• The US spends less than 10% of its budget on children and has one of the highest child poverty rates in developed countries.
• Congress now has a historic, bipartisan opportunity to cut the child poverty rate in half in one year.
• Congress needs to replace our patchwork of child support systems with universal child benefit for every family.
• Suraj Patel is an attorney, lecturer, and former US Congress candidate
  from New York.
• This is a split opinion. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
• You can find more stories in Insider’s business section.

The United States has one of the highest child poverty rates in developed countries, reflecting a simple fact: our investment in children systematically does not match our society’s collective rhetoric about them, as the pandemic made painfully clear. Our excessive child poverty is the result of our political priorities – currently less than 10% of the federal budget is spent on children.

Children are hardest hit by COVID-19. More than 4 in 10 children live in households that have difficulties meeting their basic needs. Even before the pandemic, more than 10 million children in the United States were living in poverty – a condition that has catastrophic consequences.

Side effects of child poverty

Child poverty leaves devastating and permanent damage. Growing up in poverty hinders children’s ability to study in school, fundamentally changes their physical brain composition, and leads to long-term income losses years later as adults. In addition, our current safety net does not protect children who were born poor through no fault of their own.

In fact, a recent study found that low-income students score fewer points on the SAT – and less likely to go to college – if they take the test in the back half of the monthly grocery brand cycle compared to the first half of the month.

The pandemic has exacerbated the effects of child poverty. Free lunch at school is a vital source of nourishment for 2.1 million New York students who rely on this benefit for food security. During my campaign for Congress, we spoke to countless families whose food was stressed by the removal of a single meal from school, forcing New York to provide additional emergency SNAP benefits to 750,000 families last May. More than 100,000 New York public school students lack permanent housing. When home school is run through Zoom, these students fall further behind because they don’t have a safe place to teach. That’s a shame.

When I ran for Congress, I proposed an extremely popular universal child dividend

Our underinvestment in children is immoral and badly economically as programs aimed at children generally pay for themselves or even produce a positive return on investment. For every dollar spent addressing programs tailored for children, $ 7 will be saved later.

When I ran for Congress last year, I wrote and campaigned for a policy aimed at replacing our Rube Goldberg system of complicated child support policies with a single universal child dividend. This policy would give families $ 500 each month for each child under the age of five and $ 350 for children ages 6-17. We thought it possible to form a left / right coalition to center family and child poverty with state efficiency. This intervention would cut child poverty in half in the first year alone.

And it proved hugely popular with all income brackets in my borough, the 12th of New York – the richest and most unequal in the country.

During my campaign, we spoke to tons of parents about what an extra $ 500 per month could mean for them. For a father, it was the difference between tutoring his child and paying for groceries. Second, it meant freedom of transport – the extra money needed to get into a better-paying job.

With 40% of American families unable to handle a $ 500 emergency, an additional $ 500 per month meant the difference between admitting a child to speech therapy or caring for an older parent. Families in New York and across America make tough decisions every day – a direct money transfer is a non-paternalistic way families can choose what they need for their children. The idea that waste and drug abuse could come with direct payments has been thoroughly debunked.

Congress now has the opportunity to adopt a program to reduce child poverty

Parents, Republicans and Democrats alike, know that a little help in the uncompensated work of raising children can go a long way towards providing much-needed financial stability.

Now is the time to address child poverty. The programs proposed by President Joe Biden and Senator Mitt Romney would send hundreds of dollars’ worth of checks to families with children every month. Such a program must now be adopted.

Both the Biden and Romney plans would offer similar (if less generous) benefits than the policy I proposed: Biden’s plan would revise the child tax credit by giving most families up to $ 300 per child , and Romney’s plan would create a new program – essentially social security for children – to provide up to $ 350 per child for most families.

Whatever plan is passed by Congress, it should reflect some basic principles. The benefit should be easily accessible and come monthly to match the families’ bills. It should be made permanent in order to survive the COVID-19 pandemic and age consciously providing extra help to families raising the youngest children.

Finally, the program has to be ambitious. The extenuating circumstances of the pandemic have shattered old political constraints and dogmas and revealed the government’s simple practical appeal to sending money to families. President Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress exceeded expectations in the 2020 election in part because Americans received and appreciated the stimulus checks of the CARES Act.

Democratic Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won controversial runoffs in Georgia by handing out $ 2,000 auxiliary checks as a closing item. As Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times, the political lesson from the 2020 election is, “It’s the money, stupid.”

The plans under consideration would help millions of families transform. However, they could have a bigger impact on poverty reduction by increasing benefits to the levels suggested in my universal child dividend – $ 500 for young children, $ 350 for older children.

As Senator Sherrod Brown has suggested, that money could be instantly deposited into new individual Federal Reserve bank accounts, eliminating the need to wait for checks to ship or direct deposits to cash.

The pandemic tore apart an America that has already been weakened by a host of pre-existing conditions, including massive economic inequality and child poverty. But it has also created the political space in which our leaders can be courageous. There is no more worthy reason to bravely pursue the rationale that no child deserves to grow up poor.

Adopting a structure – like the Universal Children’s Dividend – that can match the scale of our current crisis and help everyone without the administrative burden is the best way to help our future generations thrive.