Yes to Child Tax Credits: No to Purposeful Ick

It’s become a trend to describe extreme, off-putting positions taken by Republicans as “weird.” Thank you to Democratic Minnesota Governor and now Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz, who as you can hear on this podcast got the trend started. 

I’d like to add “ick” to “weird.” There’s something truly unwholesome (in other words not just weird but icky) about contemporary conservative issue framing, especially on policy topics where there are honorable conservative framings readily available. One prime example of this kind of purposeful ick is J.D. Vance’s recently resurfaced riff describing women without children as “cat ladies” who are “miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made.” Here Vance is taking two very real issues that have an obvious conservative valence (declining birth rates and lack of adequate support for families) and making an aesthetic and cultural choice to frame them in a way that’s as negative and anti-feminist (again, icky) as humanly possible. 

How could Vance choose a better framing to describe a concern with declining birth rates and lack of support for families? Maybe, if he truly cared to do so, he could look to his elders. Elders like, for example, President Joe Biden. For me the high water mark of the Biden Administration came early, with the expansion of the child tax credit that was part of the American Recovery Act. I posted on this at the time, and the results of the experiment are clear. Child poverty was reduced by half within a single year, to 5.2 percent by one official measure. This was an extraordinarily positive policy move, and the Biden-Harris White House, as you can see in this fact sheet, remains justifiably proud of the experiment. 

For a heterodox center left white guy like me, the ick factor connected to comments like Vance’s has a silencing effect as bad or worse than cancel culture silencing on the left. The “icky silencing effect” works like this: even on topics where I’d like to show rhetorical sympathy with conservative arguments, I have to be incredibly careful around whole issue zones that conservatives frame in ways that are icky. Why? The reason is simple: I want to maintain positive and trusting relationships with women in my life, and I feel it’s important to avoid even the most oblique hint of association with male politicians who come off as resentful, blustering, and emotionally small. This is the exact opposite of the version of masculinity I’d like to see in the world—strong, steady, gallant, and yes sometimes conservative in the sense of conservatism as protection of time-honored values like the family, or perhaps liberal democracy.

This fact sheet through the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and Brookings, contains all the policy details you probably need to know about the effects of the ARP child tax credit expansion, which inexplicably was not renewed after one year (or maybe there is an explanation—thank you Joe Manchin). For me, beyond the obvious positive of removing children from poverty, there were two things I especially liked about the ARP version of tax credits. First, the initiative was non-judgmental. Families could easily access the tax credit without a difficult and humiliating application process, and they were trusted to spend the money in a way that was best for their kids. Another way to put this is that there was no welfare shaming. Second, the program was designed so that a very broad swath of American families got a full tax credit—phase-outs didn’t even begin until $150,000 in income for a married couple. This meant that the program was relatively universal, to my mind a superior and more politically sustainable policy design than means-testing. See Matt Bruenig’s clever article in Jacobin on the means-testing versus universality issue. 

According to this August 4 Op-Ed in the LA Times, 69% percent of Americans now support a renewed form of expanded Child Tax Credits, including 59% of Republicans. But most Republican Senators oppose the current Wyden-Smith Tax Relief for American Workers and Families Act, seemingly because they fear that its child tax credit provisions would deliver a big, possibly permanent win for Democrats. This article in The Hill, for instance, quotes Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa worrying that passing the Wyden-Smith bill would make President Biden “look good.” Here is a different flavor of political ick. While Democratic politicians, of course, are not above putting political advantage over good policy themselves, the way Senator Grassley seems to care about politics more than children is unusually cynical. One might think a 90-year-old elder statesman (you read that right) might show slightly more wisdom and care for posterity.

To finish, I have three concluding points: My rhetorical point is that J.D. Vance, if he were a solid, grounded man and a real conservative, would stick to stumping for child tax credits, a policy which to his own credit (and breaking with previous Republican orthodoxy) he has supported in the past. He needs to stop indulging in being a cruel ickster grousing about women who don’t have children. 

My writer’s point, for the purposes of this blog, is that child tax credits are the third of my personal “baker’s dozen” policies and cultural changes that will truly help children and families. As you’ll recall, the first was around creating more cultural support for men who want to be actively involved with raising young children, and the second was around “baby bonds.” The fourth, upcoming next month, relates to paid family medical leave. 

My forward-looking political point is that Kamala Harris, if she wins, ought to put child tax credits at or near the top of the list of policies to pass for her administration’s first 100 days (the Walz pick for VP seems an almost certain indicator that she plans to do exactly this given Walz’s past leadership on this issue). And while child tax credits are not an urban or local government issue per se, Governors and state legislatures can get involved as well. See this fact sheet from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy on the fourteen states that provide child tax credits. The one in California, in my view, is currently targeted too narrowly toward very low earners who qualify for the earned income tax credit. Then again, if a more universal credit were to pass at the federal level, a California program focused on very low earners might make more sense.