My name is Sarah Christopherson. As a senior legislative advisor to the Patriotic Millionaires, I use my decades of experience as a congressional staffer, nonprofit advocate, and policy expert to help guide the team’s legislative and lobbying work. If you’ve attended PM events in the past, you might have heard Erica call on me to explain the inner workings of budget reconciliation or Senate cloture or how work authorization for immigrants overlaps with the tax code.
As you know, we usually write our weekly Closer Look newsletter in the collective voice of our millionaire members. But this week’s topic is one that’s close to home for me, so I decided to take the pen this time. As a still-young (kinda) person myself, and the mother of a young person who will be starting his college journey next year, I worry a lot about what we are doing—and more importantly, not doing!—to ensure that young people still have a chance at the American Dream.
In the fall of 2008, I was five years out of college, two years out of graduate school, and eight months pregnant with my first child, uncomfortably perched near my boss’s desk and listening on the phone as the Treasury secretary and Federal Reserve chair informed Congress that we were mere days away from a catastrophic collapse of the global financial system. I was a congressional advisor on the economy, and I was about to give birth in the midst of what threatened to be a new Great Depression. Just my luck. And yet, truth be told, I was lucky. Luckier, at least, than many of the young people who were just five or six years younger than me. They were about to graduate from college and enter the worst job market for young people in decades, according to the Fed.
At the height of the Great Recession, the unemployment rate for college grads aged 22-27 peaked at 7.7%. Student debt carried by those same young people struggling to find work averaged $29,750 (in today’s dollars). Ultimately, the recession had a long-term impact on their lives, not only their future earnings and economic mobility, but on their physical and mental health too. Young people entering the workforce during economic downturns even tend to die younger than their peers who enter in more prosperous times.
And yet, we might be on the precipice of an even darker era for young workers. Flash forward to 2025—the most recent year for which we have complete data—when the unemployment rate for recent college grads rose to 5.8%, with no relief in sight.
While we’re still a ways off from the worst years of the financial crisis, young people today are starting from an even deeper hole: the average college debt for the class of 2025 was $39,550—roughly $10 grand more in real dollars than the class of 2008. Meanwhile, kids these days are entering a job market that is gleefully purging entry-level positions in favor of AI ‘agents,’ and job postings for entry-level positions are down by over one-third. Applicants for those openings that do exist are being screened by AI reviewers who prefer AI applicants over human ones.
We’ll have more to say in the coming weeks about the overlap between AI, greed, and our societal rush to devour our own future prosperity just to pad the pockets of a few very rich CEOs. But for the purposes of this article it’s enough to say: things are bad, folks.
In a recent piece, The Guardian reported on how the larger affordability crisis is devastating young people across nearly every metric: it’s not just homeownership that’s out of reach, now young people are struggling to make enough to move out of their parents’ homes at all. Gas prices are up, food prices are up, utility costs are up, and the social safety net is unraveling thanks to decades’ worth of GOP attacks only partially offset by small-ball, strictly means-tested advances in social programs that leave millions of low- and lower-middle-income households behind. Young people without children are three times more likely (36% to 12%) to cite “can’t afford to raise a child” as a “major reason” for forgoing parenthood compared to earlier generations of people who chose not to become parents.
It’s not surprising, then, that young people facing treacherous job prospects and higher costs across the board are deeply dissatisfied with the state of the country. These young people hadn’t benefited from the Biden administration’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), which dramatically reduced child poverty but didn’t gain widespread support among those who didn’t benefit.
Fortunately, some influential folks in Washington have a plan for this forgotten group: double and triple down on the same policies that don’t help these young adults at all! The Searchlight Institute recently founded by Democratic insiders was even explicit in calling for ‘more of the same, please’: “The next time liberals are in power, there may only be one opportunity to enact a robust reform package. Tax cuts should be part of those discussions, but the reforms should be approached in ways that have worked for past presidents (i.e., CTC, EITC).”
Roughly two out of every five taxfilers in the U.S. is a single adult without dependents, and millions of them are under 30. They don’t qualify for the CTC and only the poorest of them qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The median cost of living in the United States for a single adult without children is $46,000; but the EITC for such adults falls to zero for anyone earning more than $19,104—less than half of what it takes to survive. (In technical policy terms, we economy wonks refer to this group as “shit outta luck.”)
But while most of Washington is laser-focused on continuing to ignore these taxfilers who are left out of existing benefit programs and feel alienated from and unseen by their leaders—these individuals who are as likely to turn their class resentment downward onto immigrants and the very poor instead of upward toward the oligarchs at the top—we’re taking a different approach.
What if… what if we helped parents by boosting tax credits like the CTC and EITC, and at the same time, we also helped those low- and lower-middle income workers who aren’t helped by those two programs? What if we fully paid for that proposal by shifting the same amount of federal income taxes that those low- and lower-middle income workers would have paid to households making over $1 million in annual income instead? Crazy, right
That is exactly what S. 4083/H.R. 7937, the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act (WATCA), introduced by Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Don Beyer, would do. Earlier this month, we at Patriotic Millionaires published an explainer that details how WATCA builds on and bolsters existing anti-poverty efforts, making them more generous, while simultaneously giving the left-behind taxpayers something that actually benefits them too. Workers who would not otherwise benefit from bills limited to EITC or CTC expansions would still see an increase in their take-home pay as a result of WATCA being included in a larger package.
And workers who would see some benefit from EITC or CTC expansions would get a bigger boost from a package that included WATCA as well. In fact, even under current law, the addition of WATCA would make existing tax credits more generous—one reason why the bill would make 26 million children better off.
For example, a single worker with a child making $35,000 in 2025 would have owed federal income taxes of $1,138 before tax credits. Subtracting their $2,200 child tax credit and $2,462 earned income tax credit would have generated a refund of $3,524.
When combined with WATCA, however, their total refund would have grown from $3,524 to $4,162—an increase of $638. WATCA would have eliminated their federal income tax, letting them get back the entire $1,700 refundable portion of the child tax credit + $2,462 from the earned income tax credit. In short, every low-income household wins, with WATCA boosting the anti-poverty impact of existing refundable tax credits. While the cost to federal coffers is covered by millionaires!
Instead of pitting childless workers against parents, young taxpayers against older ones, the very poor against the merely struggling, we have the chance to help every low- and middle-income household in America—paid for by millionaires.
It’s great policy. And struggling Americans—particularly our young people—deserve nothing less.