Charles is a hard-working single dad. He’s raising two “active and precocious” kids in a tiny room here in Hawaiʻi. They’ve gotten to know Rev. Gierlach, the rector of St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church, who explains:

Tax credits, the ones he gets now from the federal government, help them keep body and soul together. They need additional help.

Rev. Gierlach wrote about more of his parishioners and how low-income and working-class tax credits would help them in an op-ed in the Honolulu Star-Advertiserin 2017:

Most of us take a roof overhead and paid utility bills for granted. For the working poor, these basics are some of the ‘economic realities that strangle,’ to borrow the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.