Fight Crime: Invest in Kids 25th Anniversary - Tax Credit Extensions

In September 2015, Fight Crime: Invest in Kids launched a campaign seeking to make permanent the 2009 improvements to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC). While these improvements were set to expire in 2017, extending them would provide an estimated $118 billion in poverty reduction over the next 10 years.

As part of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids’ 2015 campaign:

• Members met with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s office, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, and made calls to many other targeted policymakers.
• Fight Crime: Invest in Kids sent 13 different sign-on letters to Members of Congress, signed by law enforcement leaders from across the country.
• Members in target states penned op-eds, including Sheriff Greg Capers’, “San Jacinto County Sheriff: To cut crime, lift working families out of poverty” which was published in Texas in the Cleveland Advocate, and Commonwealth Attorney Thomas Wine’s “A win for working poor is win for public safety” which was published in Kentucky in the Courier-Journal.
• Fight Crime: Invest in Kids released a brief entitled “Cutting Crime by Cutting Child Poverty,” which was used directly with policymakers to successfully gain support for making these credits permanent.

Thanks in part to the work of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids members, in December 2015, Speaker Paul Ryan announced that Congress had struck a bipartisan deal on the FY16 spending bill and the tax extender bill, which included these CTC and EITC provisions. The bills passed the House and the Senate and were signed into law by President Obama at the end of 2015, extending CTC and EITC benefits for years to come.