DON'T MAKE PEACE WITH POVERTY

There's a surfeit of lessons to be learned from the economic calamity generated by COVID19. There's the one about how a deadly virus can quickly pick up steam and spread when your country is lorded over by a President who's anti-science, authoritarian, and an outright racist. There's the one about how "just-in-time" production can leave you low on inventory at the worst time imaginable. There's the one about how an economy slavishly devoted to financial maneuvering --more about extracting than creating value-- can catch you butt naked, so to speak, at the very moment when the need for" clothing" -- for protection-- is most pressing. There's the one about how prioritizing GDP over protecting the health of the populace can result in hundreds of thousands deaths. Unnecessarily. There's the one about how we're all interconnected, and that's it a risky--and possibly deadly- endeavor to ignore those interconnections. And then there's this one:

This thing that we dub "the economy" is not some divine entity that possess power over us and to which we have no choice but to submit to and accept its "rulings." Poverty, joblessness, racial domination, and income and wealth disparities-- all of these are made and, therefore, can be unmade. More specifically, one lesson that the pandemic induced recession ought to remind of us is this: There's nothing natural and inevitable about economic outcomes. Through human agency--through organization, through resistance, through political mobilization-- we can dethrone "the economy" and make it-- "the economy"-- serve us rather than other way around.

Take child poverty, for instance.

ELIMINATING ENHANCED CHILD CARE TAX PAYMENTS INCREASED CHILD POVERTY

December 2021 brought an end to the enhanced monthly checks that were hitting the bank accounts of those households with children. These monthly payments were part of Biden's Build Back Better Plan and, between July and December 2021, the Internal Revenue Service paid out $250 per child aged 6 to 17 and up to $300 per child aged under 6. It's estimated that these monthly checks reached more than 60 million kids in over 36 million households. This $3600 for kids under 6-- and $3,000 for those 6-17-- sought to continue the enhanced payments that came to be under the American Rescue Plan. That's up from the $2,000 per child during the pre-American Rescue Plan (ARP) days.

But those enhanced payments of $3600 and $3000 have been allowed to expire and, just several months ago, a report by Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy made it abundantly clear that the cost of that expiration has been an increase in child poverty: Between December 2021--the last month payments were received-- and January 2022, the monthly child poverty rate shot up from 12..1 percent to 17 percent, a whopping 40% increase. That translated into an additional 3.7 million kids living beneath the poverty line. Stated somewhat differently, the expiration of the enhanced Child Care Tax payments resulted in almost 4 million more children living below the poverty line in January 2022 than were in December 2021.

What's more, that same study shows that children of every race or ethnicity felt the impact associated with the expiration of the enhanced Child Care Tax payments:

• The number of Black kids living below the poverty line increased by 622,000 between December 2021 and January 2022.

• The expiration of the Child Care Tax payments resulted in a jump of 1,344,000 Latino kids and 140,000 Asian children, respectively, living below the poverty line.

• Between December 2021 and January 2022, the ranks of White Kids living below the poverty line swelled by 1,438, 000.

A BASIS FOR HOPE

The enhanced Child Care Tax payments never totally wiped poverty out. Even in December 2021, the last month the IRS sent these funds to U.S. households, one fifth of Black kids dwelled in households whose income put them beneath the poverty level. But the point that ought not to be lost is this: A sufficiently robust monthly payment could abolish child poverty outright.

Just like that.

There's nothing "natural" about child poverty, and seeking to abolish it is not akin to trying to obliterate the law of gravity. There's not some economy out there-- "the economy"--that compels us to make satisfy it by making peace with poverty. We can eradicate child poverty by an ample enough of amount of cash to households so that no child is poor and prevented from thriving. Other comparably countries have done so and, not surprisingly, their child poverty rates are substantially below that of the U.S.

So, sending cash-- in ample amounts, on the regular, and with no strings attached-- to all households with children is one of the most efficacious ways to obliterate child poverty. And if you're thinking--be honest!-- that the money will be wasted, that the adults will use to the money to buy dope and booze., well, then, think again. The evidence is clear that the money doesn't get blown on booze and dope. People do not use the money to get "lit." People actually spend that money on such basic goods as food, rent, utilities, and school supplies, with this being especially true of the lowest income households.

That child poverty exists when it is so simple to solve underscores a lesson here: The existence of poverty has nothing to do with some sacred economic law that produces outcomes to which we all must submit.

The powerful and the morally callous have made the choice to make peace with child poverty. The hope is that the rest of us will choose otherwise, and then agitate and organize on the basis of that hope.