When I was a child, my father kept an editorial cartoon pinned up in the vestibule of our church that made a deep impression on me I have never forgotten.
It was a black and white drawing by the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Herblock that was originally published in The Washington Post in October 1947. The picture shows well-dressed, happy people sitting at a banquet table overflowing with place settings, goblets, and so much food — a roast, gravy boats, bread, and butter, covered dishes, heaping platters of sides — the table cannot hold any more.
Hovering behind them and filling the rest of the image is a crowd of gaunt, wide-eyed hungry children dressed in rags. Back at the table, one of the dinner guests is speaking cheerfully to his smiling companions. The caption reads: “Shall we say grace?”
The Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) expansions enacted during the pandemic in the American Rescue Plan helped millions of working people and families with children afford food and other basics.
During the holiday season, many Americans are blessed and deeply grateful to gather with family and friends and say grace around a table that looks a little like the one in the cartoon. But many others are outside watching quietly with no place at America’s table of plenty.
For families who couldn’t gather with loved ones during the pandemic, celebrating around full tables seemed especially joyful in 2022. But there are millions of Americans for whom trying to put a holiday meal on the table — or just making sure everyone has enough to eat every day — became even more difficult this year. The Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) expansions enacted during the pandemic in the American Rescue Plan helped millions of working people and families with children afford food and other basics.
On Nov. 30, the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee released a report again showing the expanded CTC’s dramatic success in helping child poverty fall to its lowest rate on record in 2021. But when Congress let those expansions expire in December2021, many adults and parents couldn’t fill the gap. Research now shows food insufficiency rates among households with children increased 25% in 2022 after the monthly CTC payments ended. Some are hungrier now than when the pandemic began.
The Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a leading national nonprofit working to eradicate poverty-related hunger and undernutrition, and a coalition of more than 550 national, state, and community-based organizations, sent a letter to Congressional leadership urging them to reinstate the expanded CTC and EITC in any end of the year tax package.
“With the expiration of these two programs, organizations like ours know full well how tens of millions of families are experiencing higher levels of food insufficiency, and racial disparities are only deepening,” a section of the letter read.
“Failure to reinstate the extended CTC and EITC will only fuel hunger by increasing the income, educational, health, and racial disparities that are pervasive in our country.”
Research confirmed buying food was the most common use of the expanded CTC payments across all income levels, and the CTC increased families’ ability to afford and eat more fruit, protein, and balanced meals. If in place for another year it would support more than 500,000 private-sector jobs. More than 130 economists recently called for restarting the monthly CTC payments to offset inflation.
As this Congress tends to its last two weeks of unfinished business, it has important choices to make. Making sure fewer children, families, and workers don’t go hungry should be an easy one. There is no excuse for ignoring the deep needs all around us in a nation that has more than enough to spare and share for all.
Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund
