During President Joe Biden’s March 1 State of the Union address, he made claims about reducing Black poverty.
“The estimate is that we’ve cut Black poverty by over 30 percent. We reduced child poverty more than 50 percent in the Black community,” Biden said.
Biden didn’t go into details on how his administration did this, but digging deeper into the current financial state of Black America, it seems the president is far off the mark.
The Child Tax Credit of 2021 did reduce child poverty for Black families as it did for all families, but these reductions have been erased since the tax credit expired at the end of 2021. The child tax credit is a tax credit for parents with dependent children.
On top of this, inflation has heavily impacted the Black community and as it continues to rise, most experts say it will increase the racial wealth gap. According to a Penn Wharton Budget Model report, low- and middle-income households spent about 7 percent more in 2021 for the same products they bought in 2020 or 2019 — an average of about $3,500 — NBC reported. Black households tend to have lower incomes. In 2020, 19.5 percent of Black Americans were living below the poverty line compared to 8.2 percent of white people.
Poverty among Black people is not decreasing. It’s on the rise. The pandemic hit Black people harder than others. Black households suffered from higher unemployment rates, lower wages, lower incomes, and had less savings to fall back on.
The Biden-Harris administration claims that it “Advances Equity and Opportunity for Black People and Communities Across the Country,” according to White House fact sheet. It outlines a long laundry list of plans to increases economic equality among Black people on a wide range of areas from housing and federal contracts to child poverty. However, the administration hasn’t made much progress.
Child poverty spiked by 41 percent in January 2022 after the government benefit program expired at the end of 2021, according to new research. The White House was unable to extend an expansion in the Child Tax Credit amid pushback from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III, The Washington Post reported.
The child poverty rate rose from 12 percent in December 2021 to 17 percent in January — an approximately 41 percent increase, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. An additional 3.7 million children are now in poverty relative to the end of December, with Black children seeing the biggest percentage point increases, found the study.
In January, there were 3.7 million more children in poverty, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 74: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin returns for a new season of the GHOGH podcast to discuss Bitcoin, bubbles, and Biden. He talks about the risk factors for Bitcoin as an investment asset including origin risk, speculative market structure, regulatory, and environment. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble?
More than 50 percent of homeless families are Black, a new government report found. African Americans, despite making up 13 percent of the U.S. population, account for a disproportionate segment of the nation’s homeless. An estimated 568,000 Americans experienced homelessness in 2019, with African Americans making up about 40 percent of that total, according to the annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress.
“African Americans have remained considerably overrepresented among the homeless population compared to the U.S. population,” the homelessness report said. “This report demonstrates continued progress toward ending homelessness, but also a need to re-calibrate policy to make future efforts more effective and aligned with the unique needs of different communities.”
Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said the 2020 Homeless Assessment report is as an urgent call to action to federal, state, and local leaders. “Now is not the time to abandon the practices that drove those results,” she said. “Now is the time to get serious about funding them to scale.”
Photo: Students eat lunch in the gym at Little Fort Elementary School in Waukegan, Ill., June 7, 2016. (AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski)