House Finance

It. The committee will come to order. Please call the roll. Representatives Camacho. Here. Garcia. Excused. Gonzalez. Good afternoon. Hartsuk. Excused. Marshall. Here. Stuart. Here. Weinberg. Excused. Woog. Here. Zokai. Excused. To tell him here. Mr. Chair. Here we have a quorum, believe it or not. Rep. Rootinel, you got a co prime. For the record, we've been joined by Representative Hartsuk. All right, we have the bill sponsors here on 1240. Who would like to kick us off? Rhett Rudenell. Thank you, Chair. I am honored to be presenting House Bill 261240 alongside Representative Zo Kai here. Colleagues, we've gotten a chance to learn a very important lesson while doing this job over the last couple years, and that lesson is that poverty is a policy choice, and we can prove it because the General assembly has made a choice in the past to dramatically decrease poverty when we passed the Family Affordability Tax Credit and when we expanded the Earned Income tax credit, those two policies together reduced childhood poverty by 40% overnight. With the signing of that bill, a study found that the credits lifted more than 52,000 children out of poverty here in this state, giving…