[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 56 (Thursday, March 25, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1841-S1845]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   CONFIRMATION OF ADEWALE O. ADEYEMO

  Mr. BROWN. Madam President, before we hear from Senator Booker and 
Senator Bennet and Senator Warnock on one of the best things this 
Senate has done in my career, that being the extension of the child tax 
credit and the earned income tax credit, I just want to say a few words 
about someone we just voted on at the Department of the Treasury who is 
so, so important, Adewale Adeyemo, who will be Janet Yellen's--one 
exemplary Treasury Secretary--Chief of Staff. He is a terrific public 
servant.
  Senator Cortez Masto, the Presiding Officer, and I were talking a few 
minutes ago about the importance of the Treasury Department in so many 
things from the child tax credit, to the pension bill, to so many 
things that we do that matter--getting the $1,400 checks out and making 
sure our tax system is fair.
  Senator Bennet and I serve together with Senator Cortez Masto and 
others on the Committee on Finance. What that means and what we are 
trying to do on that committee is to take away the 50-percent-off 
coupon from corporations that shut down production in Reno or in 
Boulder or in Cleveland or in Newark and move overseas. They get, 
essentially, a 50-percent-off coupon on their taxes. We need to close 
those loopholes. We need a Treasury Secretary, and we need Adewale 
Adeyemo, who will make a huge difference in our work there.
  So I thank Senator Schumer and those on both sides of the aisle for 
finally confirming him today and getting him to work.
  I yield to Senator Bennet, who, I think, is going to start or, maybe, 
Senator Booker.
  Less than 2 weeks ago, President Biden signed the American Rescue 
Plan into law. He ushered in some of the most transformative economic 
policies to come out of Washington in generations.
  By expanding access to and eligibility for the child tax credit and 
the earned income tax credit, the American Rescue Plan is going to lift 
10 million kids above or closer to the poverty line and put money in 
the pockets of 17 million American workers across the country.
  I want to start out by noting that both the income--low-income and 
middle-income families and workers potentially qualify for these 
credits, and they will be issued periodically via check and direct 
deposit. American workers should know this was a profound change that 
will benefit you.
  American workers also have to know that they won't have to wait until 
next year. You won't have to start to see advanced payments of these 
credits 6, 7, 10 months down--you will see them as early as July. And 
because of the changes that we made, if you didn't previously qualify 
because you didn't have a high enough income, you could be eligible 
now.
  I am so proud to be here today alongside Senator Brown, Senator 
Bennet, Senator Warnock, the Presiding Officer, who are in large part 
responsible for this powerful lifeline to the American people and, 
critically, for our children.
  Senator Bennet, Senator Brown, Senator Warnock, thank you. You are 
champions who have been fighting in and out of the Senate and 
understand not just the economic urgency but the moral urgency to 
address poverty. And that is really what we are all here to talk 
about--the urgency of the crisis of poverty and specifically child 
poverty.
  In America, this is unacceptable. In the wealthiest Nation on the 
planet Earth, the question of poverty is not one of inevitability; it 
is one of policy choice. It is not if we can do something; it is will 
we do something.
  Tonight, I am going home to Newark, driving very soon, where I have 
lived over the past 20 years. I am proud to call Newark home. I am 
proud to be a part of a community of people who take care of each 
other. I am proud to be part of a community that is rich with dignity, 
rich with activism and intellect and engagement.
  But we are also a community, like so many others in America, that 
still struggles. According to the last census, the median income for 
the census track that I live in was about $14,000 per household, and 
that was before the dual public health and economic crises of the COVID 
pandemic.
  And in my community, like many others, urban and rural, across 
America, adults aren't the only ones struggling; our kids are too. In 
fact, the poorest age group in America is our children, with one in six 
American kids living in poverty. It is nothing less than a moral 
obscenity that the richest Nation in the world should have the highest 
rates of child poverty in the developed world.
  For adults, poverty has a technical definition. It is a federally 
defined guideline--an amount of annual income that you fall under that 
also takes into account how many people are in your household.
  For kids, poverty is defined by what they experience every single 
day, by what happens to them. It is growing up being more likely to 
deal with food insecurity, not knowing where your next meal will come 
from or when it will come. It is facing housing insecurity. A quarter 
of kids living in poverty will have gone through an eviction before 
they turn 15 years old.
  Kids in poverty have worse health outcomes, worse educational 
outcomes, and are more likely to become entrapped in our broken 
criminal justice system. And kids who grow up in poverty are more 
likely to be poor as adults.
  Study after study has shown how children who live in poverty have 
higher levels of stress hormones. The stress of poverty literally 
affects their brains. It inhibits brain development. It is violence 
against the brain of a child.
  One child poverty expert described the stress hormones that are 
constantly released in kids growing up in poverty as similar to the 
feeling that an adult would get after a car crash--every single day. 
This is violence.
  We know that when a child experiences poverty, there are lifelong 
psychological and physiological effects they carry with them. Study 
after study after study has borne this out.

