This week, we look at student-loan borrowers who could miss out on the child tax credit, the perils of income-sharing agreements, baby-bond accounts — and more. Read this week's Extra Credit:
Hello and welcome to Extra Credit, a weekly look at the news through the lens of consumer debt. Your monthly car or student-loan bill may not seem like an obvious frame through which to look at the world, but I’m here to argue that what we borrow and lend — and the way we talk about it — can explain a lot about the most pressing questions in our lives and communities.
But here, we’re going to try to cut through that jargon and call these obligations what they are: debt. The credit provides qualifying families with up to $300 per month for every child under six-years old and $250 per child, for kids ages six to 17. Single parents earning up to $75,000 per year are eligible for the full payment, $150,000 is the cutoff for married couples filing jointly and $112,500 for people filing as head of household. .
Yu and others have been raising alarm for years about the government seizing borrowers’ Earned Income Tax Credit, money the government gives to low and moderate-income working families that members of both parties support as a tool for reducing poverty. One lawyer who represents low-income student loan borrowers described this practice to me in 2018 as “morally suspect.”
New York City was the latest to ride the buzz when officials announced in June that as part of the city’s Juneteenth Economic Justice plan it will create a universal baby-bond program, providing every public-school kindergartener with a college savings account and $100 in seed funding. These accounts did a couple of things: actually provide a mechanism for low-income people to save — financial products for this demographic can often be hard to find or predatory — and pushed students towards college.
“Education in itself will never reduce wealth inequality in America, it can be a part of it and it’s really important, but if we’re talking about inequality, you’ve got to have wealth and start off with assets,” he said.
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