In launching the child tax credit, which sends $300 to parents with children under the age of six and $250 per month for children between 6 and 18, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are bragging to the national media about what they have done for the children of America.
The major address was led off by Vice President Harris – who AGAIN used the “things my mother taught me” schtick. I mean … we love our mothers, but I would like to think that Harris has been influenced by more than her mother.
In terms of the purpose of the national address, Harris reached a new level of hyperbole. She suggested that this day was one of those never-to-be-forgotten moments in history. You know, the kind that you will always remember where you were when you heard the news. She was comparing this bit of political boondoggling as comparable to Japan bombing Peril Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy and the attack on the Trade Towers. To be honest, I already forget what I was doing when I heard the news.
Of course, you cannot lose politically by giving away money – especially when it is not your money. So, where will the money be gotten? Biden says by raising the taxes on corporations and rich people. Two Problems. Corporations never pay taxes. They only collect them and pass them on to the government. Any tax increase on corporations will be paid by you and me when we purchase stuff. It is a hidden tax that hits hardest on the poor, who have limited funds to cover the increases in cost of goods and services.
The Biden child gift package will also hit us at the retail counter because pouring money into the economy causes inflation – a rise in prices. We are already seeing that. So, the parents who receive the child credit money should remember that they are paying for it through that increase at the gas pump, the cost of a used car and all those other purchases at the grocery and clothing stores.
Biden repeatedly called the child tax credit a tax reduction over and over. No matter how many times he says it, it is not a tax reduction. It is no different than the stimulus checks we received that started the over-heating of the economy (meaning inflation). The so-called Child Tax Credit may have compensated a bit for the taxes parents pay. But it is not a tax cut. It is not a credit. And it is not necessarily for the children.
They claim that the child tax credit will lift millions of kids out of poverty. If you look at the numbers, they are actually offering to lift more kids out of poverty than there are kids in poverty. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that parents will spend it on the children. They could spend it on their own costly habits – cigarettes or booze.
Biden said that it would go to a couple earning less than $150,000 dollars and a single parent earning less than $75,000. That is not exactly poverty level. And it actually benefits couples much more than single parents – who is more likely to be at poverty levels. Why? Because couples still live in one house or apartment, share utility bills, etc. Two people living in a house with a $150K income are much better off than one parent in a house – and paying all the utility bills alone — getting half that amount.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the child subsidy welfare programs incentivized women at poverty level to have more children. Eventually, limitation place on child support programs mitigated the problem. The Biden approach of giving away money ostensibly to support children in poverty may well produce a bumper crop of children in poverty.
The final problem is that we just cannot afford the cornucopia of spending that Biden and the Democrats are proposing and doing. It would appear that they are counting on the age-old Democrat strategy of buying votes with taxpayer money.
We should be mindful of what Benjamin Franklin said. “When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”
There is a sad irony in that fact that Biden & Co. are bankrupting the future of the very children they are purporting to help.
So, there ‘tis.