Today, Vote Kids is releasing a scorecard for votes in the first session of the 111th Congress for both the United States Senate and House of Representatives. It scores each senator on 13 key votes, and each member of the House of Representatives on 19 votes on policies and budget items that would impact children and families.

Click here to read the entire report card and see detailed state fact sheets how each member of Congress voted.

According to a new research report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, facing large budget shortfalls, a small number of states are scaling back tax credits for low-income working families, which not only harms some of the families hardest hit by the recession but also weakens the economy by lowering overall demand.

Millions of low-income working families and individuals are relying on federal and state tax credits, such as Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC), to help them endure the recession. The economic crisis has increased unemployment and reduced work hours and wages. Credits offered by states help to alleviate this hardship and stabilize incomes.

The benefit of such programs also extends to the economy at large. State tax credits for low-income families put money into the hands of people most likely to spend it, and most likely to spend it in their local economy.

Earlier this month, Virginia enacted a cut to its EITC that would take effect in 2010 and would cost an estimated 114,000 low-income working families a total of about $6 million. Strange given how the new governor, Bob McDonnell, regularly touts the favorable tax climate as reasons for businesses coming to Virginia. A spokesperson for the governor Bob McDonnell is promising that the governor will reverse the cut so that families can claim the full credit for the 2010 tax year. So far this is simply talk because to restore this tax cut, the Governor would have to call a special session of the Virginia legislature. The 2010 regular session is over.

The Virginia legislature had to make hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts and tax changes to close their budget deficit this year, presumably why this EITC change was made. The legislature voted to phase out a corporate tax break this year, but Governor McDonnell line-item vetoed that measure. Allowing that phase-out to take effect would have saved the state $30 million, more than enough to sustain the EITC. This is simply misplaced priorities and failure in leadership. Low-income children in Virginia will have to pay the price for this even though none of them voted for Bob McDonnell last fall.

Other states are considering similar measures:

• Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty cut funding for the state Renters’ Credit by $51 million for close to 300,000 low- and moderate-income households. One-quarter of the affected households are seniors and people with severe disabilities.
• In Georgia, the state legislature is considering eliminating the refundability of the state’s low-income tax credit, which provides needed tax relief and wage support for workers earning less than $20,000 per year. The change would take nearly $22 million directly out of the pockets of the 1 million affected taxpayers — mostly workers and seniors.
• New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has proposed reducing the state EITC from 25 percent of the federal credit to 20 percent. Approximately 485,000 families would lose more than $45 million. The governor is also proposing eliminating property tax rebates for seniors, renters, and homeowners with incomes below $75,000.
• In the District of Columbia, Mayor Adrian Fenty proposed reducing the District’s credit to 39 percent from 40 percent of the federal credit. This change would save the District a tiny fraction of its expenditures but take $1 million from some of the 50,000 low-income workers whose wages get a boost from the DC EITC.
• A similar reduction is being pursued in Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the three localities in the country to offer a local EITC (the other two are New York City and San Francisco). County Executive Isiah Leggett has proposed reducing the county’s EITC by one-third or $5.4 million for the 30,500 working families who claim the credit.

It is pure idiocy to raise taxes on those hardest hit by a recession. State refundable tax credits targeted at low-income working families encourage work, stabilize income, and spur consumption. Every state legislator who votes to eliminate them need to be asked why the oppose tax breaks for some, but not for working families who need them the most.

Last year, the Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It provided billions of dollars to support education and education reform throughout the country. It kept states from firing teachers and closing schools. It is set to expire at the end of the year, and without additional funding, these educational reform efforts could end. As Education Secretary Duncan recently told Congress, “We are gravely concerned that the kind of state and local budget threats our schools face today will put our hard-earned reforms at risk.”

The recession has driven down state revenues by record proportions. Education makes up the largest single item in state budgets, and spending cuts there have been deep and widespread. Serious state budget shortfalls will likely persist for at least the next two years, reaching an estimated $180 billion in fiscal year 2011 (which in most states will begin July 1) and $120 billion in 2012. This sets the stage for even more severe cuts as states wait for revenues to recover to pre-recession levels. For 2011, governors are proposing cuts that go even deeper than those enacted to date. Congress must continue this educational and Medicaid support or children will have to pay an even greater price for a situation they did nothing to create. The economy didn’t crash because of spending on education, and firing teachers and close schools will not get us out of this recession.

