Here's my entry, Integrated Cash Assistance: http://tiny.cc/iCa . It differs from any of the charts in that benefits start at zero income but rise with work and then phase out (like several of the others). Is neutral regarding number of parents in the family. Is more affordable because it replaces many existing programs rather than adding to them. It is all cash, no vouchers.
Paul Ryan was constantly pitching his consolidate and block grant plan as a way to get the federal government out of the benefits program business. It was of course a ruse to eliminate these programs entirely as they would eventually be starved into nothing.
I understand. But that was the Trojan Horse part of the Ryan proposals. If anything, more programs such as Unemployment Insurance need to be federalized.
Even short of consolidation, cross-eligibility and other efforts to reduce administrative overhead would go a long way.
I agree that despite the rhetoric about state programs being a laboratory for experimentation, devolution of national programs to the states has unintended consequences, not just for the welfare of individuals, but for labor mobility and unification of markets. This is especially apparent in healthcare, but that is not the only instance. See https://www.niskanencenter.org/health-care-decentralization/
Agree there a large downside to state-by-state variation in healthcare, but I think the problem is more on the provider side than the payor side (protectionist state regulations that impede interstate commerce in healthcare services, for example).
Healthcare is almost a fifth of our economy, way too large and complicated to be entrusted to just one central planning agency like CMS.
As well-intentioned as CMS may be, it's a politicized bureaucracy that's been struggling for years just to come up with some basic reimbursement reforms to reduce misaligned incentives of providers.
Any analysis of conservative proposals is futile because they are not made in good faith. All Republican programs are bait-and-switch Trojan Horses. If Democrats ever adopted them, the goalposts would shift and Republicans would then oppose them. Case in point: The ACA which was based on Mitt Romney's tenure in Massachusetts but got branded as Obamcare rather than Romney care.
If you always assume the other side is dealing in bad faith and never give them the benefit of the doubt, you'll never make a deal. Better to evaluate the proposals on their merits rather than through a lens of trying to mind-read the motives of the people making the proposals. Who cares what their motive if the proposal is acceptable?
I mean we, as civilians, can evaluate merits all we like, but it’s pretty important for Dem lawmakers to figure out whether Republicans actually plan to work with them on these proposals or not.
Yes, for sure, but that's mostly a mostly a matter of imposing some discipline on the timeline so the Dems don't get strung along. If the Republican caucus can't seem to ever get to the finish line, at some point it matters less whether they're acting in good faith but just have internal dysfunction or are purposely trying to delay. Either way they're not a reliable negotiating partner and that's when it time to cut bait and move on.
There are no deals to be made with Republicans, at least on measures that cost substantial amounts. Thankfully it would appear most Democrats in Congress finally realize this is the case.
Medicare Part D was passed when Bush was President, which was a substantial increase. Republicans passed the CARES act last year, which cost $2.2 Trillion. So, I would disagree with your categorical statement.
A slightly more fair version of this is- who actually runs the Republican party are the media stars- Carlson, Hannity, used to be Limbaugh- and to a lesser extent the various activist groups. They are both demagogues, and also completely divorced from any policy consequences- they can just be against stuff, they don't have to present anything positive or accept consequences. If individual Senators start to move towards making a deal, the media & activist demagogues will whip up the party base against them. This most famously has happened several times over an immigration compromise, both under Bush & Obama, but it happens constantly.
Basically- we all have to update our mental model of the Republican party, the elected officials are not mostly not in charge. Tucker Carlson is in charge
I'm hella partisan and cynical about the GOP, but I don't think it's quite applicable here. Since it's not clear what the best or most popular program would be, we're not in the normal territory of "GOP demands we cut spending, then runs ads about how terrible Democratic spending cuts are".
In what universe is it in the interest of Senate Republicans to give Biden a victory?
The details of the plans are forgettable enough that few swing voters will remember who stood for what. However, any plan that passes is likely to be really popular, probably more popular than the mortgage interest deduction. Passing any such plan would be a big win for Biden, especially when it would pass mainly with D votes. Rs ought to know their hold on the white working class is weak, and letting a D administration hand out this kind of sugar is not in their interest.
You’d think the McConnell’s discovery of this would be enough for people to recognize that a presidential system with ideologically polarized parties is doomed to fail. But America isn’t ready for that conversation.
Romney's plan seems to be clearly the best, obviously designed by economists to minimize work disincentives while still being available to families with no or very low income. Then on top of that it is deficit neutral and eliminates or consolidates other ineffective welfare programs. The Dems + Romney could pass it with reconciliation. But it would probably die in the House because of the pay fors.
All programs with income based phase-outs are hidden marginal tax rate increases which actually increase the rate at mid-level brackets and can be higher than the marginal rate the really rich people pay. At its extremes they can be high enough to actually discourage work.
The recent bill was a good example of this. It worked out fine, mainly because people can't time travel and it only applied to the prior year, but on a going forward basis, phasing out a benefit over $10k of income would be beyond ridiculous.
