I get to be progressive today. At various times in my life I’ve qualified for food stamps. My daughter gets subsidized day care and many other benefits for my granddaughter while she is finishing her associates degree in Mechatronics.
I’ve helped my daughter navigate all the various requirements for different programs and it sucks. I seriously don’t know how people do it without support.
One thing I can say unequivocally is cash benefits would be so much simpler and useful. A single source. Here is cash. Use it for milk, food, daycare or clothes. Let the parent figure it out.
God bless all the social workers who manage all the problems, but instead of doing paperwork managing all these various requirements, let’s put them out in the community.
The fundamental lack of trust, even from working class parents for other working class parents, is something I struggle to understand.
I get that there are some parents who are parents only by dint of having created a kid, and who will blow every cent on their own gratification.
But in my experience, including dealing with very, very poor families, they're a *tiny* percentage of the total. The vast majority of even desperately-poor people live and die by how much they can insulate their kids from the reality they face.
Yet their slightly-less-desperately-poor-peers are extremely unlikely to trust them, and their middle-class peers in turn are extremely unlikely to trust anyone working class.
I think the answer to this is that many people know "that family" or "that person." People who will absorb your time, money, and energy and a year later are in the exact same terrible situation because they keep making bad choices that are entirely foreseeable. At some point, it starts to feel like enabling sunk costs fallacy in throwing good money after bad.
Actual reality is much more complex than that, but having been a person who felt like I put enormous effort into trying to help someone, only to see it wasted - I can at least understand the feeling even if I think its shortsighted at best.
Agreed. One problem Democrats and progressives have is their reputation for believing in a nanny state approach where the government knows better than you what is good for you. We don't trust you to make good housing decisions, so we'll give you a dedicated voucher (or maybe build the stuff ourselves). I do like some nanny state stuff (seat belt requirements, vaccine mandates) but in general I think a generous welfare state would be best if they just give people money and let them make their own decisions, while providing support resources to help people make the best decisions possible with the fewest bureaucratic headaches.
I'm at the point where I would argue there are *no* instances in which a voucher makes sense.
There are instances in which cash subsidies makes sense (when markets are doing their job, mostly); examples include food assistance, tuition and childcare assistance, etc. Cash will let families spend the money how they need it, and the vast majority of them have the good judgment to do so.
There are instances when the government just doing something makes sense (when markets are failing, mostly); healthcare, higher education, public housing construction, and a few other examples come to mind.
With regard to the last paragraph, those are hardly market failures. It makes little sense to subsidize, set prices, grant monopolies, control what must be offered, and prevent housing from being built, and then claim it as a "market" failure.
With regards to housing, sure. But there's no iron-bound rule that says upzoning cannot be accompanied by some concerted public investments as well. If the body politic doesn't regard purely market outcomes as optimal, we invest as needed.
On healthcare, I don't think the libertarian viewpoint on healthcare "markets" has any merit at all. Likewise for higher education funding.
That could play into it in swing districts and in districts where the rep faces a serious risk of getting primaried. But are the reps from swing districts/the ones who are afraid of getting primaried the ones pushing to half-ass lots of projects? I legit don’t know.
It seems to me that too many reps and even senators think of themselves as super-aldermen who want to have their fingerprints on anything in their districts
2. I have the sense that the reason Democrats don't like direct cash programs is the lack of control over the lifestyles that cash will support. And it's true that many of the direct-cash childcare dollars would be spent on cigarettes for wayward parents, or maybe West Elm furniture if less poor families get some of this cash. But humans seem tragically averse to the imperfections of the intermediate steps along the path to their grand vision, so we reject a small improvement and end up with nothing. Or worse: we end up with Trump.
3. Framing politics as "slow boring of hard boards" puts me in a very evolutionary frame of mind. And one of the fundamental laws of evolution is that each successful mutation must be an improvement on its own, not just as a step toward some large mutation -- a successful eye could never evolve before a single successful light-sensing cell. Similarly, in politics, each successful policy change must also be an improvement on its own, and not just a step toward some future vision -- a successful welfare state cannot be legislated before a single successful child care policy. If more pundits looked at policy in this way (YM is one of the few) then The Discourse would be a lot more fruitful in terms of real-world improvement.