Even though the funding the Recovery Act has provided has saved 284,000 jobs, school districts and other local education employers (such as community colleges) have nevertheless cut 104,500 jobs — and this number is very likely to grow. California school districts have notified nearly 22,000 teachers that they might be terminated, for example, and Illinois’ governor has proposed education cuts that he estimates would mean layoffs for 17,000 teachers. The end of this funding would likely accelerate this job loss. These job losses — as well as teacher furloughs, salary reductions, cancellation of contracts with private-sector vendors, and other budget-cutting measures — also weaken the overall economy by reducing consumer demand. Without additional federal aid, state budget cuts could cost the economy 900,000 public- and private-sector jobs.

In addition, current and additional education cuts undermine reform initiatives that many states are undertaking with the federal government’s encouragement, such as supporting professional development to improve teacher quality, improving interventions for young children to heighten school readiness, and turning around the lowest-achieving schools, to name just a few.

After the jump, we enumerate state education cuts already made:

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In advocating for the health reform bill passed by the Congress last week, the President and the reform’s supports frequently talked about how immediately when the bill is passed, insurance companies would no longer be able to deny coverage, or charge absurdly high rates, to children with pre-existing conditions like diabetes.  However, immediately after the bill passed, the insurance industry claimed that they could just stop writing insurance for sick kids altogether. They claimed that they did not have to guarantee coverage for these children until 2014.

After hearing from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius who insisted that:

Now is not the time to search for non-existent loopholes that preserve a broken system. I urge you to share this information with your members and to help ensure they cease any attempt to deny coverage to some of the youngest and most vulnerable Americans.

Instead of fighting to deny care to sick children for four more years (after doing so for decades), the insurance industry backed down immediately:

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the industry’s top lobbyist said insurers will accept new regulations to dispel uncertainty over a much-publicized guarantee that children with medical problems can get coverage starting this year.

Quick resolution of the doubts was a win for Obama — and a sign that the industry has no stomach for another war of words with a president who deftly used double-digit rate hikes by the companies to revive his sweeping health care legislation from near collapse in Congress.

“Health plans recognize the significant hardship that a family faces when they are unable to obtain coverage for a child with a pre-existing condition,” Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a letter to Sebelius. Ignagni said that the industry will “fully comply” with the regulations, expected within weeks.

This will keep happening as the insurance industry fights tooth and nail to avoid complying with this historic bill that does much for children and working families. The key is fighting them at every chance as they have shown that when kids are at harm, the best way to fight back is to shine a light on their practices.

Arizona Senator Jon Kyl has an interesting approach to legislating. 1,100,000 workers are set to lose their unemployment benefits and health coverage through the COBRA program. Senator Harry Reid from Nevada is trying to extend these benefits for the next year and provide Medicaid relief to states like Arizona. Jon Kyl has decided to block this effort in order to preserve a massive tax break for those who inherit millions of dollars:

On Wednesday, a top Republican leader said a deal on the bill would depend on working out the fate of the expired estate tax…Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said that Republicans will block consideration of the new bill unless they get “a path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.

Not only are 1.1 million workers scheduled to lose their unemployment insurance in March, 2.7 million are on track to lose them by April, while unemployment is still at 9.7 percent and there are six unemployed workers for every job opening. 6.3 million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer, which is the most since the government began keeping track in 1948 and “more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.

Despite all this, Jon Kyl is insisting nothing can move forward to help middle and lower income families in dire economic straits until those wealthy few are protected from having to pay taxes when they inherit millions of dollars. Due to a Bush-era budgeting gimmick, there is no estate tax for those who inherit money in 2010. This tax will be reinstated in 2011 at the level it was when Bill Clinton was president. Kyl’s proposal to slash the estate tax rate and increase its exemption would cost $250 billion over ten years, with 99 percent of the benefit going to the heirs of multi-millionaires. Under 2009 law, only 0.2 percent of estates are subject to the estate tax at all.

The fact that Kyl has vowed to stop the business of the Senate to deal with this non-urgent issue for 99.8% of households is particularly galling given what children in his state are facing. Arizona has been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn and the housing crisis. And the Governor and legislature are proposing policies that will hurt children and families far more than the reimposition of the estate tax. If the budget were enacted, it would:

• Eliminate the state’s children’s health insurance program (KidsCare), which covers 47,000 children
• Repeal Medicaid coverage for 310,000 childless adults and 3,000 adults with serious mental illness
• Make deep cuts to support for early learning by eliminating preschool for 4,328 children and K?3 education support for more than 77,000 students
• Reduce the number of months that low-income families can receive cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, immediately eliminating assistance for 10,000 families

Last year, Jon Kyl voted against expanding the KidsCare program to 100,000 more children. He voted against the economic stimulus program that provided nearly two billion dollars in Medicaid for children, prevented a billion dollars cut in children’s programs, and invested several hundreds of million dollars in education programs and programs for disabled children in Arizona. He voted against the federal budget that increased funding for Head Start and many other children’s programs, and was just one of votes against expanding afterschool programs.

