Finally, Legislation Designed to Help Single Adults with No Children

Before recent legislation, single people with no kids could be taxed into poverty

Something unusual and quite good happened when President Biden signed the Covid relief bill, the American Rescue Plan, into law on March 11, 2021. The needs of a group of Americans who are typically ignored, single adults with no children, were recognized and addressed.

Maybe you haven’t heard anything about this. In some of the news articles about the legislation, it wasn’t even mentioned in passing. Much of the fanfare focused on the potential of the Plan to lift half of the currently impoverished children out of poverty. That’s important and impressive. Also significant is that many low-income workers with no children will be spared from poverty, too.

In 2020, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) proclaimed that “childless adults are the lone group taxed into poverty.” The federal tax code has been designed to protect families with children from being taxed into poverty. The standard deduction, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) “are set at levels to ensure that families with children don’t have net federal tax liability if they earn poverty-level wages.”