As noted by Gordon Gray, the CTC [childcare tax credit] in the Ways and Means-passed reconciliation bill costs $556 billion – and that covers only the next 5 years. A permanent CTC [expansion] would easily pass the $1 trillion mark, and it is the undisguised aim of the proponents for it to be permanent.
Will Marshall, of the Progressive Policy Institute, writes,
in a warning shot across Democratic bows, nearly three-in-four (73 percent) voters say they are concerned that “Democrats in Congress want to spend too much money without paying for it.”
I don’t think that the far-left faction cares.
One of these things is not like the others: The New Deal; The Great Society; Obamacare; and the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
The difference is that with each of the first three, the radical policy measures were spelled out. The President put in a lot of effort selling them to the public. (I didn’t say that the salesmanship was honest.) With the reconciliation bill, there is no attempt to convince the public that it is desirable to enact an enormous child tax credit or to mandate ending use of fossil fuels in a decade. Instead, what we read is that if you’re on the blue team you want the number to be 3.5, but a few Democrats are holding out for something lower.
If all it takes to get the legislation to pass is to arrive at a compromise number, that can be done using legislative trickery, such as pretending that the CTC expansion will expire even sooner. So the radical agenda has a higher probability of passing than it might appear. If it does, then the latest wave of social transformation will be the first one to be instituted under conditions of near-total stealth.
I have tried to find the bill number for the spending bill or the reconciliation bill, but it is never mentioned. If the bill number is known and linked, people can view it.
More effort should be made to publish the bill number and link it.
https://www.congress.gov/browse
try this:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-concurrent-resolution/14
It is difficult to like massive and complex bills that can’t be understood until long after they pass. It hasn’t been a good process for creating political legitimacy nor good policy. All that said, in a time of low fertility, a pure cash transfer with a very gentle phase out is about as close to an economist recommended policy as we are likely to get. Worse than a negative income tax like the EITC but pretty darn good. I’d much rather they cut the bill down to just the child credit, make it permanent, and directly market it to the American people and force supposedly natalist Republicans to vote on it than the entire rest of the bill.
My expectation is that this will have minimal fertility effects. I don’t think there are a lot of people on the margin of “well, a $2,000 annual child tax credit isn’t enough for me to have a child, but $3,600 paid in installments throughout the year changes my mind.”
If you want higher fertility, you need policies that will encourage women to marry young and get out of the workforce. Women who are career-oriented are far more likely to wait to figure out life after their career has been established to settle down and get married, but it’s not that easy to just get married, especially these days. It used to be that prospective husbands brought a lot to the table in terms of being able to provide, an important consideration which had to be weighed along with feelings and other preferences.
I made a list of the first 30 women I could think of who are in my social circle. It’s a diverse list that includes colleagues, friends, and family members. I believe all have at least bachelor degrees, perhaps 1 or 2 do not. The average age is a little over 36 years. I can’t be certain about the average earned income, but many of them have high powered jobs and so the average could easily be over $100,000. With 26 total children (including two current pregnancies), the average number of children is 0.87. That average falls to 0.69 if you exclude immigrant women, as the 4 immigrant women have 8 children between them. There was only 1 child born and 1 current pregnancy to all of the women who were not married by age 30 or earlier. Fully half, or 15 of the 30 women, are childless, with an average age slightly older than the group as a whole.
An extra few dollars per month of government largesse isn’t going to fix this massive social problem.
Right. Only completely radical measures could have any hope of moving the needle on fertility rates. Small amounts of free gubmint cash that are furthermore totally negligible for high human capital types can’t do anything. Female education and participation in the workforce unconditioned on childbearing is empirically incompatible with patterns of procreation that can sustain population and other social conditions.
I’m head in a different direction actually. Massive subsidies and incentives for birth control “vaccines” at the lower end of the SES spectrum.
IUDs last longer than injections, but good luck convincing Republican politicians to “subsidize irresponsible sex”.
Don’t you think elites will just try to amp up immigration of low SES people from the third world to offset the lower number of births to low SES (or high SES) Americans?
I think rather than sterilization (which I don’t support), it would be optimal to make unwed motherhood a lot more painful.
