North Carolina Budget & Tax Center director Alexandra Sirota on the latest poverty data

One of the very few silver linings to accompany the COVID-19 pandemic was a significant decline in American child poverty. Thanks to various relief initiatives and, most notably, the expansion of the federal child tax credit that the Biden administration championed, poverty numbers fell significantly for a time as the federal government provided what was, in effect, a big tax cut for millions of the nation’s lowest income families.

Unfortunately, congressional Republicans have rebuffed the administration’s’ efforts to retain the expanded child tax credit and, as a result, poverty numbers have flattened or started to trend back upward. As analysts at the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center recently reported, this is the case in our state and recently NC Newsline got a chance to review some of the numbers and the policy choices driving them in a conversation with the Center’s executive director Alexandra Sirota.