As someone who is both married and has with four kids, our benefit was $8,400. This would have phased out between $150k and $160k completely, resulting a in a marginal tax rate of roughly:
84% stimulus + 25% federal + 6% state +8%SS = 123%!!!
It's interesting that no one really knows what they want to incentivize with parents (mostly mothers) working. Both liberals and conservatives are a bit at cross purposes within their own parties.
I think Matt is wrong, however, that parental leave indicates that Biden is all over on workforce participation, having better parental leave should support parents staying in the workforce by making the commitment trade offs slightly less stark. Overall, I think we should looking at more flexible family friendly workplaces as a priority. Beyond some minimum paid leave, the feds can't really legislate that, but the federal government could become a leader in its own workforce policies including part time work that isn't automatically a career killer.
I'm confused...the hypothetical above about college grads making $130k says they get nothing from Biden, but they'd be under the phase-out limit and get the full $3600 right?
I have a hard time seeing many Republicans coming to the table and handing Biden a bipartisan win unless they get something in return. The only votes I can see on this front are:
-Romney. Mostly because I suspect Mitt actually wants to DO something with his time in office
-Collins. Because her brand is getting things done and compromise.
-Murkowski. For Collins' reason, and also because she's up for re-election in a state that likely benefits a lot from this kind of program, and she can tout it in 2022.
This is mildly off topic. A lot of people on the edge of getting Hawley right. It isn't quite right to call his approach bad faith. It isn't a trap for Dems. It is more that it just doesn't matter whether or not it gets passed. Reality means nothing, optics and ideology are everything.
He was a crappy professor in law school, making his way by taking principled stances regardless of how much sense they make. His goal was never to be a good professor.
He is DEEP into dominion theology and making that ideology into reality is his primary goal. His method to get there is winning elections and he obviously wants to be president. He has correctly taken the position that passing actual policy means less than the appearance of being a bad ass that fights the man.
He started running for Attorney General promising that his primary goal was being Attorney General. He said he was going to focus on doing it well and doing it with integrity. He immediately starting running for senate. He used his office and state staff to help him win, likely breaking the law. Clearly his stated premise was false, it just doesn't matter. Then he said his goal was to be a good senator. Clearly that is also not true.
His goal is to win elections so he can be president. He will get there by creating the image that he is fighting against the man and for the people. Almost nobody is making a clear political argument that runs contrary to his claims. The policy itself passing or not passing has no bearing the goal, the goal is just to say he fought for the people. So he wins either way here.
"In many respects, the upshot of this is absurd. A family with two adults and one child gets more help than a family with one adult and two children. "
That seems like a great idea. We shouldn't be encouraging people to have children they can't afford to care for.
Sure but from societal point of view, punishing kids because their parents had more kids than they could take care of is kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face. There's not an easy solution to the problem of preventing irresponsible people from having kids that doesn't veer into dystopian impingements on peoples freedom. But in the scheme of things, that's a pretty small number, the tail that shouldn't wag the dog. For years I've represented kids in dependency and neglect cases - in a great many cases, giving the parents assistance to help the kids is the best solution for the future of the kids, even though the parents aren't exactly the most responsible or capable people and may not in any sense "deserve" the help. But once the kids are on the scene, it's question of whether to look forward to the next generation, or look backwards and focus on the mistakes of the prior generation.
No, Matt's on firm ground here. The country needs more children. Full stop. And if the US were a civilized country we'd provide robust help to the parents of children. Also, there's essentially zero probability any legislation that could conceivably make it to Biden's desk is going to somehow incentivize minimum wage workers to suddenly start having huge families. Those days are over.
I more or less agree with this but the global warming numbers about having a kid in a rich country are real and compelling. Ultimately, the reason we care about climate change is so we can keep the human race at its current level we would still have 70% of all existing land if all the ice melted.
One billion Americans are much more likely to figure out how to mitigate climate change better than 330 million (*at least* ~3x more likely, but probably much more). What the degrowth approach appears to not appreciate is that climate change is going to be addressed by technology, not rewinding society a few centuries.
Even taking your reasoning as good (which is debatable), what if you have a married couple who has a child, then the husband dies in a car crash? Of cancer? Is abusive and it's best for the wife and the kids to leave him forever?
Car crash or cancer? That's what SS survivors benefits are for.
"Specifically, more than 6.1 million Americans receive survivor benefits from Social Security, with nearly all of them being surviving spouses or children of deceased workers.
In total, recipients of survivor benefits get about $6.68 billion in monthly Social Security payments. That represents an average of $1,088 per month for every surviving family member getting Social Security benefits. "
Maybe I don't know enough about survivor benefits, but if the husband had a low-wage job, are they really sufficient for families to have decent money?
And this still feels like it incentivizes women to stay with their abusers.
