| 摘要 | The federal government imposes too heavy a tax burden on parents, and particularly on parents of large families. It ought to reduce that burden by expanding the child tax credit: enlarging it from its current value of $2,000 per child to at least $4,500; applying it fully against payroll and income taxes; indexing it to grow along with wages; and making these changes part of permanent law. For decades, Americans have had fewer children than they indicate to social scientists that they would like. An enlarged child credit would make it more possible for them to reach their goals.
So I ought to be receptive to Gladden Pappin and Maria Molla’s argument in American Affairs for a more “robust” system of family support. But I think that their proposal is inferior to a simple expansion of the credit.
They naturally disagree, and treat the child credit as the kind of “modest” thinking they are trying to transcend. But their case against it is baffling. They say that the “reformist conservatives” behind the child credit have “frequently” claimed that the earned-income tax credit raises fertility rates, and then say they’re wrong. But reformist conservatives haven’t made that case at all, let alone frequently. (Pappin and Molla supply a footnote, but the citations don’t back them.)
They next claim that no politically feasible expansion of the child credit — at least we are now talking about the relevant feature of the tax code again — will increase the fertility rate. And then they take another turn, saying that we should not be “narrowly preoccupied” with fertility rates in the first place: the fertility rates that are the reason they just gave for ditching the child credit.
The alternative policy proposed by Pappin and Molla resembles the tax credit in directing money to families. But there are some important differences. There will be two programs, called “FamilyPay” and “CarePoints.” The amount of aid dispensed by the first program will depend on how many children are already in the household: The first will receive $6,500, the second $5,000, the third $5,500, the fourth $4,750; I confess not to being able to grasp the logic of the pattern. (Pappin has, incidentally, described the existing, simpler child credit elsewhere as an example of “technocratic management.”)
The second program will be “cash-like vouchers that can be spent on childcare expenses, very broadly defined,” or saved in “special government accounts” as “CareBonds” for use to finance post-secondary education. The child credit, in contrast, can be spent or saved by parents on literally anything.
Child support will also be reconfigured. “Under the new program [fathers] will pay differential rates depending on whether they are at fault for abandoning the child,” they write. “If they refuse to live with the mother and child under the new system, they will pay a higher rate to compensate for lost public support, while if the mother refuses to let them live with them they will pay a lower rate.” But if “an alcoholic or drug addict father . . . wants to live with the family and use family cash payments for illicit purposes. . . . a judge will examine the case and rule according to what is best suited to the situation.”
Pappin and Molla offer a number of thoughts about financing the plan, involving new taxes and borrowing: “We aim to increase the structural budget deficit by around 5 percent of GDP,” or around $1 trillion.
The criticism of the child credit, recall, was that it was not politically feasible to make it big enough to matter. The Pappin–Molla plan, at once technocratic and romantic, seems far less politically feasible. While their ambition to have a much more pro-family economic policy is laudable, those who share it would be better off trying to build on what we already have. |
