Federal pandemic-era aid – led by an historic expansion of the Child Tax Credit – helped cut America’s child poverty rate nearly in half in 2021. Those historic gains were largely wiped out when Congress refused to renew the credit. But even when child poverty was reduced to historic lows, Black and Hispanic children were three times more likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts. Ismael Cid-Martinez and Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute explain why child poverty bankrupts Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream for economic justice: 

Realizing Dr. King’s dream will require a recognition that the brunt of economic disparities falls largely on children of color, and Black children in particular. The early deprivation that poor Black children are left to endure is likely to compound once they enter a labor market that shapes outcomes by race and economic status. Breaking this cycle of economic vulnerability will require some form of child allowance, akin to the enhanced CTC, that doesn’t exclude families who stand to gain the most due to their material shortcomings.

Taxpayer dollars for religious schools

In 1995, Ohio created a “ limited scholarship program in the City of Cleveland” for disadvantaged students in struggling schools. It marked the beginning of a decades-long campaign by social conservatives, clergy and religious groups to use taxpayer dollars to broadly finance parochial schools. Ohio’s voucher program has morphed from the small program on the shores of Lake Erie to cover more than 150,000 students in mostly Catholic and evangelical institutions across the Buckeye State, with a price tag of more than $1 billion. ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis has the story: 

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support. The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab.

Pew’s Alexandre Fall and Page Forrest break down forces that complicate state education funding, including the skyrocketing costs of universal school voucher programs: 

In Louisiana, the state’s newly created universal ESA program, LA GATOR, will launch in August with limited eligibility and will phase in to full implementation by 2028. The state’s Legislative Fiscal Office (LFO) projects that the program will have a minimum $258 million annual price tag once it ramps up to full eligibility. But the LFO also warns that the full financial costs are “difficult to project” because of uncertainties that, opponents say, could lead to expenses ballooning quickly.

What did Trump’s tax cuts actually do?

The economic upheaval caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has made it difficult to determine if the 2017 Trump tax law, which slashed individual and corporate tax rates, among other things, was effective at supercharging the U.S. economy as supporters promised. Andrew Duehren of the The New York Times explains what economists know and don’t know about the controversial law: 

“There are two things we know it did: It increased the deficit, and it redistributed resources toward the wealthy,” said Bill Gale, a co-director at the Tax Policy Center, a think tank, of the 2017 tax law. “The things that are harder to pin down are whether and how much it raised investment and whether and how much it affected wages.”

There’s ample evidence showing that previous tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy and corporations, a characteristic of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, did not “trickle down” to the broader economy.


It pays to pollute

A British-owned wood pellet plant with locations in Mississippi and Louisiana has been fined millions of dollars in recent years for violating pollution laws. But during this same time Drax has received $762 million in “green” loans from banks. Alex Rozier of Mississippi Today explains how polluters are able to cash in on sustainability-linked loans, or SLLs, that are aimed at motivating climate-friendly policies: 

In 2020, [Mississippi]  fined Drax $2.5 million, one of the largest such penalties in state history, for emitting over three times the legal limit for volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Shortly after the fine was announced, Drax announced receiving its first SLL. State regulators found that Drax also exceeded its legal limit of VOC releases at its two plants in Louisiana. While the company didn’t have to admit to any wrongdoing, Drax agreed to pay a  combined settlement of $3.2 million in 2022. It was the largest amount paid to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality in the last decade, The Times-Picayune reported.

Number of the Day

$595 million – Louisiana’s budget surplus from the 2023-24 budget year. Louisiana’s constitution requires Gov. Jeff Landry and legislators to direct half the money to the state’s rainy day fund and to pay down retirement debt, and the remaining amount must go to one-time projects. (Source: Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget)