Wild, Casey promote relief for Lehigh Valley families, child care workers in $1.9T package
Congressional Democrats continue to promote the benefits of the recently passed coronavirus relief package to Lehigh Valley residents.
U.S. Rep. Susan Wild on Tuesday evening held a telephone town hall to discuss how the $1.9 trillion law passed in March helps families and businesses in the Lehigh Valley and beyond.
One highlight: The bill includes $40 billion for child care providers to cover operating expenses and tuition assistance for the children of essential workers. Earlier in the day, Wild toured the Allentown YMCA to learn more about how its share of federal relief funding will help the families it serves. Before the pandemic, YMCAs across the Lehigh Valley served more than 1,100 families daily through child care and other educational programming, and expanded their offerings during the pandemic.
Wild reiterated her confidence that roughly $5 billion for Pennsylvania schools as well as additional support for Head Start programs will help students make up for the valuable learning time missed in the classroom.
While some students have had the resources to adapt to the disruption, Wild acknowledged, “there are going to be an awful lot who have been badly affected by this, and we are going to have to figure out how we are going to make up for a year of lost learning.” The recently passed relief package, she said, strives to address the inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic.
Also Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pennsylvania, held his own news conference touting the “foundation for transformative change” he believes the law provides families.
He highlighted the expansion of the child tax credit to $3,600 for children under age 6 and to $3,000 for older children, as well as the expanded child and dependent care tax credit. Under that provision, families can get up to $4,000 to cover costs of child care for a child under 13 (up to $8,000 for two or more kids), as well as the costs of dependent care for a spouse or parent who cannot care for themselves.
The bill also extends 15% monthly SNAP benefit increases adopted last December through this December and extends a program that provides grocery benefits to replace school meals that children miss when schools are closed.
According to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, the legislation could cut child poverty in half and overall poverty by a third.
Sandy Bailey of Allentown is a single mother of two who has worked throughout the pandemic as a store manager. She had been looking forward to seeing her older child start elementary school this year, but because classes remained virtual, she was forced to continue paying for full-day care for both children. She also did not qualify for subsidized care or SNAP benefits.
“I needed to refigure how I was going to do my schooling, how I was going to deal with work, how I was going to handle everything,” Bailey said. “It has been extremely difficult, and I’m very excited ... to hear about the changes and benefits that [are coming].”
The relief bill passed without a single Republican vote. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, has pointed to many funding streams he believes have little or nothing to do with helping the country recover from the pandemic. Among others, he’s pointed to an $86 billion bailout of failing union pension plans; $350 billion in aid to state and local governments with relatively few strings attached; and $4 billion in payments worth up to 120% of debt held by minority and immigrant farmers and ranchers.
“There is no justification for this bill. There’s no medical justification, there’s pandemic justification, there’s no economic justification,” Toomey said last month on the Senate floor while debating the bill. “This isn’t about coming together and doing something about a crisis. This is about a partisan, left-wing wish list.”
Casey said Tuesday that Congress needs to do even more over the next year to help struggling families as much as it has long helped “the privileged, the well-connected, and the powerful corporate elites.”
“I’m not at all satisfied,” he said.
During her town hall, Wild said she looked forward to negotiating across the aisle to pass an infrastructure bill along the lines of the $2 trillion plan President Joe Biden proposed last week, which includes money to modernize schools and child care facilities, as well as expand access to affordable home- or community-based care for seniors and people with disabilities, among many other things.
One Lehigh Valley caller wondered if all the spending could backfire by causing severe inflation, which he argued would disproportionately affect the same people most impacted by the pandemic. Wild said she shared his concerns but does not believe rampant inflation is an imminent threat based on conversations with economists across the ideological spectrum.
She urged her constituents to get vaccines and continue following public health protocols so the economy can recover and the government won’t have to provide further financial relief of this magnitude down the road.
“Nobody could have solved the problems we’ve seen over the past year except for the federal government,” she said. “There’s just no way around that, and you can’t let people out on the street figuratively or literally when you’re in the midst of a pandemic.”