[[Page S1842]]

For kids, poverty is literally dangerous for their development, 
dangerous for their health, and they could have permanent and lasting 
damage to their brains.
  The cruelty of this crisis is that no parent would ever choose that 
for their child. Poor parents do not choose for their kids to 
experience the daily trauma of poverty. They do not choose to condemn 
their kids to a life of worse education outcomes, worse health 
outcomes.
  What we must understand is that child poverty is not a choice that 
low-income parents make. It is a failure of our country to take 
collective responsibility for the well-being of American children. This 
is a moral sin. It is not a sin to be poor but a sin to tolerate such 
poverty in our communities.
  Almost 2 weeks ago, Congress and President Biden made the choice to 
do something about this American sin, this unacceptable reality, this 
moral obscenity--the violence happening to so many children. They did 
something about it; we did something about it in the American Rescue 
Plan. And now we are calling on our--really, we are on our way for a 
year to cut child poverty in half; for Black children more than in 
half, 52 percent; for Hispanic children, by 45 percent; for Native 
American children, by 62 percent.
  That is millions of kids across the country who will not face the 
violence of poverty. In New Jersey, that is 89,000 kids and their 
families who are not just going to be lifted out of poverty but will be 
given the opportunities and the freedoms that come with being able to 
build a life and a future beyond without the trauma that comes with 
poverty.
  That is why we are together here this afternoon--because lifting kids 
out of poverty is not just about ending a crisis but about beginning a 
new American tradition of giving every child what every child should 
have in America as a birthright. It is about creating freedom and 
liberty from the oppression of poverty. We have the power to do this. 
We have the tools to do it, and we know it makes good economic sense to 
get kids and adults out of poverty.
  I love what James Baldwin wrote. He said: ``Anyone who has ever 
struggled with poverty knows how . . . expensive it is to be poor.'' 
Well, that is also true for our country. Whether we realize it or not, 
child poverty is expensive for all of us, costing our country $1.1 
trillion every year. But investing in ending poverty benefits us all. 
Every dollar spent on combating child poverty saves this Nation $7 down 
the road; $1 invested saves us $7 later. Other countries, our peers, 
have made thes kinds of investments in children and families and have 
reaped rewards that we are denying ourselves.

