Key piece of Biden's $1.8T families plan expires after 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden couldn’t get everything he wanted into his own $1.8 trillion families plan.

His proposed child tax credit is set to expire after 2025. It would provide parents with $300 a month for each child under 6 and $250 a month for older children. Democratic lawmakers are pushing hard to make the credit a permanent policy, but the administration told them that the annual costs of roughly $100 billion were too high.

Biden is embracing a dramatic shift from four decades of politics in which presidents from both parties focused more on containing government than expanding it. But the resistance to making the child tax credit permanent is a sign that even in a White House that embraces big government, there are some limits.

“This is a very expensive policy, probably another $500 billion-plus to extend this for the rest of the decade,” said Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "According to the principles they’ve laid out, they would want to show they’re paying for it, and the current ‘pay-fors’ would be insufficient even on a 15-year basis.”

Still, the tax credit is integral to the administration's goal of reducing child poverty to the single digits and improving the well-being, education and earnings of America’s next generation. It was first introduced in part of Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus package as a yearlong benefit that increased the size of the existing credit, opened it up to almost every family and enabled it to be paid out monthly.

“With two parents, two kids, that’s up to $7,200 in your pocket to help take care of your family,” Biden said in his joint address to Congress on Wednesday night.

The policy gets at the essence of Biden's belief that people should feel that government policies...