Productive bipartisanship is rare these days, especially on hot-button topics such as the family, but Republicans and Democrats have brokered a deal on the child tax credit that, while not ideal, is a good compromise.
Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has written a tax compromise with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Democrat most interested in policymaking.
The deal modestly expands the child tax credit while not going as far as Democrats did in Biden’s first year, when they transformed the credit into a large monthly child allowance. The deal indexes the credit for inflation, increases the amount available as a cash payment to low-income families, but preserves work requirements.
There are many competing interests and ideologies in the debate over a child tax credit. Some conservatives and libertarians object to its very existence, seeing it as a special-interest subsidy. We reject that view.
A valid conservative worry is that a large child tax credit will discourage work and marriage. While there’s nothing wrong with tax policy making it easier for one of two parents to stay at home, it is true that there is nothing pro-child about a policy that results in more children being raised by single mothers who do not work.
Children raised without fathers and without the example of a working parent are more likely to fall into poverty and unwed parenthood; this is how intergenerational poverty happens.
That’s why Republicans insist that at least one parent who gets a child tax should be working. This isn’t due to concern that the credit might reward the lazy but about ensuring that policy doesn’t incentivize intergenerational poverty.
The current deal has modest work requirements that should limit anti-work or anti-marriage impacts. A $2,000 credit is not too big. For the middle class, it’s not even a child subsidy. It doesn’t give parents an advantage over nonparents. It is a simple fairness measure that acknowledges that a family with children has more expenses than a childless couple.
Without a child tax credit, married parents with three children and earning about $125,000 a year would pay about twice as much in taxes as a household of five young adults earning, in aggregate, the same $125,000.
In other words, a $2,000 child tax credit is simply an acknowledgment that a child is a person.
For most families, the worst thing about the 2017 child tax credit is that it keeps shrinking. The legislation set the credit at $2,000 and didn’t index it for inflation, so it is now worth about $1,700 in 2018 dollars, a 15% loss in its value.
The Smith-Wyden proposal doesn’t reset the credit to its original value (which would be about $2,400 in 2024 dollars) but does index it to inflation from now on, so it won’t keep losing value.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The worst thing about the Smith-Wyden fix is that it is temporary. The changes expire in 2025. Temporary tax breaks are almost always bad policy, and short-term moves are particularly inapt when it comes to family policy.
Raising children is a long-term project. Marriage is supposed to be a lifelong commitment. Raising children is at least an 18-year commitment (but really, it’s a lifelong thing). Millennials are extraordinarily risk-averse, and that’s a reason they aren’t having children. This is all exacerbated by laws that create a future in which the tax code might or might not count children as people.