Relief bill expands aid for poor Texans
Checks, increased tax credits to benefit 3.9M in poverty
WASHINGTON — The $1.9 trillion COVID relief package the House plans to send to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature on Wednesday is expected to be a big boost for the poorest in the nation — and it could be especially significant in Texas.
The state has among the highest poverty rates in the U.S., with more than 3.9 million living in poverty, including 1.1 million children. It also leads the nation in uninsured residents and lags most other states in vaccination rates.
Those are all problems that major new provisions in the so-called American Rescue Plan are aimed at alleviating as it expands federal safety nets. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-VT., has called it “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country.”
Beefed-up tax credits for low-income families and those with children, along with direct payments of $1,400, could boost income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans by 20 percent, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center. The stimulus also expands the Affordable Care Act, cutting health insurance premiums for the 1.3 million Texans enrolled in the program. The $1.9 trillion package also includes another round of checks — up to $1,400 a pop for those making less than $80,000 a year — extends unemployment benefits and offers up funding to accelerate vaccine production and make schools safer for students, among other things.
“Relief is on the way,” said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat.
But the latest stimulus package marks a departure from the bipartisan nature of the roughly $4 trillion in relief packages Congress passed in 2020. Every Republican has so far voted against it, saying it
includes far more than just muchneeded COVID-19 relief. GOP lawmakers have also blasted the $1.9 trillion cost, saying it will only add to the escalating national debt and burden future generations.
“We could have built on that record this year, but instead Democrats put together a package of unrelated, wasteful, and downright partisan priorities: a blank check for mismanaged union pension funds; funding for climate justice; backdoor money for Planned Parenthood; an exclusive paid leave program for bureaucrats; and the list goes on,” Texas Sen. John Cornyn said when the bill passed the Senate.
‘Overwhelming’ support
Despite the expected partisan vote, polling indicates the vast majority of Americans support the relief package. A Pew Research Center poll released Tuesday found 70 percent of Americans supported the bill and only 28 percent opposed it. The stimulus also has the support of 63 percent of low-income Republicans, according to the Pew poll, 22 percentage points higher than support among Republicans overall.
That’s a sign that it’s likely popular in Texas, even if the Republican-dominated state may be less enthusiastic about some elements of the bill, said Joshua Blank, research director at the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project.
“Given overwhelming national support, it’s very likely that Texans’ support for the stimulus package in general, but especially the stimulus payments, is similarly high,” Blank said. “And even if, and really when, the stimulus bill gets painted in a more partisan light, it wouldn’t be surprising to find opposition to the stimulus increase among Republicans, while at the same time, support for specific provisions, and in particular the checks to individual Americans, remains extremely popular.”
The stimulus could cut child poverty in half, according to estimates by the Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, potentially lifting more than 550,000 Texas children above the poverty line.
That’s in large part due to expanded child tax credits of $3,600 for children younger than 6 and $3,000 for children up to 18, up from the current $2,000 per child. Those benefits are targeted toward lower-income families, as well, as they begin to phase out for married couples making $150,000, heads of households making $112,500 and other parents making $75,000.
But it’s not just those with children who see new benefits in the stimulus. The bill roughly triples the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income workers without children to about $1,500.
Medicaid expansion
An estimated 1.6 million Texans lost job-based health insurance during the pandemic, driving a 15 percent increase in the number of Texans enrolled in the Affordable Care Act last year.
The stimulus would expand subsidies to upper-middle-income Texans to buy ACA health insurance plans and would boost subsidies already going to lower-income Texans.
The stimulus also includes another attempt at getting Texas to expand Medicaid, something Republicans in Austin have long resisted, suspicious that the federal government will eventually shift the costs of the program onto the state. An estimated 1.4 million uninsured Texans would be eligible for Medicaid if it were expanded.
The stimulus boosts the federal share of the cost of expansion by 5 percentage points — a move pushed by U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Houston Democrat, who said the provisions are “vital to helping incentivize states like Texas and the others that have not expanded Medicaid to do so.”
Texas and its cities and counties, meanwhile, are on tap for billions in the latest relief bill.
The state is expected to receive $16.7 billion in federal aid, with its cities and counties set to receive nearly $11 billion more.
And the latest round of aid to cities and counties — $715 million for San Antonio and Bexar County — comes with fewer strings, meaning cities and counties can use the funding to improve water, sewer or broadband infrastructure in addition to the assistance programs for renters, small businesses and others that local governments funded with the last round of federal aid.
The package also includes $47 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund — money that could help not only Texans reeling from the pandemic but also the recent major winter storms that did billions in damage.