Sheldon Whitehouse: “first of all, let me congratulate Senator Brown and Senator Casey and all the work they put into this effort and…”

“first of all, let me congratulate Senator Brown and Senator Casey and all the work they put into this effort and Chairman Wyden for his negotiation to where we are right now. This is a big deal for Rhode Island. We actually tried the child tax credit during COVID. We know how it works. It helped 174,000 Rhode Island families through COVID, and what we saw is that it lifted many of them out of poverty, and what else we saw is that it enabled parents to get into the workforce. There is a phony narrative that if you give the child tax credit to families, they will just avoid work. Our experience was the opposite. Once you had child tax credit revenues and you could afford, for instance, childcare for your kid, then you could go to work. And, of course, we needed a workforce through COVID, so people were paying attention to this, and that was our experience. This is a pro-child and pro-work tax credit. Now, you think it would be an easy slam dunk over here because it came through the House with a big bipartisan vote and the corporate benefits included in this bill far exceed the family benefits included in this bill. So you would think our Republican friends who are all about corporate tax benefits would be saying, hey, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, whatever the ratio is, we won this one big, let's close the deal; I support this even though it is a little bit out of balance. The Budget Committee did the work that showed the imbalance problem.…”