By Robert Reich
They need it. Even before the pandemic, child poverty had reached post-war records. Even non-poor families were in trouble, burdened with deepening debt and missed payments.
Most were living paycheck to paycheck – so if they lost a job, they
and their kids could be plunged into poverty. It’s estimated that the new
monthly child allowance will cut child poverty by more than half.
But every single
Republican in both the House and Senate voted against the measure.
After I posted a
tweet reminding people of this indisputable fact, Republican Senator Mike Lee
of Utah responded Friday with a perfectly bizarre tweet:
“If you’re one of the 39 million households receiving their first Child Tax
Credit payment today, don’t forget that every single Democrat voted against
making it larger.”
Hello? Did we
just go through the funhouse mirror?
In point of fact, when the American Rescue Plan was being debated last February, Lee and Senator Marco Rubio did propose slightly larger payments. But here’s the rub: They wanted to restrict them only to “working parents.” Children of the unemployed would be out of luck. Yet those kids are the poorest of the poor. They’re most at risk of being hungry without a roof over their heads.
In a joint press release at the time, Lee and Rubio said they refused to support what they termed “welfare assistance” to jobless parents, warning against undercutting “the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.”
Then
Lee, Rubio, and every other Republican voted against the whole shebang – help
for working and non-working parents. And now Lee wants to take
credit for wanting to make the payments larger to begin with? Talk about both
sides of the mouth.
As we move
toward the gravitational pull of the midterm elections – and polls show how
popular the monthly child payments are – I expect other Republicans to make the
same whopper of a claim.
But underneath
this hypocritical Republican rubbish lie two important questions. The first:
will a payment of up to $300 per child every month – totaling up to $3,600 per
child per year – invite parents to become couch potatoes?
That seems
doubtful. Even a family with three kids under six would receive no more than
$10,800 a year. That’s way below what’s needed to pay even subsistence
expenses, and still far below what a full-time job at the federal minimum wage
would pull in.
But even if the
payment caused some parents to work a bit less, it’s far from clear their
children are worse off as a result. Maybe they benefit from additional
parenting time.
Which only
raises a second question: should children be penalized because their parents
aren’t working, or are working less than they would without the child payment?
This question has
been debated in America for many years – ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt first
provided “Aid for Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC) in the Social
Security Act of 1935.
It can’t be
decided based on facts; it comes down to values. We know, for example, that
child poverty soared after Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans ended
AFDC in 1996 and substituted a work requirement. Many people – myself included
– look back on that decision as a horrible mistake.
But many of its
proponents call it a success because it resulted in additional numbers of poor
adults getting jobs and thereby setting good examples for their children of
personal responsibility. In the view of these proponents, a country where more
parents take responsibility to provide for their children is worth the
collateral damage of a greater number of impoverished children.
Since the 1990s,
the Republican view that public assistance should be limited to families with
breadwinners has taken firm hold in America. Only now, with the American Rescue
Plan – put into effect during the worst public health crisis in more than a
century and one of the fiercest periods of unemployment since World War II –
has that view been rejected in favor of a universal family benefit.
It’s too early
to know whether this about-face is permanent. The Act’s payments will end a
year from now unless Congress passes Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion addition.
Almost every Senate Democrat has signaled a willingness to go along. But here
again, not a single Senate Republican has signed on.
Let’s be clear.
Mike Lee’s Republican Party – the putative party of “family values” – doesn’t
support needy families. It supports a pinched and, in these perilous times,
unrealistic view of personal responsibility – children be damned.
Robert Reich's latest book is "THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged
It, How To Fix It." He is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. He
served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time
Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the
twentieth century. He has written 17 other books, including the best sellers
"Aftershock," "The Work of Nations," "Beyond
Outrage," and "The Common Good." He is a founding editor of the
American Prospect magazine, founder of Inequality Media, a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning
documentaries "Inequality For All," streaming on YouTube, and
"Saving Capitalism," now streaming on Netflix.
