Kamala Harris’ Dishonest Proposal for Per-Child Handouts

September 3, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

In my two-part series on how best to reduce poverty (see here and here), I argued that the goal should be to help poor people climb the economic ladder, not to make indolence a comfortable way of life. 

 

Unfortunately, many Republicans and Democrats prefer the latter approach. For instance, Senators Mitt Romney and J.D. Vance have both put forth proposals to send money to families based on the number of kids in each household.

But when there’s a bidding war to spend other people’s money, Kamala Harris has lots of experience. So it is hardly surprising that she is proposing even-bigger per-child handouts. And these giveaways would be very harmful, reducing incentives for lower-income people to work and gain independence.

Adding insult to injury, Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute explains Harris is being dishonest.

The policies in question are called refundable tax credits, which originated in the 1970s and have grown in number and scope ever since. The name suggests recipients are merely getting a refund of taxes they already paid Uncle Sam. Instead, in a lexical sleight of hand that would make George Orwell blush, refundable tax credits provide benefit checks to those who don’t owe federal income taxes — in effect, refunding them someone else’s taxes.

Harris’s proposals call for expanding refundable tax credits in all directions at once. Parents would collect expanded child tax credit, or CTC, payments, which a campaign summary calls “critical tax relief.” But that’s merely the revival of the Biden-Harris administration’s expanded CTC paid in 2021, plus an even bigger $6,000 payout in a child’s first year. …Harris’s latest agenda doubles down on her longtime zeal to turn the tax code into a mammoth ATM redistributing income. It’s perfectly fine for her and other liberals to argue for enlarging the welfare state, but they shouldn’t get away with suggesting that this amounts to “cutting taxes.”

Amen.

Harris is being utterly disingenuous. If you give money to someone who doesn’t pay taxes, it’s absurd to call that a tax cut.  Simply stated, refundability is just another word for redistribution.  Moreover, we should be getting Washington out of that racket, not making America more like Europe with a bigger welfare state.