WASHINGTON – Parents who received monthly child tax credit payments in 2021 didn’t spend the extra cash on drugs, according to a new study that contradicts a top talking point against the payments.
Researchers examined drug use trends among more than 40,000 parents and nonparents in survey data around the half-year period when the government sent all parents in the U.S. monthly payments for as much as $300 per child.
It turns out that not only did the parents not use the money to increase their drug use, they actually cut back on cigarettes, likely because the extra money made them less stressed.
“This evidence does not support policymaker concerns about increased parental substance use outweighing the substantial benefits of [advance child tax credit] monthly payments to low-income children and families,” the researchers, led by the University of Pittsburgh’s J. Travis Donahoe, wrote of their investigation.
Democrats launched the monthly payments in 2021 as part of their American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief bill that also included a third round of stimulus checks. They intended to continue the recurring payments in a followup bill but couldn’t get agreement from then-Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who later left the party and is no longer in Congress. (All Republicans opposed the legislation; it needed all Democrats on board in order to pass.)
Manchin didn’t say so publicly, but he told his Democratic colleagues he believed parents spent the extra money on drugs, as HuffPost first reported at the time. And a constituent who met with the senator as part of a group lobbying for the payments told HuffPost Manchin raised the same concern in their meeting.
“He said he’s gotten phone calls from one grandmother specifically talking about her crackhead daughter ― he used the word crackhead three times ― talking about her crackhead daughter running around using the child tax credit to buy drugs and get high instead of it going where it needs to go,” JoAnna Vance, a mother of three from Beckley, West Virginia, told HuffPost in December 2021.
The expanded child tax credit gave American parents a taste of the universal child allowance payments that are typical in every other advanced country besides the U.S. The payments also brought about a record reduction in child poverty, which rebounded as soon as the money stopped. Previous research suggested parents used the extra cash on necessities such as food, clothes and school supplies.
Continuing the parent payments was only one part of the much broader “Build Back Better” bill that Manchin opposed. The measure also included universal prekindergarten, child care subsidies and new requirements that companies offer their workers paid leave. All that material was jettisoned, while the bill’s green energy subsidies became law as part of the Manchin-endorsed Inflation Reduction Act.
The monthly cash payments to parents came about as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, which in 2020 upended politics and led Republicans to support stimulus checks to people who weren’t even working.
For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have opposed unconditional cash payments to the unemployed, and Manchin’s stand against the advance child tax credit showed American politics reverting to its original tendency.
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Josh McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a right-leaning think tank that supported the payments to parents, noted that several states have enacted smaller-scale child tax credit improvements, but surveys showed most Americans didn’t think of the expanded federal child tax credit as the newest form of Social Security, as many Democratic lawmakers had hoped they would.
“Most people saw the pandemic child tax credit as like a version of a stimulus. They saw it as a temporary relief under extraordinary circumstances,” McCabe told HuffPost.