So while the Governor and legislature are making tough decisions that will hurt the health, safety, and education of Arizona children, Senator Kyl in Washington DC is blocking needed relief so that a few millionaires can avoid paying money on the millions of dollars they inherit. And people wonder why Washington is broken.

This week, the Obama Administration announced its priorities for the re-authorization of the Child Nutrition Act. The need for this is clear:

• A recent USDA report showed that in 2008, an estimated 49.1 million people, including 16.7 million children, lived in households that experienced hunger multiple times throughout the year.
• School-age children are not eating the recommended level of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products according to a 2009 Institute of Medicine report.

The administration is proposing several things to improve child nutrition. They suggest adding an additional $10 billion over ten years starting in 2011. This investment will lead to an improvement in the quality of the School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs, increase the number of kids participating, and ensure that schools have the resources they need to make program changes, including training for school food service workers, upgraded kitchen equipment, and additional funding for meal reimbursements for schools that are enhancing nutrition and quality.

This investment will allow additional fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products to be served in school cafeterias and an additional one million students to be served the healthy diets that will allow them to succeed in school.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is also joining with First Lady Michelle Obama in promoting the Let’s Move campaign, which will combat the epidemic of childhood obesity through a comprehensive approach that builds on effective strategies, and mobilizes public and private sector resources. Let’s Move will engage every sector impacting the health of children to achieve the national goal of solving the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation.

Finally, the administration supports the creation of a new program to reward States that move aggressively to eliminate hunger by 2015. Through this program, USDA will provide competitive grants to Governors to implement creative and innovative approaches to eliminating hunger, letting the states act as laboratories for successful strategies.

Vote Kids strongly supports this initiative and urges Congress to pass this Child Nutrition Re-authorization with full funding to promote these initiatives.

Leo Hindery Jr wrote an excellent column about “America’s Dirty Little Secret: Who’s Really Poor in America?” that contained some amazing and disturbing statistics.

At least 50 million people are ill-fed — up from 37 million just a year ago — including 17 million children. Hunger in America is now at an all-time high, and there are currently entire national geographic regions — the very large 15-state ‘South’ being one of them — where more than half of all public school students are poor and ill-fed.

30% of the nation’s 50 million homeowners own a home whose value is below its mortgage balance, and this number could rise to an almost unbelievable 50% by year-end 2011. It would cost about $745 billion, more than the size of the original 2008 bank bailout, to restore these borrowers to the point where they were breaking even, which there is no obvious political will to find right now.

Despite the truly dismal ‘real unemployment’ figures with which most everyone now agrees — a staggering 30 million workers and 19% of the labor force — very little attention is being paid to the particularly adverse effects the recession is having on people of color, recent immigrants, and out-of school youth. And almost no one is acknowledging the sad reality that even the nation’s 130 million full-time workers have had an average economic loss of 15% just since December 2007 — an average effective work week of 34 hours rather than 40 — which means that the number of unemployed workers, measured economically, is actually as high as 50 million.

The overwhelming problem today for most workers isn’t this recession, as horrible as it is — it’s the fact that for every earned income level except the top 10%, average household income hasn’t changed a bit for 10 years, and that for the bottom 60% of wage earners it hasn’t changed for more than 20 years. Through economic expansions and recessions — and bull and bear markets — alike, 90% of workers in America have been standing still earnings-wise.

And 100 million people, fully one-third of the entire U.S. population, are at or below “200% of the federal poverty line of $21,834 for a family of four”, which is a needs-measure made lame by the fact that no family of four can actually comfortably live on such a low annual income.

Nothing better illustrates the need for a strong response from Washington DC that we are currently not seeing. The Senate passed a small jobs bill yesterday that does little to address these major structural problems in the United States economy. The next steps must be extension of unemployment insurance, COBRA, and robust state aid to prevent devastating cuts in Medicaid, education, and child protection, among many other things. If America is to compete over the next 50 years in this cutthroat global economy, while maintaining its commitment to Social Security and Medicare, these structural problems must be addressed in a way far differently than what is currently being proposed at the federal and state level.