Lone Candle

“Suppose you’re a single parent raising two kids, ages 3 and 5. You were furloughed in the spring, when the big-box store you worked at downsized. You started getting hours again in the summer, enduring substantial risk by going to work with customers who didn’t always wear masks. Child care was a mess, and you had to scrape together help from family and friends.

It was a rough year — but you stayed afloat. In total, you ended up working about 1,000 hours last year at $14 an hour, or $14,000 total — plus there were the two stimulus checks the government sent out in April and December.

Less heralded but no less important to helping you pay the bills were a couple of tax credits the government offers: You got $1,725 through the complicated child tax credit (CTC) and another $5,600 from the earned income tax credit (EITC). That came out to $7,325 — a badly needed infusion. But as is the case every year, it was also a pain — you basically have to go to a tax preparer every tax season to help you with the paperwork to claim the credits.

This week, your member of Congress, in an unprecedented act of constituent outreach, asks you to hop on a Zoom. She’s working on legislation meant to make life easier for single parents like you, including a stimulus check. But it’s the two options to reform the tax credits that she wants to ask you about.

The first option: The government will increase your CTC a ton, so you get a whopping $7,200 a year ($3,600 per child), not just $1,725. Instead of a lump sum at tax time, the government will send you the money every month or so. Under this scenario, you’d still get the $5,600 from the EITC. The downside? You’d still have to go through all that tax prep every spring.

The second option: The government will junk the CTC — and will just send you $700 per month in the mail. That’s $350 per kid under 6, every month, regardless of whether you owe taxes. Perhaps just as appealing, there’s no tax-season paperwork to prepare. That’s $8,400 per year total, even more than the CTC in option one. The downside in this scenario: Under this plan, the EITC shrinks — and your EITC goes down to $2,000.

To recap: Both give you more money than you get now. Option one gives you more money than option two. But option two makes your life much easier logistically. You get big regular monthly payments whose amount doesn’t vary. And you would no longer be in a desperate rush every spring to get your tax return in for your big refund.

Option one above is what Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration want to do to tackle child poverty. Option two is Republican Sen. Mitt Romney’s plan to enact a new, simplified child allowance.”

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“If you make $14,000 a year, there are a bunch of state and federal programs out there to help you. And by “a bunch,” I mean a bunch.

Depending on the state you’re in, you may qualify for Medicaid. It’s not so simple, though — you’re eligible in every state that did the Obamacare expansion, but a bunch of states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi) set the eligibility cutoff much lower. In Texas, single parents have to make less than $277 a month to qualify, so in this scenario, you’d be way too “rich.” (And getting your kids covered through Medicaid or S-CHIP is a whole other can of worms.)

Need housing? You can apply for a housing choice voucher under the Section 8 program, but it’s underfunded so you will have to navigate years or decades of waitlists.

Need help with child care and early education? There’s Head Start and Early Head Start. In addition, there’s the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant — but you probably won’t get it; only about 15 percent of income-eligible families do, and depending on your state, you might have to be enrolled in a formal welfare-to-work program.

Speaking of which, you might get some money from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). But, again, most don’t, and for those who do it’s strictly time-limited and requires tedious “work reports” to prove you’re not too “lazy” to deserve it.

In the winter, if you need help with heat, there’s the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) — but only 20 percent of eligible families get it.

You’ll probably be able to get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, or food stamps, to help with groceries. If you have an infant, you can probably get aid from the nutrition program for women, infants, and children. There are probably some other programs I’m forgetting.

Conservatives and libertarians sometimes see this laundry list and think, “Look at how much we do for poor people!” I see it and think, “Look at how ridiculously complicated the system we make poor people navigate is.””

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“Romney’s child allowance plan is generous. The Democrats’ plan is even more so. But Romney’s plan has one edge: It simplifies things for the people it’s supposed to benefit.”