An ambitious plan to rescue and reset

Treat the American Rescue Plan not just as emergency aid but as a down payment on the future, especially that of today’s young people.

As a strategy to relieve the unprecedented strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the American Rescue Plan is well named. The lifeline begins with buttressing household income, rental assistance, expanded food programs and money for school systems to reopen safely. It addresses the crises that are afflicting the country right now, today. Nothing is more urgent.

The overall strategy introduced by the Biden administration and enacted by Congress looks far forward of the early signs of improvement, however. It is not just a rescue but a reset, the chief beneficiaries of which will be the young people whose future, even before the arrival of the novel coronavirus, was looking hemmed in.

The resources in the plan are huge, immediate and temporary, a combination that means think big, plan both the short and the long game, and don’t waste either the money or the time. Connecticut, as we have all been bemoaning for years, has had a gray and cloudy forecast for its debt, economy, infrastructure and educational equity. If used wisely and energetically by the adults in charge, this game-changer could frame a future that gives young people new incentives and opportunities to get ready educationally. It can create hope.

A generation that largely grows up properly housed, fed, educated and healthy is one of the few prizes that could make $1.9 trillion — the overall price tag of the American Rescue Plan — seem like a good bargain. Because what could be more crucial to the future of the country? Treat the resources coming from the federal plan in the next three years as a down payment on the future.

The plan’s ambitious goals address overall causes of poverty and include lower- and lower-middle-class families in the recovery, unlike the corporate-based recovery from the Great Recession. The ARP raises the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 a year per child to $3,000 a year for children ages 6 to 17, and $3,600 for children under age 6, with payments of up to $300 per month beginning in July and through the end of the year. It expands food assistance, subsidies for health insurance premiums in the public exchange and housing stability.

These remedies are getting until 2024 to show what they can do to pull millions of people back into the middle class. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the changes will raise 4 million children out of poverty and 1 million out of “deep poverty.” The Urban Institute estimates a 42% decrease in child poverty among Blacks and a 34% reduction among whites.

How can the average American measure the success of the plan? How will you know whether the children are in fact doing better?

One very good measure will be what the schools have to tell us as learning rebounds from the heroic but often unsatisfactory results of a year-plus of adjusted classes. The first months will be another big adjustment. Children and teenagers tend to rebound quickly, and just being back among their classmates will jumpstart their readiness to learn. But their educational losses are uneven, depending upon the learning environment at home, digital access to classes, and the generalized anxiety and gloom of the past year. Ask almost any high school student, and they will tell you it just isn’t high school from home.

As family economics stabilize and schools reopen — safely, with the infusion of $130 billion from the plan — students and educators should also begin to benefit from the technology and infrastructure improvements the plan aims to provide.

There is always the danger that this grand, exorbitant plan could fail to deliver, and failure would feed the argument that government handouts are not an answer. Given the stake that individuals and families have in this recovery, however, millions of people will be the living evidence if their lives improve and they make good use of the opportunities, including exercising their right to vote.

With the American Rescue Plan, government is attempting to meet its responsibility for the public good for present and future generations. To carry that out will mean judicious decision-making at the federal, state and local levels about how to use the money for the most good — now and for decades to come.