4. In evolutionary terms, every organ is a reproductive organ. Your liver's ultimate purpose is to improve your ability to reproduce, no less than your ~!@# and $%^&*... and also your mind. The purpose of human ingenuity is to perpetuate itself -- the industrial revolution and the NYC skyline are side-effects. Similarly, every successful policy should be analyzed first for its political advantage, and only then for its implications on possible futures. This is Trump's Lesson: a horrible, dystopian future that is politically easy will out-compete a beautiful, flourishing future that is politically difficult.
5. I'm not sure that a horrible, dystopian future is avoidable, but if it is, the only possible path involves policy proposals that are political winners. What MY does here is look for policies that are both politically easy, and that will lead to flourishing futures. The trend that I see is that policies like that are flexible - like supporting kids by giving cash to parents, even though some of it will be spent on cigarettes or West Elm furniture - and that flexibility is at the root of my libertarian leanings. Tax the things that everyone agrees is bad (like carbon) and subsidize the things that everyone agrees is good (like children) but do it in as flexible a way as possible. This will let you come up with proposals that are supported by larger constituencies (the cigarette and West Elm buyers as well as the childcare buyers) so it's politically easier.
6. This flexibility has many enemies among the political classes. Political classes pursue power, and once they have it they work to calcify those power structures into permanence. They only really squabble as to which particular inflexibilities they prefer. Flexible policy is the ultimate diffused social good, with few vocal supporters, and these almost all necessarily idealogues rather than savvy political operators. Did I mention that I'm not sure a horrible, dystopian future is avoidable?
"I have the sense that the reason Democrats don't like direct cash programs is the lack of control over the lifestyles that cash will support."
Everything I've seen is that this seems to be the reverse -- it's the electorate that cares a lot about how that money is spent. See this article about working class parents -- many of them talk about how they're worried about the money going to someone without a job.
This. Politicians like votes. If people suddenly thought en masse that sticking bananas up your butt was a good idea, you would have politicians with slogans like "bananas up your butts for all".
Because people more often than not operate from fixed mindsets and fear, you get fear mongering from politicians stoking up "see that happy poor person with a banana up their butt? they look happy. are you happy? no? The Make America Great Again and take back your bananas".
Maybe what we need is socialized therapists so people can learn to be happy on their own without having to worry whether someone else has more or less.
While the rest is accurate, I suspect that last is a pipedream, short of some pretty terrifying genetic engineering.
People are people, and well-being is by definition relative.
You can be sure that if you dropped a medieval noble into a modern setting, even if you gave them the language grounding and the skills to hold down an upper-class professional job, they'd want to go back within a year after figuring out that they're not at the top of the heap anymore, absolute increase in standard of living be damned.
Basically yes. To the extent Democrats care about this it's because they're gun-shy about attacks from their *right flank* about how they're wasting hard-earned taxpayer money on funding welfare cheats and whatever.
Yeah, this is something I'm not sure about. I feel like I've seen good data about this, but I can't find it with a quick search. I probably just need to spend a little time poking around Pew's results.
I actually think that it is Republicans who are much better at thinking evolutionarily in terms of policy goals, especially when it comes to laws and the courts. They seem to have less of a struggle in getting the team in line for the small win in the hopes that it sets up the big one later on.
In practice, this sounds right to me. In theory, the nature of conservatism - keep things from changing too much or too fast - seems to more easily mate with the limitations of an evolutionary, step-by-small-step approach.
>>>I have the sense that the reason Democrats don't like direct cash programs is the lack of control over the lifestyles that cash will support.<<<
I don't have that sense at all. I'm pretty sure most liberal policy wonks working in Congress share Yglesias's sensibilities on this issue.
