Child Tax Credit poll brings some surprises
By making an expanded child tax credit available for one year to all but the wealthiest households, the Biden administration is aiming both to strike a major blow against child poverty and to create a political constituency to guarantee the benefit’s longevity.
Polling, however, finds the child benefits have lagged in popularity. A new YouGov/American Compass poll found that only 28 percent of voters said they preferred the expanded Child Tax Credit to be made permanent and go to “all families, regardless of whether they work to earn money.” This could be because of the credit’s slow rollout and the submerged nature of carrying out social policy through the tax code. But it could have more to do with the disconnect between policymakers in D.C. and working-class parents, particularly when it comes to family policy.
The biggest divide may be on the importance of work. For a new report, the Institute for Family Studies (a conservative think tank) and partner organizations hosted focus groups of white parents in southeastern Ohio, Black parents around Atlanta and Hispanic parents in the San Antonio area. We heard parents talk about work as a way of paying into the system, the price of admission for being eligible for government benefits like the expanded child tax credit. “Some people will be responsible with it,” said a Hispanic dad in Texas. “The other people will just live off of it.”
My ideal form of child benefit would look like the one proposed by Sen. Mitt Romney this year, which would streamline the tangle of tax code provisions for families into one monthly benefit. But it’s clear from talking to working-class parents that they want something more from family policy than just a check. They want to feel that their benefits were earned. If politicians want expanded child benefits to stick, they need to listen to the families that will benefit most.
For the focus groups, we recruited participants mostly without college degrees, some married, some single or cohabiting, ranging in age from their 20s to their early 50s. We talked to parents putting in the hours without expecting much in the way of a career progression, in jobs like retail clerk, HVAC installer, stay-at-home mom and part-time entrepreneur, and social worker. Our goal was to see if the proposals and framing popular in policy circles resonated with parents busy with putting bread on the table.
Our findings pour cold water on some of the left’s favored policy solutions but don’t fit comfortably with the political vision of most Republican politicians, either. Working-class parents don’t want to dramatically increase or shrink the size of government but want to improve how it works on their behalf — to make work pay, expand the options available to them and help them afford the everincreasing cost of living.
The government has a responsibility for boosting families with a worker present, most parents said, even while admitting the frustration that long, unpredictable hours can inflict on a family. Unprompted, parents in all three groups volunteered feeling damned if they do, damned if they don’t, with take-home pay seemingly insufficient to keep up with the bills yet too high to qualify for safety-net benefits.
One Georgia working mother remembered her frustration with finding out her income was slightly too high to qualify for Head Start. Unable to afford any other child care for her then-preschoolage son, she said, “I had to lie and say I wasn’t working.” That incident colors her view of policy proposals now. Sometimes, she said, “it seems like the people who are not working seem like they’re better off, because they get all the assistance.”
Of course, those receiving government assistance would likely tell a different story about their challenges. Before the pandemic, nondisabled households with children in the bottom tenth of the income scale received an average of roughly $15,000 from safety net and social insurance programs — unlikely to be truly better off than those with steady employment.
The parents we talked to felt a tension between the obvious benefits a monthly benefit could bring but still wanting some kind of work requirement. Work made a family deserving of government support; without it, family benefits were seen as welfare. A Hispanic mom in her late 30s ticked off her monthly expenses — food, rent, car — and admitted that an extra $300 to $400 per month would be “really beneficial.” But, she added, “it could also coddle people that don’t want to work and are playing the system.”
There is good reason for policymakers to prefer the administrative simplicity and egalitarianism of universal benefits. One Texas mom noted a strict work requirement would leave out parents who were most in need: “Some people are working and doing their best, but they’re working at, like, McDonald’s, you know? They’re still low-income.” But among most of the working-class parents we talked to, fairness was seen not in uniformity but in more actuarial terms: If you want to receive a benefit, you have to pay into it.
We also heard parents wish government benefits would be flexible instead of one size fits all, especially when it comes to the trade-off between work and family life. Even the more self-described progressive parents tended to not want government-run child care programs, preferring vouchers or tax credits. Our participants also recognized trade-offs; most were in favor of raising the minimum wage but were quick to note the negative effects too large an increase could have on the economy.
Some parents expressed frustration with tax benefits or safety-net programs that can provide more assistance to cohabiting couples than to married ones. One participant in Georgia shared that she and her partner had chosen not to marry because marriage penalties in the tax code and the child support system would leave their household financially worse off. Another participant spoke for the group: “It’s sad that she has to choose between marrying a man she loves or losing the benefits that she has.”
Working-class parents’ feelings on work and parenthood don’t comfortably fit a partisan script, frustrating the attempts of political opportunists hoping to harness their energy to advance their favored policies. Progressive agendas tend to reflect the cares of college-educated, dual-career couples in big cities. (The Biden administration’s proposed American Families Plan, for example, polls much stronger among highly educated voters than those without a college degree.) Meanwhile, too many politicians on the right offer cultural red meat in lieu of a meaningful pro-family economic agenda.
These blind spots are real and endemic. They are what could undermine the political future of an expanded child tax credit. But they also point the way forward for a political movement that would devote time to open-ended discussions with parents from all walks of life and craft an agenda that responds accordingly.