  Expanding the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and 
making them permanent are proven, data-driven, evidence-based, result-
apparent ways to respond to some of the most morally and economically 
urgent challenges of the United States of America. These are the kinds 
of investments in our people that will change life trajectories and 
have a ripple effect for generations yet to come.
  If you give the child--a child firmer ground on which to grow, they 
will blossom and reap a harvest beyond our imagination. But if you 
punish them in the trauma, in the violence of poverty, you decimate not 
just their destinies but all of our destinies.
  I am so grateful to have champions that are here today alongside me 
in this effort, and, together, I know this is a crisis we are going to 
meet, and this crisis we can overcome. I am proud of the work we have 
done. Now we should make those changes to the earned income tax credit 
and the child tax credit permanent.
  I am proud to pass the microphone and the moment on to a great 
champion of the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, one 
of the original authors of the legislation that was pulled from for our 
recovery plan, and that is the Senator from Ohio, Sherrod Brown.
  Mr. BROWN. Thank you, Senator.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Warnock.) The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, thanks to Senator Booker. I will be very 
brief. I want to hear from Senator Bennet, and I know that the 
Presiding Officer is going to switch chairs and be out here speaking on 
this.
  I am so appreciative of the Presiding Officer, who won his election 
just in--on January 5. He was declared the winner--I don't know. 
Georgia elections are a little different from those of us from other 
places, and as soon as he was named the winner of that election, he 
came here and has been in the Senate about 6 or 7 weeks now and is 
already a leader on this fight that Senator Booker talked about in the 
child tax credit and the earned income tax credit.
  I have been here long enough to remember when the earned income tax 
credit was--people just didn't know much about it, including our 
constituents.
  I used to, when I was a Member of the House, I would ask 
accountants--CPAs and public accountants--to volunteer their time a 
couple of Saturdays a month for the 2 or 3 months before April 15. They 
would volunteer their time, and we encouraged people to sign up for the 
earned income tax credit, and people making $20,000 or $25,000 a year 
with kids would often get $2,000 or $3,000 in a tax refund, in real 
dollars back, because they benefited from the earned income tax credit.
  So what Senator Bennet and I have worked on for a number of years is 
to continue to expand the earned income tax credit and now a big 
expansion of the child tax credit. Senator Bennet has led on that 
issue, on that expansion, and we worked together with Senator Booker 
and now Senator Warnock to make a huge difference.
  When I voted from this chair on January--I am sorry, on March 6, we 
had been in session all night. We had voted time after time after time. 
It was a partisan vote.
  I mean, partisanship is not what Senator McConnell and my Republican 
colleagues say it is. Something that is partisan or nonpartisan is what 
the voters think, and the voters overwhelmingly support the earned 
income tax credit, the child tax credit, and the whole American Rescue 
Plan Act, and it will make such a huge difference in peoples' lives.
  But I remember after that vote--it was 1 o'clock in the afternoon. I 
was walking out of the building to drive back to Ohio. I drive every 
week or a young man drives with me every week back home. And a reporter 
stopped me and said: What do you think? I said: This is the best day of 
my political life because we--what we did, as Cory Booker said, we are 
cutting the child poverty rate in half.
  In my State--and I don't think Colorado or Georgia is much different. 
In my State, 92 percent of children in my State--92 percent of children 
will benefit from the child tax credit and their families often also 
benefit from the earned income tax credit. What is not to love about 
that?
  That is why, like, 40 Democratic Senators are signing a letter to the 
President of the United States, asking--we have done this for a year, 
this expansion to the child tax credit and the earned income tax 
credit. We should do it permanently, and that is what--that is the 
mission that the four of us Senators sitting in this room have, is to 
make sure this is permanent because we know there will likely be good 
economic growth next quarter, the quarter after, in large part, because 
of what we have done with this rescue act. There will be strong 
economic growth, but I want to make sure that growth is shared by 
people at the bottom.
  And it so often isn't. We have seen for 20 years--30 years we have 
seen executive compensation explode upward. We have seen profits up. We 
have seen worker productivity is up, but workers' wages are flat. That 
is why, in the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, we are 
working so hard to make sure that we provide more housing for people so 
that people have safe, affordable, accessible housing in this country 
because, too often, they don't. That committee is called the Senate 
Banking Committee around here. It is officially Banking, Housing, and 
Urban Affairs, but for years it is all about banking and Wall Street 
and very little about housing and urban affairs. We are changing that. 
We are changing that, in part, because this body, under Senator 
Bennet's leadership and others--this body is actually going to do the 
right thing, as Cory Booker said, and make sure that America's children 
have greater opportunities than they have had in the past. That is why 
I am thrilled to be a part of this effort.