To the extent Democrats shy away from direct cash programs, it's a kind of preemptive fear of right wing attacks, some of it (still, after all these years) the legacy of Reagan's "welfare queen driving a Cadillac" agitprop way back when.
Less flippantly, I think the party needs a coordinating mechanism that is broader in scope than the Dem leader of a particular branch of gov't. Conservatives have set this up in a more functional capacity than Dems and oftentimes are much better at quickly and quietly doing powerbuilding after winning an election
I don’t think this is really true. ACA repeal was a complete shitshow. The TCJA had ambitions of being deficit-neutral and, well, yeah. And then they just sat and did nothing for 3 years, not even being able to get Ted Cruz to shut the fuck up, much less vote on productive pieces of legislation. I think both groups are terrible at coordinating because parties are weak in the era of social media.
Well, in the states, Republicans have been very good at prioritizing power-building after taking power. Like, often one of the first things I bust the unions and other groups are comfortable waiting their turn secure in the knowledge that this is good sequencing.
That said, this is another impact of having a narrow majority. Every member can tout a pet project secure in the knowledge that it’ll get serious consideration.
That's true. But members should feel a lot less comfortable exerting their personal will. Like, why should a bunch of safe-seat Dems get to put drug price negotiation or the SALT cap on the table?
I thought the tidbit about expanding school lunches was interesting. I live in Baltimore County and this year the school system made breakfasts and lunches free for all, no sign-ups or means-testing. My kid just goes to school and gets food. He says he actually likes the breakfast, but prefers to bring his lunch. I have no idea how this came to be, but I imagine someone was able to point out it could actually save money by eliminating administrative costs of means-testing. It'll be interesting to see if they're able to make it stick.
Watching Obamacare under Trump has reconfirmed my bias in favor of cash as something that Republicans cannot easily "break." This column sort of flicks at that by mentioning how a preschool program in Texas would likely suffer. Programs are just particularly prone to the predations of bad-faith actors.
one weird thing about this spending package is that it seems like most of the proponents highlight the spending number instead of, like, what benefits that spending is going to provide.
Yet, looking at that chart in the post, even the skimmed down version of where MY would put the money, it's unlikely that most people would be able to notice whether the total spending is $1 trillion or $3 trillion. There's nothing big and branded or easy for people to see and attribute to this bill. Seems like politically, it might end up being a tree falling silently in the forest.
Cash is king. While my wife and I were just over the income threshold for receiving any stimulus funds, receiving this child tax credit the past few months has been great - it essentially pays for our son’s schools aftercare program.
And his school lunches are also free, and based on the menu, seem mostly nutritious with more interesting choices than in the past.
This is really the first time in my adult life that it feels like I’m receiving a direct benefit from the government, which is nice, given most of my SALT taxes just go to propping up poorly designed and failing pensions to boomer retirees in Arizona and Florida.
This is one of Matt's best posts because it directly addresses one of the things I've found most frustrating about the BBB debate: anchoring.
That debate has focused almost entirely on a top-down movement of "what would we have to give up to go down from $3.5T to, say, around $2T?" This is bad because once those delightful $3.5T programs are anchored in supporters' minds, any movement down from that is colored by regret, disappointment and possibly anger.
But imagine if we said, hey, here's $2T to be spent over 10 years of so for (almost) anything you want. How would you spend that money? That's a very different, and far more positive discussion. Roughly $200B/year is a great chunk of change. Progressives would always want more (and might be justified) but with $2T as their anchor, we could focus more clearly on what would work best and satisfy the most people.
This is why I don't like the idea of Biden, or anyone else, going out there and "winning public support" by talking about what's in the BBB. There's nothing in the BBB because no one has agreed to anything yet. So you're talking about vaporware and, worse, risking making supporters mad when what you boosted disappears. And in any case, I have no idea how a Biden speech in Michigan is supposed to affect the thinking of Manchin or Sinema.
