Child Poverty in 2024 Was a $62 Billion Problem

Child poverty is a big problem for children and their families, but a small problem for a rich country to solve.*

Last year, child poverty in the United States was a $62 billion problem. Is that a lot? No, it’s not. Below, I show we can pay for it just taxing families who are more than $43,000 over the poverty line an average of $1000 each.

This all started with David Brooks said this ridiculous thing:

Poverty is an and/and issue, because it takes a zillion things to address it, and some of those things are going to come from the left, and some are going to come from the right. … And if poverty is this mysterious, unknowable, negative spiral-loop that some people find themselves in, then surely the solution is to throw everything we think works at the problem simultaneously, and try in ways we will never understand, to have a positive virtuous cycle.

Counterpoint: Poverty is the absence of adequate income – that’s it!

For this exercise, I use the Supplemental Poverty Measure concept. This sets a poverty threshold, an amount of money (total economic resources) for a family’s “basic needs,” depending on its size and age composition, and on the food, shelter, clothing, utilities, and telecommunication costs in the area where they live. In 2024, the threshold for families with two adults and two children ranged from about $28,000 to $60,000 — which could come from earned income, tax credits, welfare benefits, and so on. Since the issue here is intergenerational poverty, I’m just focusing on families with children.

In March 2025 there were 142 million family units in the US (families here include members of cohabiting couples, and anyone else related in the same household); people living alone count as a family, too. Of those, 21.2 million were below their calculated poverty threshold in 2024. Of the poor families, 22% included children. So that’s just 4.8 million poor families with children.

Here are some round numbers. Among these poor families with children, the mean shortfall was about $13,000. So, to eliminate child poverty in 2024 we would have to give 4.8 million families an average of $13,000 each. It comes out to $62 billion.

Where are we going to get $62 billion per year? To understand the scale of the obligation, let’s see what it would look like to get it from relatively well-off families. These numbers are all rounded.

We’ll just tax the surplus income families have, over their SPM threshold. There are 121 million nonpoor families in the US, with incomes over their threshold. But we don’t want to punish people for being just a little over the threshold, so let’s leave out the bottom half of nonpoor families. That leaves 60 million well-off families who have a surplus (over the poverty threshold) of $43,472 or more. Their median surplus is $87,000 per family. Together they have $7,161 billion in surplus. If we tax that surplus at 0.86% it will cover the cost of eliminating child poverty. (Income averages get big because the data are so skewed, which is great for taxation. Note this data doesn’t capture super high incomes well, but neither does income tax, so maybe that’s OK.)

How much Child Poverty Elimination Tax would you pay? If you’re family’s total income (from all sources) was less than $43,472 over the poverty threshold, you pay nothing. After than, the figure shows the average Child Poverty Elimination Tax by total resources. The tax doesn’t kick in till over $50,000, and then it ranges from $384 per year up to $3,100 for top-bracket families with more than $250,000 incomes. But notice I’m taxing family surpluses at a flat rate for the top half of nonpoor families (the line jumps up at the end because the top bin includes very high incomes). You could easily make it more progressive than that. For example, at today’s wealth of $487 billion, Elon Musk could pay the entire cost of eliminating child poverty in America eight times over.

The policy details are obviously not my strong suit. The point is, it’s very affordable, so just rustle up the money and end child poverty.

Changing poor people to address poverty is complicated, difficult, as well as often coercive and demeaning. Most of them are unable to earn much for some good reason (like they’re children, retired, or have a disability), or have very low skills. Giving everyone lots of opportunities to get education and jobs — with childcare, and so on — is great and we should do it. But to the extent we fail at that, just pick up the slack with the Child Poverty Elimination Tax (or something like it).

* (Versions of this using data from 2015, 2018, 2023, 2024; some of this text is the same. Stata code for this year, using 2025 ASEC [March CPS] from IPUMS, reflecting 2024 incomes, is here.)

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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