Here’s one for all the people complaining that this election hasn’t focused enough on policy. Hillary Clinton has released yet another detailed proposal aimed, this one aimed at helping families living in extreme poverty:
Specifically, Clinton is calling for a change in the refundability threshold of the child tax credit. Those sound like technical changes, but it has tremendous ramifications. Currently, the poorest American families can’t claim the credit, which is a mainstay of the tax returns of most middle-class families. That’s because households that make less than $3,000 a year — the truly, desperately poor — are excluded entirely, and households making under $9,666.67 can’t get the full credit.
Clinton would change the law so that families start getting the credit with the first dollar they earn. That would effectively increase the tax refunds of the poorest families with children. In addition, Clinton would double the credit for children 4 and under, something that helps both poor and middle-class families with young kids, and she’d make the credit phase in much faster for families with kids in that age range. [...]
Back in 2011, the Tax Policy Center estimated the average tax break that poor people affected by the change would get to be $372 a year — not a lot to middle-class families, but a very significant sum for families in desperate poverty.
This would, in short, be a major help to the very poorest families. It’s not a lightning bolt solution to poverty, but it would matter. And it’s one of dozens of detailed, serious policies that Clinton has proposed in the course of this total cluster of a campaign cycle. Here’s one way to think about it: if Hillary Clinton can stay focused on policy while she campaigns against Donald Trump, she can stay focused on policy while she wrestles with a Republican Congress. Although over the next 27 days, we’ll see what we can do about that Congress.