Relief is needed to help families struggling due to COVID virus

So here’s a ray of light in an otherwise dark political moment: Last week, a group of socially conservative luminaries — are they the last surviving “compassionate conservatives”? — strongly endorsed further aid for some of the most economically vulnerable people in our country.

In a letter organized by W. Bradford Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the signers called for an expansion of the earned-income tax credit, which, as they noted, “rewards work,” and a $2,000 payment this fall under the Child Tax Credit program.

The underappreciated child credit, they wrote, “reduces poverty while fostering some of our nation’s most critical investments: those that parents make for their children.” Yes, and expanding it would have a large impact in stimulating the economy.

Their proposal, coming as the Republican-led Senate prepares, very belatedly, to engage on a new round of economic relief, points to how the next stimulus bill should be judged. Above all, does it do enough to help those facing the greatest hardship from the downturn, through the tax credits, an expansion of food stamps, renters’ assistance and other forms of relief?

Also: Does it include sufficient help for state and local governments facing a collapse in revenues? Does it continue to give expanded help to the unemployed? And does it deal with the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on our health-care systems, our voting system and those stranded without health coverage?

Yes, it will have to be a large and expensive piece of legislation.

This is a time when cynicism is amply justified by the behavior of the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress. One could be forgiven for wondering whether this conservative initiative might be used as a cover for slashing other forms of help — especially since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., shamefully dragged his feet on a new relief package, leaving it until the last moment.

Democrats cannot let McConnell jam them by offering an inadequate proposal this week on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. One big danger: that the assistance is timed to expire just before Inauguration Day 2021, even though the effects of the downturn will continue well into next year and beyond.

If former vice president Joe Biden wins in November, he could face immediate obstruction from Republicans. For now, they want to get themselves and Trump reelected. If Trump loses, the GOP will suddenly rediscover deficits as their all-purpose excuse for blocking Democratic initiatives.

But none of this should detract from the open letter signed by, among others, the writer J.D. Vance, Princeton professor Robert P. George, and a group of AEI scholars including Michael Strain, Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru.

Progressives rightly take conservatives to task for preaching about “family values” without offering any concrete help for parents desperate to build better lives for their children. Here, happily, is one occasion when words and deeds intersect.

And the Child Tax Credit is the ideal policy for bringing together the left and the kinderhearted right. Expanding the credit has been a major cause of a group of Democrats that includes Sens. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, as well as Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., Suzan Delbene, D-Wash., Richard Neal, D-Mass., — and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Versions of it have also won support from Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

The House-passed Heroes Act provides for a more generous credit — $3,600 for children under the age of 6, and $3,000 for those aged 6 through 17 — and that should be the standard.

To get a sense of how powerful an instrument the child credit could be, Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that a credit at the House bill’s level would cut the child poverty rate among African Americans in half, and reduce it by 42% for all U.S. children.

Consider: “Our nation’s unemployment rate is a devastating 11.1% — much higher than it was even during the Great Recession. The coming months will be very difficult for many Americans and their families as they try to regain their financial footing after an unforeseeable blow.”

That’s not liberal or Democratic propaganda. That’s from the conservative scholars’ letter. The moral logic is clear. Congress has an obligation to the nation’s most vulnerable families to go big again.