Instead, I'd like to see supporters build from the bottom up: here are the things we most like that would cost $2T (or $1.5T or whatever) and make that clear to Manchin/Sinema and congressional leaders. I can see that approach actually helping them make up their minds and, who knows, maybe even being open to adding a bit more.
Very disappointing that replacing deductions with partial tax credits and raising marginal rates on personal income is not in there instead of corporate rates. Taxing business profits is just a bad way of taxing owners' incomes.
I think we should spend some money trying to experiment ways to increase productivity in the childcare sector. The upside there is much greater than any other childcare proposal.
I like this idea but my baseline assumption is it would be a very hard sell. I work as a teacher and we spend so much time assuaging fears of even extremely low probability negatives.
I mean maybe there is some low hanging fruit that you could pick but it would have to have some way of weeding out the kinds of parents who throw a shit fit if anything isn’t perfect.
I understand this is my pet-issue and I was awarded the worst-comment-in-SB-history related to it but given some of these plans will require tax increases ... I'd just like to remind everyone how fucking gross and unjust these billionaire tax-avoidance trust schemes are. I remain convinced aggressive prosecution of tax cheats is a winning platform. I would cheer on a simple Biden tweet "Fuck Phil Knight".
WEll put. More on your basic point - look at "our" childcare proposal in BBB - talk about an implementation nightmare. How much better to just give parents the money letting them decide what's best for their kids and their family - you could have all kinds of new models including kinship care shared parenting etc. ((which often exists and could thrive with parent based funding) .
But no - instead we get a complex Rube Goldberg model ripe for fraud and abuse. Let's see - you set higher wages, matched to school salaries (so childcare competes with schools and assume the workforce is there) that may sound good, but really hard to figure and/or game. Then reimburse parents for costs above a percentage of family income, again think about implementation. So labor costs will rise and low income people will be reimbursed for their outlays (done with all their disposable cash on hand ? )
How will providers estimate labor costs to cover expenses given that many providers, especially the good ones, serving low income neighborhoods are non profits. All providers can now charge whatever they want since the the feds will pay an estimated 90% of salaries (and how will those checks arrive in time to meet payrolls) - you can easily imagine large for profit chains dominating this new market because they can upfront increased cost to more readily use the federal subsidies.
and families who choose to work less or share childcare get - nothing??
It would cost less and be so much fairer to just give parents the money
Then again think of all the investigative journalists who'd be employed analyzing the abuses easily foreseen in this mess
But how were we gonna set aside time to discuss this when we were figuring out whether Mayor Pete was progressive enough without supporting Medicare 4 All! Priorities, priorities
I’ve been deeply disappointed Democrats didn’t at least attempt a bipartisan Family Deal - could’ve leveraged Romney’s Families Securities Act with DeLauro’s & Gillibrand’s FAMILY Act, plus maybe expanded SNAP and universal free school meals for something that at least would’ve had a shot at passing.
I don't think that there was a reasonable route to 10 Republican votes for that. On the other hand the elite signaling of doing a bipartisan negotiation is generally better, it looks like all the Democrats and some Republicans are for it, so it must be reasonable.
I get to be progressive today. At various times in my life I’ve qualified for food stamps. My daughter gets subsidized day care and many other benefits for my granddaughter while she is finishing her associates degree in Mechatronics.
I’ve helped my daughter navigate all the various requirements for different programs and it sucks. I seriously don’t know how people do it without support.
One thing I can say unequivocally is cash benefits would be so much simpler and useful. A single source. Here is cash. Use it for milk, food, daycare or clothes. Let the parent figure it out.
God bless all the social workers who manage all the problems, but instead of doing paperwork managing all these various requirements, let’s put them out in the community.
The fundamental lack of trust, even from working class parents for other working class parents, is something I struggle to understand.
I get that there are some parents who are parents only by dint of having created a kid, and who will blow every cent on their own gratification.
But in my experience, including dealing with very, very poor families, they're a *tiny* percentage of the total. The vast majority of even desperately-poor people live and die by how much they can insulate their kids from the reality they face.
