Davis Opening Statement at Worker & Family Support Subcommittee Hearing

(As prepared for delivery)

Mr. Chairman, child poverty is a moral emergency. It is inexcusable that children in the wealthiest nation in the world are growing up in poverty. Poverty exacts tremendous suffering from our youngest citizens – causing massive gaps in cognitive learning, increasing risks of hunger and homelessness, and raising the likelihood of lower lifetime earnings and poverty as an adult.

In the face of that emergency, I am deeply concerned about how unproductive this Republican House remains frozen by an extremist agenda and failing at the most basic acts of governing while children and families wait.

Due to strong federal investment by Democrats and President Biden – especially the expanded Child Tax Credit – child poverty precipitously dropped by almost half between 2020 and 2021 – the lowest rate on record. In the Chair’s and my home state of Illinois, child poverty dropped by 51 percent in 2021. This record drop in child poverty reached the Black, brown, and rural children who are disproportionately likely to be poor. Approximately 122,000 children in my district received monthly payments from the Child Tax Credit that helped buy food, pay rent, keep the heat and the lights on, and provide the stability needed to grow up healthy and strong. The John Burton Advocates for Youth found that the foster youth in their tax clinics received an average Child Tax Credit of $3,161 to help their young families.

Alarmingly, just one year after the Republican-led expiration of these poverty-lowering investments in workers and families, the child poverty rate more than doubled, causing the biggest one-year increase in poverty we’ve ever seen.  It pains me that over one-quarter of the children in my congressional district are poor.  The progress we made in 2021 shows that we can slash child poverty when we have the political will to act.

We do not need academics quibbling about the nuances of how we measure poverty.  The doubling of child poverty in our country in one year is a five-alarm fire; academics arguing about how to measure the fire leaves children suffering and weakens our nation.  This focus on the minutia of poverty measurement ignores the wide array of other indicators of the hardships that families experience – food insecurity, hunger, housing instability, homelessness, debt, or having the heat turned off. 

This Subcommittee should be taking action to eliminate child poverty, not attacking struggling parents. We should restore the Child Tax Credit, dramatically increase child care funding to address the child care cliff that will force some parents to leave their jobs, and enact comprehensive paid family and medical leave and other policies that research and experience prove effective.

After this conversation today, I hope we can work together to end child poverty. I realize that the House Republicans must resolve the dysfunction within their Caucus before we can act.  This inability to govern has prevented us from doing our work for over three weeks, despite an urgent need to keep our government operating, address the child care cliff, and stand by our allies.

It is shameful that this Congress is not taking strong, immediate action to end poverty using polices proven to work. Every day we delay action, poverty poisons the future for millions of our children and for our nation. Democrats stand ready to set an aggressive child poverty reduction target and hold ourselves accountable to restore income supports to strengthen families and cut child poverty.