Democrat Richard Neal Calls to Permanently Extend Government Benefits from Coronavirus Package

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) is calling to make permanent the temporary government benefits in the Coronavirus package.

“Child care needs to be a guarantee, not an expensive hassle that drives parents out of the workforce or makes them choose between wages and family.” Neal continued, “We will give every worker the right to paid family and medical leave.”

“This is our opportunity to reduce child poverty by permanently extending the changes to the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit that we made in the American Rescue Plan,” Neal explained.

He intends to expand the welfare state by wrapping the programs into pending legislation. “Strengthening our care economy will align closely with President Biden’s American Family Plan that he is set to unveil in the coming weeks, but the urgency of this necessitates that we begin our work now,” he said.

“While the current program distributes the money annually, as a tax reduction to families with income tax liability or a check to those too poor to owe income taxes, the new program would send both groups monthly checks to provide a more stable cash flow,” Breitbart News reported in March.

Neal has previously said concerning this initiative that “getting something out of the [tax] code is often harder than getting something into the code.”

“What we did is unlikely to go away,” he concluded, speaking about the initial welfare provisions in the coronavirus package.