146 Comments

I think these are great proposals. Reading this column has also crystallized for me just how much I hate the doom and gloom in my feeds (which, since I'm an academic, are mostly from the left). It's incredibly self-defeating (a testable hypothesis next November) when your message is, "everything sucks," particularly in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Kid vaccine rollout was good. Passing an infrastructure bill: good. Passing pandemic support: good. Doing expanded CTC this year: good. Judge nominations in a Dem Senate: good.

It's way easier to convince people to fight when they feel like their efforts matter, but right now it feels like there is a deep commitment to convincing people that they are riding the Fail Train. I don't need this to be a counter-narrative about unmitigated victory, but I wish people could be clear-eyed about the difference between incremental progress and overblown pessimism, because the latter will absolutely cost you winnable elections at the margin.

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One thing I've learned from discussing this on Twitter the last few days is that some of the angriest people in the debate quite literally have no idea what programs are even in the proposals. All they know is that Manchin is a bad guy, so they oppose whatever he wants, plus he's lying anyway (about whatever it is he's saying, though they have no idea what that is). It's totally politics as soap opera or pro wrestling match or [choose your metaphor].

Meanwhile, normie swing voters also have no idea what programs are in the bill proposals (some probably don't even know there's a bill, or that the current bill is different from the one that passed a few weeks ago) because they all have better things to pay attention to like Christmas shopping. If the Dems can somehow get it together and pass the kind of compromise bill that Matt's outlining here, all this sturm and drang will be forgotten within a month.

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If Democrats can't pass a good bill with $1.75t to spend, they don't deserve to be in power.

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I read all this thoughtful effort, and imagine the possibilities, yet I’m left with the distinct impression that when it comes to how real people experience this legislation, the media narrative about the content of bill matters more than the actual content of the bill.

This bill is well-intentioned, and can make an actual difference in people’s lives. But I also think it’s so complicated, and the workings of the bill so arcane, that for most Americans, the primary experience of the bill, no matter how helpful it is to them, is what the media says about it.

All that being said I hope they can get something passed.

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Dec 21, 2021·edited Dec 21, 2021

Although long forgotten, I think Romney presented a serious proposal for the Child Tax Credit earlier this year. It even got plaudits from Matt's former co-workers at Vox and I think Matt had good things to say about it on Twitter.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22280404/mitt-romney-child-allowance-tax-credit-biden

Maybe I've watched too many West Wing re-runs but I think you had hammer out a good CTC deal with Romney outside of BBB on regular order and I think he could bring 9 other Republicans along.

Something like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv70tm-Gh3A

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House BBB is the equivalent of doing 10 bad one liners insulting every demographic

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How much longer until pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training?

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The fallacy of high US child poverty rates is based on the "relative" metric, not an absolute threshold. It's the same problem with so-called racial income inequality. Basing conclusions on the median is problematic. Take away the wealthiest 1% of the population and both child poverty and racial income disparities disappear. Another prog trick to engender a crisis is to base child poverty on household income, absent government assistance like SNAP, TANF, EITC and Housing vouchers.

Between the two options, we should have spent the stimulus dollars on this BBB legislation, but we can't afford both, especially with interest rates rising. At nearly 6 trillion dollars in spending on COVID so far, Gen Z is going to face shrinking government programs for debt payments as it is now.

If it were me, I would not eliminate SALT deductions AND I would repeal Trump's income tax cuts to payback the COVID spending so far.

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I am less interested in the details of what, and more frustrated Congress and Biden can't prioritize. Pick one or two things, and kill it. Run on THAT in '22 and give themselves a fighting chance.

Instead Progressives are acting like they will never have a chance to run Congress again and Biden is acting like he's a lame duck one term president despite his protestations.

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I’m confused with Matt’s position here. One Billion Americans Matt would have wanted a CTC that was as broad as possible to increase the birth rate. Now it seems that Matt wants CTC to reduce child poverty. But it seems Manchin is not aligned that free cash is good for the poorest of Americans (ie he believes that they are bad with money and will spend it on drugs etc).

So if you want Manchin onboard with CTC, you’d need to focus on the broad case that this will increase birth rate. Which means the broad CTC. Which we can’t afford.

It seems Dems should kill expanded CTC and pass a CTC-less bill. Perhaps we can work with Romney instead of Manchin on a separate CTC bill.

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These are great ideas and I hope the blowup this past weekend doesn't mean the Joes can't come together and agree on one of these proposals. (And if Joe+Joe stand arm in arm outside the White House proclaiming agreement, I assume everyone else will fall in line.)

What I doubt it will do is help the Democrats in the mid-terms. And that's because of my Rule of Electoral Success: the good things you do legislatively don't help you and the good things that happen that you have no control over do help you.

No one really cares about what legislation passes when they cast their vote, especially if there's any kind of phase-in for the new laws. By contrast, huge improvements in inflation (especially gas prices), the job market, wage growth etc *will* make voters favorably inclined toward the ruling party, even though they have little to no influence over those trends.

So, pass good laws because it's good to pass good laws, and cross your fingers and hope that trends affecting people's lives go in your direction.

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I feel like I'm taking crazy pills on this CTC thing. Someone please explain to me how a permanent CTC is a childhood poverty reducer and not simply pro-natalist. Now, I get that obviously a newly introduced CTC or CTC expansion reduces poverty by putting cash in the hands of people who have already made the choice to have children, but once it's a permanent program, and people adjust their expectations, doesn't it merely shift the perceived financial burden of parenthood however many thousand dollars down the income ladder? Don't you end up with the same number of children at the poverty margin? If anything aren't these children's parent's even less likely to be financially stable? If it has any impact at all I can't see how it doesn't exacerbate the damage of childhood poverty over time.

I get that plenty of people are on the pro-natalist or parenthood is a human right line of thinking in this argument, or maybe it's all just a cover for wealth redistribution, but if you're coming with one of those takes then own that shit. Stop pretending this is about poverty when the program doesn't actually have any incentives to promote more money going to children rather than going to more people having children.

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Great article, but a data visualization nit--there are way too many categories for any human eye to make sense of these pie charts. Milan--you already have groupings done by shade of color, so why not use those to construct a treemap?

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I agree with this, but I am at the point I don't know what is true.

Does Manchin really agree to this?

It seems all hearsay.

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The insulin provision sure seems to be pretty underrated, but I'm glad it's cheap enough that it basically fits in any version of the bill. With the amount of attention insulin has had over the last couple of years as a symbol of everything wrong with Big Pharma, this seems to me like they should be touting how they are Doing Something about it.

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Dumb question: what does it mean for $250B in “deficit reduction” to be in the plan? How do you “spend” $250B in deficit reduction? Or is it an accounting thing where really the bill would be $1.5T instead of $1.75T because $250B is taken off the table?

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