Democrats want to bring back Biden's child tax credit soon — and a new report shows it was a huge success in fighting child poverty

• One measure of the poverty rate fell to its lowest level last year, per a new Census Bureau report.
• The expanded child tax credit helped slash child poverty by roughly half, and some Dems want to bring it back.

The poverty rate fell to 7.8% in 2021, the lowest level on record due to an extraordinary amount of federal assistance last year, according to a new report from the Census Bureau released on Tuesday.

It stems in large part from the stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and a monthly child allowance briefly established under President Joe Biden's stimulus law.

The new report also indicated that the number of children living in poverty was reduced roughly by half. The data stemmed from the Supplemental Poverty Measure, a metric that accounts for federal assistance like food stamps, the child tax credit, and wages. The official poverty rate, which doesn't factor in assistance like the SPM, came in higher at 11.6%.

The SPM rate for children was 5.2% in 2021 after being nearly twice as high at 9.7% in 2020. In 2009, the SPM rate for people under 18 was 17.0%.

Experts said the enhanced child tax credit was among the federal relief programs with the biggest impact.

"This is what policy success looks like," Chuck Marr, vice president of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Insider. "This was a historic achievement to reduce child poverty by a record amount driven by the expansion of the child tax credit."

"Typically, you might see a steady decline," Joshua McCabe, a policy expert at the libertarian-leaning Niskanen Center, told Insider. "But in this case, at least for children, it was a pretty significant drop."

Marr said what "drove this reduction in poverty was for the first time the child tax credit was fully available to low-income children just like it's available to middle-class children."

He added that given the expanded child tax credit has expired, "the challenge now is for the Congress to extend it."

Some Democrats want to bring back the expanded child tax credit

The enhanced child tax credit provided up to $300 monthly checks per kid to parents for six months. But resistance from Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia prevented Democrats from extending it as part of their ill-fated Build Back Better plan in 2021. No child allowance was included in the Democratic health, climate and tax bill that passed last month.

Now, some Democrats like Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Michael Bennet of Colorado want to use an expiring piece of the 2017 Republican tax cuts to bring Republicans to the negotiating table for a deal by year's end. The White House supports them, Axios reported.

"We should not extend corporate tax breaks at the end of this year without also extending the expanded Child Tax Credit," Bennet, Brown, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Reps. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, Ritchie Torres of New York, and Suzan DelBene of Washington said in a Tuesday statement.

Those numbers come on the heels of a recent comprehensive analysis by research organization Child Trends, which found that child poverty has fallen 59% since 1993, with children across all races and states experiencing less need across multiple metrics within that timeframe.

Nearly 28% of children were classified as poor in 1993, the researchers said, "poor" defined as lacking the income deemed necessary to meet basic needs. By 2019, that measure had fallen to roughly 11% — and that's not counting what temporary pandemic aid did to cut that further.

The Child Trends research suggests expanding the social safety net has only helped child poverty go down over the years, even in light of economic crises like the Great Recession.

Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said in a statement without the expansion of the child tax credit, "some 2.1 million more children would have lived in families with incomes below the poverty line." That number was also highlighted in a Census Bureau post.

There was also other positive news out from the Census Bureau on Tuesday as well. The share of Americans with health insurance climbed to 91.7% in 2021, a slight increase from the year before. That's partly due to enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies made available for people under the stimulus law. It allowed low-income Americans to pay a small amount or nothing for a private health plan.

Without measures like the expanded child tax credit, poverty likely increased in 2022.

"I certainly do have some concerns that without those economic impact payments and the child tax credits, we will see an increase in poverty in 2022," Elise Gould, senior economist at Economic Policy Institute, told Insider. "So we know that some of those measures were instrumental in reducing things like food insecurity. So unfortunately I think without them, we're going to see an increase in hardship in 2022, even though we've had a growing economy."