[[Page S1843]]

  I yield to my friend from Colorado, Senator Bennet.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado is recognized.
  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, thank you very much for being a part of 
this effort, and I want to thank my colleague from Ohio for his 
extraordinary leadership from the very beginning on both of these 
bills. He led on the EITC bill, and I was very grateful to have the 
chance to be with him on that, and I on the child tax credit, and he 
was my partner from the very beginning on that, as was Senator Booker 
and Senator Harris, before she became Vice President Harris.
  I have only been here for 11 years, Mr. President, and you have been 
here a shorter time than that, and I never thought this day would come. 
I never thought we would see this day.
  Before I came to the Senate, I was the superintendent of the Denver 
Public Schools. That is a large urban district in Colorado. Most of the 
kids are kids of color and most of the kids are kids living in poverty, 
and parents are working two and three jobs, many of them. No matter 
what they do, they can't get their kids out of poverty. No matter what 
they do, no matter how hard they work, they are not paid enough to get 
their kids out of poverty.
  Over the last 11 years, I have had the great privilege of traveling 
the State of Colorado, and it is a diverse State. Politically, it is a 
diverse State. We have urban areas and rural areas, and we have got 
some of the most dynamic economies and business environments in the 
country, and therefore on the planet. And yet, if I had to summarize 
those townhalls, it is really easy. It is people who are coming and 
saying: Michael, we are working really hard, but no matter what we do 
we can't afford housing, healthcare, higher education or early 
childhood education. We can't save. We think our kids are going to live 
a more diminished life than the life that we would, and we are already 
living less of a good life than our parents did.
  And that is the anecdotal reflection of an economy that, for the last 
50 years, has worked really well for the top 10 percent of Americans 
but has not worked for the bottom 90 percent. The bottom 90 percent is 
all of America, and their wages have been flat. We have seen income 
inequality grow through two recessions, the great recession and now the 
COVID recession, and the gaps between more affluent families and poorer 
families have only grown as a result.
  And everywhere I went this year--I went to all 64 counties of 
Colorado during COVID--I heard the same thing: Give us a little bit of 
hope.
  That is what the American Rescue Plan is going to do. It is going to 
give people just a little bit of hope, make it a little bit easier for 
people to buy groceries for their families or to pay the rent at the 
end of the month, pay their mortgage, set up a savings fund for their 
kids' college education.
  That might sound like an obvious thing for us to want to do, but 
Washington, for years, has done exactly the opposite of what we are 
doing in this plan. Washington has passed one regressive tax cut after 
another saying they were cutting taxes for the middle class. That was a 
complete smokescreen. Since 2000, they have cut--listen to this--$5 
trillion of taxes. Almost all of that has gone to the wealthiest people 
in the country, when we have got the worst income inequality that we 
have had since 1928. It doesn't make any sense.
  Can you imagine if the mayor of Atlanta went to his citizens and 
said: We are going to borrow a bunch of money from the Chinese. We are 
going to borrow more money than we ever have before. And you say: Well, 
that kind of worries me. What are you going to use that money for? Are 
you building infrastructure and roads and bridges? No. Are you going to 
invest in our schools? No. Our sewers? No. Mental health, something we 
need desperately across this country? No. Healthcare? No.
  What are you doing with the money? You are borrowing $5 trillion, 
what are you doing with the money?
  We are going to give it to the two wealthiest neighborhoods in 
Atlanta and hope that somehow it is going to trickle down to everybody 
else. That is how you write a bill, which is the Trump tax bill, where 
42 percent of the benefit of that bill--it was a $2 trillion bill--42 
percent went to the top 5 percent of Americans, to the people who 
needed it least.
  This is exactly the opposite of that. Sixty percent of our bill--I am 
not going to give you a lot of numbers, but 60 percent of our bill, the 
majority of our bill, goes to people making $50,000 or less. And as my 
colleagues have said, we are cutting childhood poverty in half this 
year as a result of what we are doing, and 90 percent of American 
children are going to benefit from what we are doing. That is about as 
broad-based as you can get. It is progressive in the sense that the 
greatest benefit is going to the poorest kids because the credit means 
the most to the people making the least, but if you are making u to 
$150,000 as a couple, you are going to have a benefit for your kids. 
You will get the full tax credit for your kids.

  So let me describe it a little bit, and then I will talk about the 
earned income tax credit, and then I am going to take over for the 
Presiding Officer, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
  Most families under this change to the law are going to receive $250 
a month per child. That is $300 a month for kids under the age of 6. It 
is fully refundable. What does that mean? Well, there was a view about 
this tax credit before that said that you had to make a certain amount 
of money before you could be eligible for the tax credit because there 
was a theory that, you know, if you got the tax credit, you wouldn't 
work.
  That is not the problem. People are killing themselves. They are not 
getting paid. And so we say that you get the tax credit from dollar 
zero, which means, finally, millions of America's poorest children who 
have been completely overlooked--not just overlooked, ignored--are 
going to get the tax credit. So millions and millions and millions of 
children who were too poor to benefit from what was going on here while 
we were cutting taxes for the richest people in America are now going 
to benefit from this tax credit, and it will make the biggest 
difference for them.
  We are the wealthiest country in human history, and yet we have one 
of the largest, if not the largest, childhood poverty rates in America. 
As my colleague from New Jersey, Senator Booker, said--I lost my train 
of thought--wait until I get it back. I am so excited about what we are 
doing, I can't believe it.
  As Senator Booker said, the largest group of poor people in America 
are children. In other words, children have the highest percentage 
poverty rates in our country. How can that be? How can we accept that 
as a permanent state of things? Well, we are not. Because of Joe 
Biden's bill, we are cutting it in half. And we are saying, in the 
richest country in the world, it is unacceptable for us to have one of 
the highest poverty rates. Other countries have cut their poverty rates 
by half, why can't we? Well, today we are.
  We also have some of the worst economic mobility rates in the 
industrialized world as well, meaning it is hard to move up on the 
economic ladder. We used to say we are the land of opportunity. 
Unfortunately, there are a lot of other countries where people are able 
to get ahead by working hard. We want that to be our country again, and 
we want to give poor children a chance here. There is not a single 
child who chooses to be born poor.
  The Senator from New Jersey quoted James Baldwin. He is one of my 
favorite authors, too, about how expensive it is to be poor.
  The other thing that we have done in America is we have made it 
incredibly hard to be poor, incredibly hard to be poor. And that is one 
of the interesting things about this bill. In countries that have child 
benefits like this child benefit, they actually have a higher 
percentage of people in the workforce than we do. And why is that? It 
makes total sense. It makes total sense because if you have got a 
little bit of breathing room at the end of every month, you can fix a 
car that breaks down, and you can stay on your job. If you can afford 
to pay for a little bit of childcare for a few hours in the afternoon, 
maybe that lets you stay on the job.
  For working moms in particular, I think it is going to really create 
the opportunity for them to earn income over the long haul because it 
will be easier for them to stay in their jobs than not.

[[Page S1844]]

  As I mentioned, nationwide over 90 percent of children are going to 
benefit. So, over many nights, late nights often, on this floor, I have 
come here with one complaint or another about how we have turned our 
back on America's children. I have come here and I have said over and 
over again that we are treating America's children like they are 
someone else's children, not like they are America's children. And you 
know what? In this bill, we treated America's children like they are 
America's children, like they really matter to us, like we believe in 
their future and the future of our country; that they are filled with 
promise. No matter how poor they are, no matter what ZIP Code they live 
in, rural or urban, they matter to us. They are visible to us, and we 
are going to make them a priority.
  This is the biggest reduction in childhood poverty in the history of 
our country, and we need to make it permanent. Today, 40 of us sent a 
letter to President Biden saying that we are going to work with him to 
find a way to make this permanent.
  My goal is to end childhood poverty in this country. That is where I 
really want to be because then I will know we really are not going to 
hold some child's economic circumstances against them, but we are going 
to give every child in America the chance to run the footrace with each 
other. But 50 percent is pretty good. It is the best thing we have seen 
out of Washington in generations.
  I want to just mention a few words also about the other bill that 
Senator Brown led on the earned income tax credit, which triples that 
credit for low-income workers who don't have kids. So these are workers 
who don't have kids, who won't benefit from what we are doing in the 
child tax credit but will benefit from what we are doing on the earned 
income tax credit.
  Believe it or not, until now, until we passed this bill, Washington, 
DC, was actually taxing people into poverty. In other words, people 
were working; they were earning a living; and then they had to pay 
their taxes. And then they were in poverty because we were tripling the 
tax credit from about $500 to $1,500. That no longer will be true.
  We also bring the minimum age down from 25 down to 17, and we lift 
the cap for seniors so more people can benefit from this tax credit. In 
fact, 17 million people in this country are going to benefit from this 
change. There are 300,000 workers in my home State of Colorado. And 
these changes are going to transform lives. They are going to give 
folks a chance to breathe.