Yet their slightly-less-desperately-poor-peers are extremely unlikely to trust them, and their middle-class peers in turn are extremely unlikely to trust anyone working class.
It's profoundly stupid.
I think the answer to this is that many people know "that family" or "that person." People who will absorb your time, money, and energy and a year later are in the exact same terrible situation because they keep making bad choices that are entirely foreseeable. At some point, it starts to feel like enabling sunk costs fallacy in throwing good money after bad.
Actual reality is much more complex than that, but having been a person who felt like I put enormous effort into trying to help someone, only to see it wasted - I can at least understand the feeling even if I think its shortsighted at best.
When I was in the foreign assistance business we always said, “let’s save every penny, no matter what it costs.“
Agreed. One problem Democrats and progressives have is their reputation for believing in a nanny state approach where the government knows better than you what is good for you. We don't trust you to make good housing decisions, so we'll give you a dedicated voucher (or maybe build the stuff ourselves). I do like some nanny state stuff (seat belt requirements, vaccine mandates) but in general I think a generous welfare state would be best if they just give people money and let them make their own decisions, while providing support resources to help people make the best decisions possible with the fewest bureaucratic headaches.
I'm at the point where I would argue there are *no* instances in which a voucher makes sense.
There are instances in which cash subsidies makes sense (when markets are doing their job, mostly); examples include food assistance, tuition and childcare assistance, etc. Cash will let families spend the money how they need it, and the vast majority of them have the good judgment to do so.
There are instances when the government just doing something makes sense (when markets are failing, mostly); healthcare, higher education, public housing construction, and a few other examples come to mind.
With regard to the last paragraph, those are hardly market failures. It makes little sense to subsidize, set prices, grant monopolies, control what must be offered, and prevent housing from being built, and then claim it as a "market" failure.
With regards to housing, sure. But there's no iron-bound rule that says upzoning cannot be accompanied by some concerted public investments as well. If the body politic doesn't regard purely market outcomes as optimal, we invest as needed.
On healthcare, I don't think the libertarian viewpoint on healthcare "markets" has any merit at all. Likewise for higher education funding.
Or more succinctly: Yglesias to Dems: Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.
Can we get the city’s government to stop quarter-assing 4-9 things and do the basics well?
Lol. No comment
No comment, my left [BEEP].
You're just afraid of getting turfed out of your cushy taxpayer-funded sinecure, you *bureaucrat*.
:-{P
I was wondering about this. Perhaps it’s a result of having single member districts where people run on their individual records and not their party’s
That could play into it in swing districts and in districts where the rep faces a serious risk of getting primaried. But are the reps from swing districts/the ones who are afraid of getting primaried the ones pushing to half-ass lots of projects? I legit don’t know.
It seems to me that too many reps and even senators think of themselves as super-aldermen who want to have their fingerprints on anything in their districts
1. I love your first paragraph. Thank you.
2. I have the sense that the reason Democrats don't like direct cash programs is the lack of control over the lifestyles that cash will support. And it's true that many of the direct-cash childcare dollars would be spent on cigarettes for wayward parents, or maybe West Elm furniture if less poor families get some of this cash. But humans seem tragically averse to the imperfections of the intermediate steps along the path to their grand vision, so we reject a small improvement and end up with nothing. Or worse: we end up with Trump.
3. Framing politics as "slow boring of hard boards" puts me in a very evolutionary frame of mind. And one of the fundamental laws of evolution is that each successful mutation must be an improvement on its own, not just as a step toward some large mutation -- a successful eye could never evolve before a single successful light-sensing cell. Similarly, in politics, each successful policy change must also be an improvement on its own, and not just a step toward some future vision -- a successful welfare state cannot be legislated before a single successful child care policy. If more pundits looked at policy in this way (YM is one of the few) then The Discourse would be a lot more fruitful in terms of real-world improvement.
