Keep the tools to fix child poverty — and bring their benefits to Florida
Nearly 20% of Florida’s children live in poverty.
That might seem puzzling during an ostensibly strong jobs and economic recovery, but there are clear culprits: a growth mainly in lower-paying jobs and the end of COVID-era economic support programs, which began petering out that year and continued falling into 2023, tragically multiplied by a bizarre refusal on the part of state leaders to take all the aid to which Florida children are entitled.
This is a tricky thing because these safety-net efforts were never designed or intended to be permanent and were instituted specifically as an emergency response. Yet that certainly doesn’t mean that they must all be tossed by the wayside the moment we deem the crisis over.
Plenty of programs and advances that we take more or less for granted now have their roots in crisis.
The economic ravages of the Great Depression birthed banking and commercial regulations that helped guide the nation’s 20th-century economic surge, as well as New Deal programs that reshaped not only social services but culture, industry and the role of government.
Post-WWII, the needs of returning service members and the baby boom ushered in not just federal but state and local initiatives to improve access to housing and higher education. And so on.
We have an opportunity here to take some lessons learned from COVID programs, as reactive as they were to a specific and severe situation, and build them into useful permanent fixtures of our government. The arguments against this sometimes take a logistical tack, but they’re very often ideological; they center around the idea there is some significant level of child poverty that is, for lack of a better word, appropriate. We disagree.
In practical terms, it’s not really possible to eliminate each and every single possible instance of child poverty that might arise, but getting as close as we can to zero is a worthy goal, and we now have ample evidence that some of these tools work very well to do that.
The House has passed an expanded child tax credit, the kind that worked so well during COVID. Subsidized child care can help people stay stable. There’s also plenty of data to show this stability can have lifelong positive impacts for children, whose literal brain development can be stunted by the stress of housing insecurity and poor nutrition, among other factors.
If the full Congress can get its act together long enough to utilize this moment of surprising economic resilience and post-pandemic recovery to put in place some measures that can insulate the needy from the shocks of another such crisis, whenever it might come, President Joe Biden will stand ready to sign it. Federal help can also move Florida toward resolving our housing crisis and taking some of the pressure off families for whom housing is often the largest expense.
It’s also past time for Tallahassee to discontinue ruinous policies that are stripping Florida children of access to health care This state has outpaced any other in a rush to dump kids from Medicaid rolls. That should stop.
On behalf of Florida’s children, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state Legislature should accept any support they can pry out of Washington. There’s no reason to shy away from taking Florida’s share while state residents pour tens of billions in income and other taxes into federal coffers. It’s time to stop pretending: Nobody can argue that Florida’s children don’t deserve that effort.
This editorial was adapted from one published by the New York Daily News Editorial Board. The Sentinel often adapts editorials that reflect our overall point of view. The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Krys Fluker, Editorin-Chief Julie Anderson and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. Contact us at insight@ orlandosentinel.com