  Just like all of you, I want an economy that when the economy grows, 
it grows for everybody. It doesn't grow just for the people at the very 
top. That is the economy we have had for the last 50 years. Such an 
economy is a threat to democracy. You cannot have a democracy if you 
don't have an economy where everybody feels like they get ahead. It 
won't work. It has never worked in human history, and I think it would 
be unreasonable for us to expect it would work here.
  It has created a lot of uncertainty and, in many places, a lot of 
anger about whether the American Dream still exists for most Americans. 
I believe we will be able to dream again here, and we are going to 
need, as I said, an economy that works for everybody. That means 
investing in our infrastructure. That means having an approach, you 
know, to the competition from the Chinese Government that doesn't just 
leave us and our industries as collateral damage but creates thriving 
supply chains here, high-paying jobs here, and making sure that we own 
auto manufacturing here and other kind of manufacturing.
  It means having an education system that can prepare people to do the 
jobs of the 21st century. That is work we still have to do. It means 
making sure that every single high school kid or every single kid that 
graduates from high school graduates knowing they can earn not just a 
minimum wage but a living wage the day they walk out of their high 
school. That is what we need to do.
  But, in the meantime, this tax cut for working people and for low-
income people means that people are going to be able to put food on the 
table, save a little bit of money, get through this pandemic, make 
their lives a little bit better, and give their kids a little bit more 
hope.
  I am really grateful. I am really grateful that we elected a 
President and a Vice President who is not treating America's children 
like they are someone else's children but treating them like they are 
our children. That is not only the right thing to do for them. That is 
the essential thing to do if this democracy is going to survive.
  I want to thank the Presiding Officer for all his efforts on this 
bill as well since you joined the Senate. I am going to stop there, and 
I will come replace you.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet). The Senator from Georgia
  Mr. WARNOCK. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues--
Senator Brown; Senator Booker; the Presiding Officer, Senator Bennet--
in shining a bright spotlight on the tragedy of child poverty and what 
the Senate needs to do and can do to eliminate poverty permanently--
child poverty across our country.
  Someone has said that children are the casualties of every age, and 
while this is a longstanding problem, the fight could not be more 
urgent as countless families work to pull themselves out of the 
economic misery caused by a once-in-a-century pandemic. This pain is 
felt all across our country.
  But as we talk about the issue of child poverty, this is not 
theoretical. For me, it is personal. I grew up in public housing. I am 
one of 12 children in my family. I am No. 11 and the first college 
graduate. I stand here today as a U.S. Senator, but I am the product of 
good Federal public policy and good public schools. I know that what we 
do in this Chamber makes a difference in the lives of families and in 
the lives of all of our children. My life's journey is a testament to 
the promise of our country, the greatest country on Earth, when we make 
the necessary investments in our youth and enable them to thrive.
  As a pastor, I speak to young people all the time, and I often go 
back to my hometown of Savannah, GA, and communities all across Georgia 
like the neighborhood I grew up in. In my efforts to inspire children 
who are struggling, I tell them that your parent's income does not have 
to determine your outcome. It is not where you start; it is where you 
end up.
  Now, that is what I say to them, and I believe it, because they need 
to be inspired to give it all that they have got. But the truth is, 
when I tell them that their parent's income does not determine their 
outcome, that is not based simply on what they do, but on what we do. 
That has to be made real through good public policy.
  That is why I am so proud to work with my Senate colleagues and I was 
so happy to join this U.S. Senate at such a critical time in our 
country, and in a moment, when we, buoyed by the people of Georgia who 
made a historic choice, our majority enabled us to pass the American 
Rescue Plan.
  Over the past year, we have seen how the consequences of COVID-19 and 
the economic downturn that followed it have both illuminated and 
exacerbated so many of the longstanding disparities that have 
challenged Georgians, Americans, and people everywhere. We know that 
low-income families and children, especially, have not only not been 
spared but have, in many ways, suffered more than most. Children are 
casualties at every age.
  According to data from the Center for American Progress, we know that 
nearly one in five children in Georgia was living in poverty last year. 
Think about that: nearly one in five children in poverty in the middle 
of a pandemic. It is tough enough to live in poverty, but it is even 
tougher to live in poverty in the middle of a pandemic. What could be 
tougher than being a child in poverty in a pandemic?
  Another 217,000 of those children live in what we could call extreme 
poverty in the United States--stock markets soaring and children 
struggling and no relationship between what is happening on Wall Street 
and what is happening on their streets. It is our job to make it true 
when I say to them that their parent's income need not determine their 
outcome.
  I don't know about anyone else, but I think that these high rates of 
child poverty are unacceptable in the greatest, richest country on the 
planet.

