The Year That Broke Care Work
The crisis of care is not new for low-income parents. The pandemic just spread the pain and created new audiences for old solutions.
Illustration by Tara Jacoby
A small guaranteed income is included in the new stimulus package approved by Congress on Wednesday afternoon. Starting around July, households earning $150,000 or less annually will receive monthly payments ranging from $250 to $300 per child, part of the larger $1.9 trillion package in response to the coronavirus pandemic. These are a kind of advance on an existing but expanded child tax credit. What that will look like for those families, however, is a direct deposit or check, not a new program they will then need to apply or ask for. The payment per child may seem small, but in total, the impact is estimated to be a 40 percent reduction of child poverty nationally, cutting child poverty in half for Black families specifically. And it will achieve this by doing something painfully straight