4. In evolutionary terms, every organ is a reproductive organ. Your liver's ultimate purpose is to improve your ability to reproduce, no less than your ~!@# and $%^&*... and also your mind. The purpose of human ingenuity is to perpetuate itself -- the industrial revolution and the NYC skyline are side-effects. Similarly, every successful policy should be analyzed first for its political advantage, and only then for its implications on possible futures. This is Trump's Lesson: a horrible, dystopian future that is politically easy will out-compete a beautiful, flourishing future that is politically difficult.
5. I'm not sure that a horrible, dystopian future is avoidable, but if it is, the only possible path involves policy proposals that are political winners. What MY does here is look for policies that are both politically easy, and that will lead to flourishing futures. The trend that I see is that policies like that are flexible - like supporting kids by giving cash to parents, even though some of it will be spent on cigarettes or West Elm furniture - and that flexibility is at the root of my libertarian leanings. Tax the things that everyone agrees is bad (like carbon) and subsidize the things that everyone agrees is good (like children) but do it in as flexible a way as possible. This will let you come up with proposals that are supported by larger constituencies (the cigarette and West Elm buyers as well as the childcare buyers) so it's politically easier.
6. This flexibility has many enemies among the political classes. Political classes pursue power, and once they have it they work to calcify those power structures into permanence. They only really squabble as to which particular inflexibilities they prefer. Flexible policy is the ultimate diffused social good, with few vocal supporters, and these almost all necessarily idealogues rather than savvy political operators. Did I mention that I'm not sure a horrible, dystopian future is avoidable?
"I have the sense that the reason Democrats don't like direct cash programs is the lack of control over the lifestyles that cash will support."
Everything I've seen is that this seems to be the reverse -- it's the electorate that cares a lot about how that money is spent. See this article about working class parents -- many of them talk about how they're worried about the money going to someone without a job.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/opinion/child-tax-credit-biden.html
This. Politicians like votes. If people suddenly thought en masse that sticking bananas up your butt was a good idea, you would have politicians with slogans like "bananas up your butts for all".
Because people more often than not operate from fixed mindsets and fear, you get fear mongering from politicians stoking up "see that happy poor person with a banana up their butt? they look happy. are you happy? no? The Make America Great Again and take back your bananas".
Maybe what we need is socialized therapists so people can learn to be happy on their own without having to worry whether someone else has more or less.
While the rest is accurate, I suspect that last is a pipedream, short of some pretty terrifying genetic engineering.
People are people, and well-being is by definition relative.
You can be sure that if you dropped a medieval noble into a modern setting, even if you gave them the language grounding and the skills to hold down an upper-class professional job, they'd want to go back within a year after figuring out that they're not at the top of the heap anymore, absolute increase in standard of living be damned.
The princesses of the Bill and Ted trilogy beg to differ.
Yeah, therapy for all, I suspect, isn't going to win a ton of votes. Pipe dream indeed.
There's also the practical aspect, yes.
Well, I think the noble might find the "you're almost guaranteed heirs that survive to adulthood" aspect of modernity pretty tempting.
Also, noblewomen may not want to go back to medieval maternal mortality rates...
Basically yes. To the extent Democrats care about this it's because they're gun-shy about attacks from their *right flank* about how they're wasting hard-earned taxpayer money on funding welfare cheats and whatever.
Yeah, this is something I'm not sure about. I feel like I've seen good data about this, but I can't find it with a quick search. I probably just need to spend a little time poking around Pew's results.
I actually think that it is Republicans who are much better at thinking evolutionarily in terms of policy goals, especially when it comes to laws and the courts. They seem to have less of a struggle in getting the team in line for the small win in the hopes that it sets up the big one later on.
In practice, this sounds right to me. In theory, the nature of conservatism - keep things from changing too much or too fast - seems to more easily mate with the limitations of an evolutionary, step-by-small-step approach.
>>>I have the sense that the reason Democrats don't like direct cash programs is the lack of control over the lifestyles that cash will support.<<<
I don't have that sense at all. I'm pretty sure most liberal policy wonks working in Congress share Yglesias's sensibilities on this issue.
