Turns out an awful lot of US politicians see no problem with kids going hungry

theguardian.com:

Child poverty is bad. I think we can all agree on that, right? Americans are divided on lots of issues but it’s reasonable to suppose that, no matter where someone sits on the political spectrum, they would want kids to have enough to eat. Right?

Wrong. As it turns out an awful lot of politicians have no issue at all with kids going hungry. Last year the federal government lifted millions of American children out of poverty with the stroke of a pen when it expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) as part of the American Recovery Plan. There was nothing particularly revolutionary about this policy: lots of rich countries provide some version of a universal child benefit. But, while it wasn’t revolutionary on a global scale, the CTC transformed the US: monthly child poverty was slashed by roughly 30%. About 3.7 million children saw their lives improve. And then, at the end of 2021, the CTC expired and congress failed to extend it. Those 3.7 million kids went hungry again; a February study found that child poverty increased by 41% in after the program expired. In short: a wildly successful policy that improved millions of people’s lives was simply chucked away.

Republicans – the party that loves loudly proclaiming how “pro-life” they are and how much they care about family values – are largely to blame for the CTC expiring. Every single Republican in congress opposed extending the CTC. Joe Manchin, a supposed Democrat, also helped kill the program; he reportedly told colleagues that he worried that parents would waste the money they were being given on drugs. Did he have any evidence for this? No, of course not. In fact, studies show that 91% of households making less than $35,000 a year used the money to pay for food, shelter,