The easiest thing to do, as there’s already a men’s rights constituency, and it’s entirely compatible with modern notions of gender, is the elimination of child support, or at least the substantial reduction of it. For example, child support could be limited only after a divorce caused by marital infidelity (with the same level of proof required in a court of law) or a legal conviction of physical violence. Make this gender neutral: if the mother committed the infidelity, then the husband wins full custody of the children (if he wants it) and the mother pays child support to him.
That by itself won’t be enough (probably no where close), but it will at least finally be a move in the right direction.
Another policy I’d like is the replacement of all welfare with (low status) chaperoned housing, Robin Hanson’s universal basic dorms. Cash prizes like Biden’s child tax credit largely make it easier on low SES women to behave irresponsibly. With dorms instead of welfare, there’s a huge status hit to the woman who has no option but to live there. It will be a clean and safe place, heated and cooled, but she’ll eat from a cafeteria menu, share her bathroom with other women and their families, and live in a very small square footage area. She won’t get decide when to go to bed or when to come home at night. She can leave whenever she likes, but it will be very difficult to support herself and raise her children on her own.
What radical measures are you proposing?
Let’s please just have Joe Biden mandate free birth control “vaccines” at the lower end. Then we get all of the major corporations to sign on as well. The externalities in economic terms is easily greater than that of the virus hold outs.
Ideally it would be spoken in one of those Biden whispers.
Shhh!
(Hey, just get the birth control vaccine already. You’re preventing us from a full economic recovery. It’s safe and effective.)
Psaki could follow it up with a promise to circle back….
I could suggest several possibilities, but I’m not really ‘proposing’ anything, which is a normative question about preferences. I’m more interested in the positive question of what might actually have real impact, and by comparison to that set of policies, to test whether public intellectuals opining on these matters are worthy of being taken seriously.
Furthermore, that set of potential interventions being so completely out of the realm of political possibility under the current regime makes anything presented in the frame of ‘proposal’ trigger reflexive, unthinking rejections based in negative ad hominem judgments instead of open-minded and rigorous analysis.
That being said, I think a reasonable normative constraint on the list of positive possibilities would be a kind of libertarian-ish “narrow tailoring” requirement, that is, the minimum amount of obnoxious coercion required to achieve the target outcome. You could combine that with a conservative-ish narrow tailoring to also try to minimize the overall change in the current system, rights, expectations, and overall way of life.
One possibility would be to condition access to higher education (i.e., the current minimum requirement for high status and lucrative employment for most people) on childbearing. That is, “No kids, no college.”
That is, to get into a B.A. program, you must already have a kid, and be raising that kid in a stable marriage. For more than 2 years, you would need two kids, so, for example, no one could get a typical four-year degree without already having two kids, which ensures that high human capital types reproduce at replacement levels.
For professional / graduate schools, 3 or 4 kids, that is, above-replacement reproduction. People who don’t want to have kids don’t have to go to college, or can wait and do other things, and anyway, too many people are going to college anyway and could use a break after high school to get a taste of the real world.
You could combine that with Affirmative Action quotas for parents progressively rated with more points for more kids. Where I work, it’s simply impossible to compete at the near-top level while being a parent who actually wants to spend some time raising their kids. Talented people with career ambitions know that the decision to have children is an off-ramp from their dreams. The incentives are overwhelmingly powerful.
This situation is simply impossible to remedy without putting a heavy thumb on the scale, one way or another, that will in effect neutralize the competitive advantage of people with admittedly higher level of gross product (though, from watching them, I must insist, not higher efficiency / productivity *rates*.) And the only way to do that is to say you could work as hard and long as you want, but if you don’t make children, you hit the glass ceiling and *can’t* get to the top, because you’re *barred* from doing so.
At the end of the day it’s essential for both sides of the rope to be working in favor of fecundity.
On the pull side, you need most of the high-status people at the top to be conspicuously married with lots of kids, so people pick up the signal that this is how high-status people live and what they value, and try to imitate those lifestyles. Also, when most talented, high-status people have bigger families, they will necessarily use their clout and leverage to nudge policy in the direction of a more family-friendly social order.
On the push-side, you need people to have kids knowing it’s the only key the regime allows to open the door to the markers and positions associated with higher status.
I am convinced that unless one is going to go the direction of Niger or Afghanistan, nothing short of the combination of these two measures would have much hope of nudging fertility dynamics in developed countries with female access to education and participation in the workforce, into a pattern where the highest human capital individuals all tend to reproduce above replacement.