[[Page S1845]]

Often, we tell our children to stay on the right road, to stay out of 
trouble, and we should--stay focused--but we ought to spread that net 
of responsibility.
  The truth is, poverty is its own violence. Poverty is a violence that 
traumatizes the mind, oppresses the body, and bruises the human spirit, 
so that is why the American Rescue Plan is so necessary, so important, 
and so historic. I am glad that Senators Booker, Brown, and Bennet--I 
feel a little left out, the odd guy out here--I am glad that we were 
able to push through, in the American Rescue Plan, a landmark expansion 
of two tax credit programs: the child tax credit and the earned income 
tax credit.
  Now, I am calling on all my Senate colleagues to join us in making 
these expansions permanent. By increasing the child tax credit, 
thousands of more dollars a year will flow into the pockets of the 
children and families who need it most, cutting poverty--child 
poverty--nationwide in half.
  In Georgia, more than 1 million families with children will benefit 
from the increased tax refund, and it will lift more than 171,000 
Georgia children out of poverty. Those are my neighbors and yours. 
Those are kids around my church and who attend my church.
  So I want to be clear. Not only were we able to expand the tax refund 
so that more families are getting more money, but we were able to do so 
in such a way that it gives families a monthly cash payment providing 
greater financial security.
  This is going to be a gamechanger for so many families, especially 
those who did not previously qualify for the credit when it was used 
just to offset taxes already owed to the government. Prior to this 
expansion, we had folk who were too poor to get our help. There is 
something wrong about that--too poor to get our help. This expansion 
corrects that. Now, we are putting dollars directly into the hands of 
the families who need it the most.
  In the COVID package, we were able to strengthen the earned income 
tax credit, nearly tripling the maximum tax refund allowed for 
qualifying workers because we have to make sure that childless families 
in our communities also have the support they need to pay their rent, 
keep food on the table, and more to keep our communities strong.
  Taken together, expanding and extending these programs are a major 
move toward eliminating child poverty and poverty in general once and 
for all in Georgia and all across our country, but it is still not 
enough to truly tackle the issue. We have included this in the American 
Rescue Plan; now, we must make it permanent. As so often is the case, 
the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do. This will not only 
help these families, it will help the American economy.
  I am just old enough to remember when they started talking about 
trickle-down economics. I know some communities where they have been 
waiting for decades for that trickle. It hadn't trickled down; it is 
trickling up.
  The right thing to do is often the smart thing to do. When we help 
these families, it is actually good economic policy. Because when you 
help poor families with children, they buy things like food, baby 
diapers, a coat for their kid, and it helps the American economy.
  The right thing to do is the smart thing to do. If Congress can slash 
child poverty for 1 year, why wouldn't we or shouldn't we do it once 
and for all? And so I urge the Senate to stand up and do this work in 
this moral moment in America.
  In just a few days, I will go home. I will stand up, and I will 
preach on Easter Sunday morning. This year, as it turns out, Easter is 
on April 4. It is the anniversary of Dr. King's death. So I will be 
thinking about Dr. King as I preach this coming Easter because Dr. King 
spent his last birthday, January 15, 1968, in his office, at our 
church, among other things, planning the Poor People's Campaign, trying 
to organize us and get us ready to stand up against poverty. He spent 
his birthday thinking about other people's children because he 
understood that his children would not be OK until other people's 
children were OK.
  April 4 is his birthday. April 4 is also Easter this year. Let's make 
these tax credits permanent and resurrect hope and possibility and 
promise for all of America's children.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Warnock). The majority leader is 
recognized.

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