Claire Cain Miller
speaker
184 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 24 Jul
Claire Cain Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That's right, and this matters for things like eventually retiring or paying for college, but it also matters in an important day-to-day way because having these kind of savings provides a buffer.
If your car breaks down, if you have an unexpected healthcare expense and you have no savings, that's an incredible stress for your family that can plunge you into poverty.
And research has found that even just knowing that a family has some savings like that can decrease the stress in the family even when there's not a financial emergency.
It's a good question, and the people who I talk to who advocate on behalf of families and addressing child poverty would say both are needed.
They really serve different purposes.
Giving families cash now, which happens in the form of the child tax credit, which the Trump administration did expand slightly.
Right.
This helps with day-to-day needs like—
Getting food on the table, filling up your car with gas, making sure your children have winter coats.
These kind of things are very important, and it could be frustrating to have your child get an account that the Trump administration puts $1,000 in, but you can't access it even though you can't afford to feed your children right now.
And so the thing about the long-term savings accounts is that if you get $1,000 as a newborn now, it could be worth $6,000 if no more money was put in by the time they're 18.
And so taking advantage of the compounding returns of the stock market could really serve people well.
But it doesn't mean that families don't also need help in the form of day-to-day assistance now.
And people who study this field and craft these policies mostly say that both are necessary.
Right.
It's helping your child when they're an adult versus helping your child right now.
And so it's just serving a very different purpose.
And there is another real benefit of these kinds of savings accounts, researchers told me, which is that a lot of families use them to save for college.
A lot of the states and localities that already have them, they go into college savings accounts specifically for that purpose.
And even small amounts of money can really change children's attitudes towards education.
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