And the fact that either of them is isolation is so utterly impossible and inconceivable from the political position of our current regime is why the problem won’t be solves, and why anyone who thinks some small checks are going to do anything isn’t worth taking seriously as an intellectual.
Yeah that would be pretty radical.
The median female worker makes only about 25k a year. This is big money to a family like that, and especially when you consider what a plan like this does to the budget constraints of a family with 2 kids that is considering a third.
Supposedly, the average spending per kid in middle class families is about 15k per year, and again, this is large relative to that amount.
Yes, that’s not going to be nearly as tempting to a two professional income family. But the only alternative to that is regressive child subsidies, something that doesn’t seem appealing to me and has horrible politics.
Single women on low incomes were already effectively married to the government, and have had the financial cost of childbearing papered over with Medicaid, WIC, TANF, SNAP, child support, EITC, etc. The cash may be welcome to them, but I’d be surprised if it generated a lot more children to women in this income bracket, given the large amount of social programs already in place. For a middle class family earning $80K or 100K, I’m not sure the extra $100 or so per month, relative to the old credit, is a big enough financial incentive to matter, especially given the marginal cost of raising another kid.
In any case, I don’t think public policy should be trying to increase child bearing by single women who are barely over the poverty line and earning 25K per year. Creating more single moms is not the way. The real social problem is that plenty of men and women aren’t getting paired off in marriage until their 30s (if not later) and having 0-1 kids.
This would never happen, but I would turn public school funding into per capita vouchers, which would be something like $12K-$14K. If you’re a married mom, you have the option to homeschool and convert each voucher to cash. If you’re a single mom, you must pick a school. Even then, given our culture, I’m sure quite a few women would still opt for a career, but the financial incentive is a lot more powerful than the Biden tax credit.
A married heterosexual couple where both workers make the median wage receive a substantial direct subsidy for having more kids. This isn’t just a subsidy to low income people. There are enormous numbers of people where this is not just pocket change who aren’t single mothers at the poverty line. With the phase outs, this is more like a near universal subsidy like public schools than a welfare program for the poor.
It subsidizes a lot of people, but I don’t think you’ll see a large increase in fertility as a result. I also think if you look at median earnings for people who work full-time, it isn’t hard to get far above 25K income.
If you combine the median annual income of 25-34 year old men and women who work full time, it is $96,044. Even if you cut the woman’s weekly wages in half, to account for part-time work and perhaps a lower wage, they still earn $73,008.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
These men and women aren’t having small families because of a lack of money. Again, if you go back to my original point, in my social circle, child bearing is disastrously below replacement level for mid-30s women who on average earn something like $100K.
These women aren’t having children because they’ve placed too much focus on career/education, and not enough on family.
Consider my earlier example of 30 real life women, average age over 36. Of the 30, 15 are married, 4 are divorced (1 remarried), and 12 are never married. The average age of the never married group was almost the same as the overall group, at just over 35 years. The never married have 1 child amongst the 12 of them. The 4 divorced women have 3, all to the same woman, with 3 childless.
The important thing for fertility in this sample is to get married on or before age 30, and stay married. Very few exceptions to that finding.
You can’t hide the real burden of dependency- it shows up in the family budget whether it comes in the form of taxes or increased cost for goods and services. This spending bill will only increase that burden, and will, thus, reduce fertility even further.
Have a nice day!
I rather puzzled on this, as the CTC has the chance to be pretty popular and seems to enjoy at least some bipartisan support.
If the bill were only the CTC, I think they could pass it with little difficulty. From a political standpoint, it would make sense to pass just CTC and declare a major victory, allowing the press to talk for months about how Biden ended child poverty and saved Christmas.
Presumably they know that, so whatever else in the bill must seem so worth having to them that it is worth risking not passing anything at all.
I have no idea why though.
Another short-term political benefit of the CTC is to offset (briefly) the effect of inflation on family staples like food and transportation. The more those start to bite, the less pleased people are going to be with whatever administration is in office.
But, of course, dealing with rising prices by throwing money at them is never going to end well.
HENCE, vain deluding Joys,
___The brood of Folly without father bred!
How little you bested,
___Or fill the fixèd mind with all your toys!
– John Milton, from Number 9: “Il Penseroso” (1633)