To the extent Democrats shy away from direct cash programs, it's a kind of preemptive fear of right wing attacks, some of it (still, after all these years) the legacy of Reagan's "welfare queen driving a Cadillac" agitprop way back when.
Matt, please run the Democratic Party
Less flippantly, I think the party needs a coordinating mechanism that is broader in scope than the Dem leader of a particular branch of gov't. Conservatives have set this up in a more functional capacity than Dems and oftentimes are much better at quickly and quietly doing powerbuilding after winning an election
I don’t think this is really true. ACA repeal was a complete shitshow. The TCJA had ambitions of being deficit-neutral and, well, yeah. And then they just sat and did nothing for 3 years, not even being able to get Ted Cruz to shut the fuck up, much less vote on productive pieces of legislation. I think both groups are terrible at coordinating because parties are weak in the era of social media.
Well, in the states, Republicans have been very good at prioritizing power-building after taking power. Like, often one of the first things I bust the unions and other groups are comfortable waiting their turn secure in the knowledge that this is good sequencing.
That said, this is another impact of having a narrow majority. Every member can tout a pet project secure in the knowledge that it’ll get serious consideration.
That's true. But members should feel a lot less comfortable exerting their personal will. Like, why should a bunch of safe-seat Dems get to put drug price negotiation or the SALT cap on the table?
I thought the tidbit about expanding school lunches was interesting. I live in Baltimore County and this year the school system made breakfasts and lunches free for all, no sign-ups or means-testing. My kid just goes to school and gets food. He says he actually likes the breakfast, but prefers to bring his lunch. I have no idea how this came to be, but I imagine someone was able to point out it could actually save money by eliminating administrative costs of means-testing. It'll be interesting to see if they're able to make it stick.
“preschool for 4-year-olds rather than 4-year-olds AND 4-year-olds,”
One of these 4s is meant to be a 3 right?
Fixed it
Watching Obamacare under Trump has reconfirmed my bias in favor of cash as something that Republicans cannot easily "break." This column sort of flicks at that by mentioning how a preschool program in Texas would likely suffer. Programs are just particularly prone to the predations of bad-faith actors.
one weird thing about this spending package is that it seems like most of the proponents highlight the spending number instead of, like, what benefits that spending is going to provide.
“…what benefits that spending is going to provide.”
*Intended* to provide, you mean. With zero discussion about the possible huge downside.
Yet, looking at that chart in the post, even the skimmed down version of where MY would put the money, it's unlikely that most people would be able to notice whether the total spending is $1 trillion or $3 trillion. There's nothing big and branded or easy for people to see and attribute to this bill. Seems like politically, it might end up being a tree falling silently in the forest.
Cash is king. While my wife and I were just over the income threshold for receiving any stimulus funds, receiving this child tax credit the past few months has been great - it essentially pays for our son’s schools aftercare program.
And his school lunches are also free, and based on the menu, seem mostly nutritious with more interesting choices than in the past.
This is really the first time in my adult life that it feels like I’m receiving a direct benefit from the government, which is nice, given most of my SALT taxes just go to propping up poorly designed and failing pensions to boomer retirees in Arizona and Florida.
Hah just wait til you find out about what we do with tax dollars in NYC
This is one of Matt's best posts because it directly addresses one of the things I've found most frustrating about the BBB debate: anchoring.
That debate has focused almost entirely on a top-down movement of "what would we have to give up to go down from $3.5T to, say, around $2T?" This is bad because once those delightful $3.5T programs are anchored in supporters' minds, any movement down from that is colored by regret, disappointment and possibly anger.
But imagine if we said, hey, here's $2T to be spent over 10 years of so for (almost) anything you want. How would you spend that money? That's a very different, and far more positive discussion. Roughly $200B/year is a great chunk of change. Progressives would always want more (and might be justified) but with $2T as their anchor, we could focus more clearly on what would work best and satisfy the most people.
