JFI microsimulations in Congressional testimony, Congressional Research Service FAQ

In December, Indivar Dutta-Gupta of the Georgetown Center on Poverty & Inequality gave testimony before the United States House of Representatives Select Subcommittee Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. In his September talk, “Ensuring Economic Security & Opportunity in Our Lifetime: America’s Pandemic Relief Response & the Path Forward,” Dutta-Gupta used JFI’s first microsimulation brief by Jack Landry and Stephen Nuñez to emphasize the importance of Child Tax Credit administration.

“Policymakers should also prioritize improving the administration of the CTC. Researchers at the Jain Family Institute (JFI) caution that the potential poverty impacts of the ARP’s expanded CTC could be diminished significantly if the estimated 6.4 million children of non-filers (i.e., tax units that have not recently filed federal income taxes)—assumed to be living in households with low incomes—do not receive the credit. Better data sharing is one key to getting more non-filer children enrolled. JFI notes 9 that if the 71 percent of non-filers who receive other benefits had their data shared among various federal and state agencies, that would help close the CTC enrollment gap.”

View the full testimony here, and view the microsimulation brief here. You can find all of this team’s work on the Child Tax Credit here.

In other federal news, JFI’s first three microsimulation briefs also provide answers on child poverty rates in the Congressional Research Service’s “The Expanded Child Tax Credit for 2021: Frequently Asked Questions.”

View the most recent version of the FAQ, from December 23, 2021, here.