142 Comments

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.

Expand full comment

Or more succinctly: Yglesias to Dems: Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.

Expand full comment

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?

Expand full comment

Matt, please run the Democratic Party

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

“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?

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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

Expand full comment

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

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment