The President’s Budget

If enacted, the budget would continue and expand many significant investments in children.

On taxes, the President would:

• Continue to cut taxes for the families of millions of children through an expansion and continuation of the Child Tax Credit.
• Make the $2500 American Opportunity Tax Credit permanent to help kids afford college.

On investments in children, the President proposes:

• Making a down payment on the President’s “Zero to Five” plan – providing $1.1 billion to double the number of children served by Early Head Start over two years, an additional $1 billion to expand and improve Head Start, and an additional $2 billion in funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant. The Budget sustains critical support for young children and their families by building on these investments.
• Creating the Nurse Home Visitation program, which will provide funds to states to provide home visits by trained nurses to first-time low-income mothers and mothers-to-be.
• Expanding Pell Grants and putting the program on sounder footing.
• Rewarding excellent teachers by making additional investments in state and local efforts to implement systems that reward quality performance and help less effective teachers improve or exit the classroom.
• Increasing health care coverage for children. An expansion to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) was just enacted in law and will provide coverage for an additional four million children on average in CHIP and Medicaid who are now uninsured. The budget proposal will implement this law quickly and aggressively to help families whose children are at risk of losing coverage in this weak economy.
• Strengthening nutrition assistance. The budget supports a strong Child Nutrition and WIC reauthorization package that will ensure that low-income children receive the nutrition assistance they need and help end childhood hunger by 2015.
• Responding to the needs of low-income Americans. This includes a temporary increase in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly Food Stamps, to help strengthen the food purchasing power of low-income families during these tough economic times. The budget also provides additional resources for food banks and community-based food providers.
• Preventing teen pregnancy. The Budget supports State, community-based, and faith-based efforts to reduce teen pregnancy using evidence based models.
• Providing energy assistance to low-income families. The Budget provides $3.2 billion for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to help low-income families with their home heating and cooling expenses. In addition, the Budget includes a new trigger mechanism to provide automatic increases in energy assistance whenever there is a spike in energy costs.
• Increasing funding for the Project-Based Rental Assistance Program. This will preserve approximately 1.3 million affordable rental units through increased funding for contracts with owners of multifamily properties. This critical investment will assist low- and very low-income households in obtaining decent, safe and sanitary housing in private accommodations.
• Providing greater support for effective charter schools.
• Putting 50,000 more cops on the street. Using COPS Hiring Grants, this will support the hiring of police nationwide to help states and communities prevent the growth of crime during the economic downturn.
• Expanding national service. The Budget makes a substantial investment in National Service, giving more individuals the opportunity to make an intensive commitment to giving back to their communities. The Budget would set AmeriCorps on a path to expand from its current 75,000 funded slots to 250,000, and would ensure the availability of service opportunities to achieve demonstrable results. The budget also will provide additional resources for Learn and Serve America, which supports programs in schools, higher education institutions and community-based organizations that engage students, their teachers, and others in service-learning.

Vote Kids strongly supports this budget and will work to ensure its passage with strong investments in America’s children. Keep coming back to find out what you can do to make these goals a reality.