Last week, the first installment of the expanded Child Tax Credit program dropped into bank accounts. Many experts, including Luke Shaefer, Hermann and Amalie Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy and inaugural director of Poverty Solutions, believe that this program could lift many children out of poverty.
“When we load up so much of our aid in an annual big refund, it means so many of our families are going into the red by the end of the year,” Shaefer said. “We used to think about poverty in the United States as static — your income is below the poverty line — but people’s lives are very volatile.”
