, like very low income, often very low income people, right, who are getting the earned income tax credit, who are getting the child tax credit, who are using these programs.

And it's like, okay, well, how much money are you going to recover? I don't know.

I worked at a group called the Democratic Leadership Council for 15 years before we founded New Deal.

And I was there after President Clinton was elected, but was very much lived in the lore of the fact that President Clinton, when he was chair of the DLC, before he ran for president, went around the country and found things like charter schools and national policing, or sorry, community policing and national service and the EITC and all these other issues that ultimately ended up making up his agenda came from ideas that were percolating outside Washington.

This idea that states and cities are the laboratories of democracy.

So we have leaders all over the country doing, experimenting, go back to the conversation we had earlier about healthcare, on different things.

You have three children.

Government owes you through the Earned Income Tax Credit $7,500 just about in a refund from EITC.

That's right.

And 20 billion people never qualify, never even claim it every year.

That's your money.

We're protesting everything else.

Where's the protest for EITC or the march for EITC to get everybody their Earned Income Tax Credit check, right? And if you never filed, it's retroactive for as much as three years.

So if you make $35,000 a year, that $20,000, almost $20,000 check is the most money you'd ever seen one time.

We lowered the Social Security tax.

The EITC, the Earned Income Tax Credit, it's the greatest anti-poverty tool we have at our disposal.

We were able to institute some of that.

the military pensions and so forth.

But...

Our child tax credit at the federal level and our earned income tax credit at the federal level have a phase in, which means you do not get it unless you earn a certain amount of money.

A lot of our tax credits don't just have this phase out with the means testing, they also have a phase in.

And just to provide an example of that with the federal child tax credit, a single mom with three kids would not get the full child tax credit until she earned $45,000.

But one thing I really want to highlight is that at the state level where We can't really blame this on Republicans.

We are still getting this wrong.

The earned income tax credit at the federal level also has this phase in.

The poorest 15% of families are not getting the full credit.