This is why I don't like the idea of Biden, or anyone else, going out there and "winning public support" by talking about what's in the BBB. There's nothing in the BBB because no one has agreed to anything yet. So you're talking about vaporware and, worse, risking making supporters mad when what you boosted disappears. And in any case, I have no idea how a Biden speech in Michigan is supposed to affect the thinking of Manchin or Sinema.
Instead, I'd like to see supporters build from the bottom up: here are the things we most like that would cost $2T (or $1.5T or whatever) and make that clear to Manchin/Sinema and congressional leaders. I can see that approach actually helping them make up their minds and, who knows, maybe even being open to adding a bit more.
Very disappointing that replacing deductions with partial tax credits and raising marginal rates on personal income is not in there instead of corporate rates. Taxing business profits is just a bad way of taxing owners' incomes.
I think we should spend some money trying to experiment ways to increase productivity in the childcare sector. The upside there is much greater than any other childcare proposal.
I like this idea but my baseline assumption is it would be a very hard sell. I work as a teacher and we spend so much time assuaging fears of even extremely low probability negatives.
I mean maybe there is some low hanging fruit that you could pick but it would have to have some way of weeding out the kinds of parents who throw a shit fit if anything isn’t perfect.
I understand this is my pet-issue and I was awarded the worst-comment-in-SB-history related to it but given some of these plans will require tax increases ... I'd just like to remind everyone how fucking gross and unjust these billionaire tax-avoidance trust schemes are. I remain convinced aggressive prosecution of tax cheats is a winning platform. I would cheer on a simple Biden tweet "Fuck Phil Knight".
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/how-billionaires-pass-wealth-to-heirs-tax-free-2021/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/richest-americans-fear-biden-will-close-their-favorite-tax-loopholes
WEll put. More on your basic point - look at "our" childcare proposal in BBB - talk about an implementation nightmare. How much better to just give parents the money letting them decide what's best for their kids and their family - you could have all kinds of new models including kinship care shared parenting etc. ((which often exists and could thrive with parent based funding) .
But no - instead we get a complex Rube Goldberg model ripe for fraud and abuse. Let's see - you set higher wages, matched to school salaries (so childcare competes with schools and assume the workforce is there) that may sound good, but really hard to figure and/or game. Then reimburse parents for costs above a percentage of family income, again think about implementation. So labor costs will rise and low income people will be reimbursed for their outlays (done with all their disposable cash on hand ? )
How will providers estimate labor costs to cover expenses given that many providers, especially the good ones, serving low income neighborhoods are non profits. All providers can now charge whatever they want since the the feds will pay an estimated 90% of salaries (and how will those checks arrive in time to meet payrolls) - you can easily imagine large for profit chains dominating this new market because they can upfront increased cost to more readily use the federal subsidies.
and families who choose to work less or share childcare get - nothing??
It would cost less and be so much fairer to just give parents the money
Then again think of all the investigative journalists who'd be employed analyzing the abuses easily foreseen in this mess
It'd really have been nice if debating these issues in the election, or even the primary.
I wonder about the extent to which childcare is actually secretly a zoning problem more than anything else. (Also, more immigration wouldn't hurt.)
I really wish the stuff to help parents and children was polling better. It's depressing how hard a lift policies to help families are.
But how were we gonna set aside time to discuss this when we were figuring out whether Mayor Pete was progressive enough without supporting Medicare 4 All! Priorities, priorities
I’ve been deeply disappointed Democrats didn’t at least attempt a bipartisan Family Deal - could’ve leveraged Romney’s Families Securities Act with DeLauro’s & Gillibrand’s FAMILY Act, plus maybe expanded SNAP and universal free school meals for something that at least would’ve had a shot at passing.
I don't think that there was a reasonable route to 10 Republican votes for that. On the other hand the elite signaling of doing a bipartisan negotiation is generally better, it looks like all the Democrats and some Republicans are for it, so it must be reasonable.
Yet another example of how the filibuster ends up hindering bipartisanship in our current political environment.
Another example of how that’s a good thing.
They wanted the childcare nonsense too much.