Democrats Give Parents Another Reason Not to Work w/ boosted child allowance
Among the many, many welfare programs included in President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” proposal is a plan to give parents $3,600 for kids under the age of 6 and $3,000 for kids between the ages of 6 and 17.
The benefit – which was previously $2,000 per child – is fully refundable for parents who paid no income tax in 2021. In other words, a parent who did not work in 2021 is eligible to receive $7,200 if he or she has 2 children under the age of 6.
“Millions of families are trapped in a chasm between stagnant incomes and rising costs,” argues Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO).
I’m all for giving tax breaks to parents, but actually refunding the amount is just another welfare program like food stamps. With the money delivered to parents as a monthly check, we’re essentially looking at a new form of universal basic income.
As PBP has discussed many times, universal basic income is guaranteed to drive people out of the workforce. We saw the same thing happen during the pandemic when the government offered boosted unemployment benefits that provided Americans with more cash than they could have made working full-time at minimum wage. The restaurant industry still hasn’t recovered.
Despite the evidence, Democrats claim the enhanced child allowance would help parents pay for groceries and other essentials and would not convince them to quit their jobs. It is ‘ridiculous to think parents would quit their jobs in droves due to the child allowance,’ wrote Senator Sharrod Brown (D-OH) in a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
However, according to an analysis conducted by economists at the University of Chicago that was cited in the WSJ article with which Mr. Brown took issue, Democrats’ plans to convert the child tax credit into a universal basic income could drive up to 1.5 million people (2.6% of working parents) out of the workforce. This would be more than tragic for businesses already struggling to find employees in the wake of the pandemic.
If the enhanced child allowance were to persist for 10 years, we’re looking at a price tag of nearly $1 trillion.
And as noted by Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute, roughly a quarter of the program’s funding would go towards refunds, not tax cuts. This is the very definition of welfare and would contribute to the entitlement state progressives are so bent on achieving (read more on that here).
Sending checks to parents also threatens to interfere with crucial state programs that identify child abuse, notes the WSJ article. “Checks on autopilot will mean more children in homes attenuated from society, houses ‘with the shades down.”
Author’s Note: Welfare programs were always meant to be a temporary fix. This is something progressives fail to understand.
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The commiecrats bring out the lazy in people
“Welfare programs were always meant to be a temporary fix. This is something progressives fail to understand.” Oh bull, Alice, just bull.
“The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is a United States federal law passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The bill implemented major changes to U.S. social welfare policy, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
The law was a cornerstone of the Republican Party’s “Contract with America,” and also fulfilled Clinton’s campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” AFDC had come under increasing criticism in the 1980s, especially from conservatives who argued that welfare recipients were “trapped in a cycle of poverty.” After the 1994 elections, the Republican-controlled Congress passed two major bills designed to reform welfare, but they were vetoed by Clinton. After negotiations between Clinton and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Congress passed PRWORA and Clinton signed the bill into law on August 22, 1996.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act
So, it was the right’s idea but they couldn’t get er done, go figure. And it was Bill Clinton, who I am pretty sure is a Democrat, who put the restraints in a welfare system that was not working. Expected casualties did occur but were survivable and that’s the system we currently have. “Welfare programs were always meant to be a temporary fix” really depends on what you mean. If you mean programs that are temporary, you are wrong. If you meant programs with fixed intervals for the offer; that’s what we have, and no —- that was NOT always meant to be. That’s why the right thought about change and the left actually made the change happen.
It’s not that I agree with this program, or disagree with your cut n paste story, but your closing comment is factually untrue and basically full of it. It’s always easy to roll those tropes of welfare-mom’s buying lobsters, large screen tv’s and Cadillac’s, but the truth is much more complex. And obviously, the biggest change to do exactly what you are ranting about, happened on Bill Clinton’s watch.
I believe the $3.xT package is too large, must be trimmed, but rhetoric like this is not going to progress the movement towards compromise at all; quite the opposite. We just don’t profit with casting the same old stereotypes, the same old tropes, if we want action, we want progress. We need to work together via compromise to gain the win-win —– or at least not a win-loss.
You mentioned Clinton. He was too busy sexually harassing women to govern
And just how do you expect these “welfare” families to survive with $2000 for each kid without working? The truth is, both parents have to work full time to afford to raise a child. Raising children in poverty leads to lack of educational opportunities and eventually more poverty. If we want to decrease poverty rates in our supposedly “first world” country, then we have to step up and help the poorest of our citizens. Just about any study you can find will tell you that preventative measures are much more cost effective than trying to fix problems after the fact.
The poverty level for a family of two is almost $18,000.That’s more than one parent would get at minimum wage, but think about renting a two bedroom apartment – that alone would eat up most of that $18K, unless they’re living in rat-infested squalor. A few thousand dollars a year would at least keep the kids fed and together with SNAP benefits and school lunches they might even get enough to eat relatively healthy meals.
And it’s even worse for a single parent home. Conservatives and Republicans make a big deal out of saving the lives of unborn fetuses… but what are you going to do for them after they’re born? Subject them to inhumane conditions and lives of poverty and crime (and those two things always go together). How cruel do you have to be to demand a woman give birth, but then leave her and her kids to starve in the streets?
Universal Basic Income is not really a thing – it’s an experiment that has been tried in one or two places with some success. It has certainly not closed down the restaurant industry. President Trump did that on his own – most restaurants could have weathered a few months of being shut down, but because of Trump’s mishandling of the initial COVID response and his own stupid statements, he created a cult following that refuses to wear masks and have also become violent extremist anti-vaxxers. Because of this, the pandemic has strung out for almost 2 years, while most of the rest of the world was able to reopen in half the time with half the sickness/death rates. And it’s still happening in Republican-led states, while Democrat-led states are leading the economic recovery (and losing a lot fewer people to COVID).