Helping children is a good idea
Some things about U.S. politics are predictable. Anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade knew that as soon as a Democrat took the White House, Republicans would do another 180-degree turn on budget deficits.
Remember, the GOP went from hyperventilating about debt as an existential threat during the Obama years to indifference about deficits under Donald Trump. Surely nobody is surprised to see Republicans revert to deficit hysteria now that Joe Biden is president.
Why are Republicans peddling debt phobia again? Their usual argument is that federal debt is a burden on future generations; I and others have spent considerable time trying to explain that this is bad economics.
But leave the economics of debt aside. Shouldn’t politicians who claim to be terribly worried about the future of America’s children support, you know, actually helping America’s children today? That’s not a hypothetical question.
Democrats are reportedly working on legislation that would offer monthly payments to most U.S. families with children, and could, among other things, cut child poverty roughly in half.
One good thing about the legislation in the works is that Democrats finally seem to have broken free of Republican framing, under which every benefit takes the form of a tax credit. This will apparently be a straightforward proposal to send money to qualifying families.
Republicans will soon have to vote on this legislation. How will they justify voting no?
Some background: America stands out among wealthy countries for its failure to provide much help to families with children. U.S. expenditures on family benefits as a share of GDP are less than a third the rich-nation average. Largely as a consequence, we have a much higher rate of child poverty than our peers.
Independent estimates of the cost of something like the reported Democratic proposal put its price tag at $120 billion a year. To put this in perspective, it’s only about half the 2021 revenue loss caused by the 2017 tax cut.
And aid to children would achieve what proponents of the tax cut promised but failed to deliver: an improvement in America’s long-run economic prospects. If the children we help today grow up into healthier, more productive adults than they would otherwise, then that will eventually mean higher GDP.
And aid to children would also indirectly help the budget, because those children would later pay more in taxes and be less likely to call on safety net programs.
Increased aid to families with children is a good idea. It would improve millions of Americans’ lives, it would make us stronger in the future, and it would have only modest budget costs. So how will Republicans justify opposing it? Because you know that most, if not all, of them will.
One answer is that they’ll yell about fiscal responsibility and hope that voters have short memories.
Another answer is that they’ll claim that the Biden administration and its allies have a “radical leftist agenda” — because nothing screams Marxism like giving kids enough to eat and a roof over their heads — and hope that voters don’t figure out what Democrats are actually proposing.
Finally, we’ll hear some version of the standard conservative argument that any policy reducing misery reduces the incentive to be self-sufficient — you know, unemployment insurance encourages people to stay unemployed, food stamps encourage them to be lazy, and so on.
One thing I don’t expect, however, is any kind of good-faith argument against aid to families with children. That’s not to say that the Democratic proposal will be perfect. But spending more on children is a good idea, economically and morally, and should become law.