As someone who’s been the recipient of survivorship benefits, they are a terrible program which singlehandedly kept my mom from going back to work. The moment she started working full time (which, as she had been out if the labor force for a while as a stay at home mom, she’d be starting pretty low) she’d no longer receive benefits. It made the country poorer, and it probably made us poorer over the long term too. Frankly, I’m not even sure the program should exist at all - life insurance is a thing, and if you fail to prepare by buying life insurance or setting aside savings then you have reaped what you have sown - but if it does, it should be a lump sum payment or series of payments, without care as to income.
"To ease some of the burden of losing a wage-earner, the Social Security Administration offers one-time and monthly payments, known as survivors benefits. These benefits are provided in addition to any life insurance benefits the family may have had and are not contingent on income guidelines."
As someone who’s been the recipient of survivorship benefits, they are a terrible program which singlehandedly kept my mom from going back to work. The moment she started working full time (which, as she had been out if the labor force for a while as a stay at home mom, she’d be starting pretty low) she’d no longer receive benefits. It made the country poorer, and it probably made us poorer over the long term too. Frankly, I’m not even sure the program should exist at all - life insurance is a thing, and if you fail to prepare by buying life insurance or setting aside savings then you have reaped what you have sown - but if it does, it should be a lump sum payment or series of payments, without care as to income.
Can't we just split the difference on every column? Let's say $3600 per child 0-5 if single, $3000 per child 6-15 if single, $5400 per child 0-5 if married, $4500 per child 6-15 if married, phase in at $3000, phase-in rate 15%, phase out start $150k single/$300k married, phase-out rate 5%, top age 15.
I think Josh H program would be less cultural war and more likely to stay. It would not be something one party is trying to undermine. Can you imagine Democratic’s saying take away support for the kids of rich people.7.500 is barrier especially for single moms but it isn’t impossible and it is an easy bar for married people.
Yeah, I mean I would be very surprised if he's sincerely interested in pursuing this. But on the off-chance that he is, I think the generosity of the program is worth swallowing the earnings requirement.
What all these programs are are stalking horses to allow the perfect to be enemy of the good. Conservatives can then oppose Democratic proposals as not doing enough while they have no intention of really ever doing anything.
I know that is why the Josh H proposal is awesome dude is conservative as all get out and this program doesn’t have all the things conservatives bitch about.
Thank you for this article -- I like both the way you both structured the conflicting objectives of the programs, and showed the distributions of benefits by household income.
Am I terrible for hating means testing in this case? (I fully admit that this is self serving in my personal case, although I do not have kids.) I usually support means testing vs universal programs for fiscal reasons, but it just seems needlessly punitive to phase these out in the 400-500k household income range, especially since the "pay for" is likely to include raising the top rate to 39.6%. According to the IRS tax tables, (https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-size-of-adjusted-gross-income), this is the top 1-2% of households. So this isn't even *that many* people or *that much* expense.
Final point on a more political note: This is really going to alienate those well-off moderate suburbs that went from voting Republican for years to voting for Democrats over the last 2 cycles. And for what? 1-2% of the total cost of the plan? Not worth it. Just make it a Universal benefit to support increasing the birthrate (as per Matt's book). It would be worth it, even if you had to raise the tax hike to 40% vs 39.6%. At least to me.
The piece that your article doesn’t mention is the objective to increase the birth rate. If you think of this as a poverty support program, that’s one thing. But if you’re already phasing the program out in the 400-500k household income range, this is no longer a poverty support program, and is a child encouragement program.
I might be misunderstanding you, but how is something that only impacts ~2% of the population total going to "alienate those well-off moderate suburbs that went from voting Republican for years to voting for Democrats over the last 2 cycles?"
On your comment below, if you make over 400k a year, getting a $3-5k subsidy is not what is impacting whether you have another child or not.
I think we might be in "what's the matter with Cambridge" here in those suburbs, where residents vote for Democrats based on cultural issues, rather than their precise economic policies.
I have some sympathy with conservatives trying to use the tax code to encourage two parent households. Kids are a lot of work, and it seems pretty obvious to me that on average you're going to get better outcomes on average if you have multiple adults raising a child rather than one. I never understood why many in progressive circles are loathe to admit this. Having grown up in a two-parent household that abruptly became a one-parent household, I can tell you. It. Really. Sucks.
The example of two parents with one child getting more than a single parent with two children seems like an unnecessarily cruel way to go about incentivizing coparenting, but surely there are other less punitive levers to pull. Wondering what you're take on this is Matthew Yglesias. Maybe I'm missing something?
Here's my entry, Integrated Cash Assistance: http://tiny.cc/iCa . It differs from any of the charts in that benefits start at zero income but rise with work and then phase out (like several of the others). Is neutral regarding number of parents in the family. Is more affordable because it replaces many existing programs rather than adding to them. It is all cash, no vouchers.
That's the ideal solution, to consolidate these programs/
Paul Ryan was constantly pitching his consolidate and block grant plan as a way to get the federal government out of the benefits program business. It was of course a ruse to eliminate these programs entirely as they would eventually be starved into nothing.
nyet on the block program, that's not what the linked study proposes
I understand. But that was the Trojan Horse part of the Ryan proposals. If anything, more programs such as Unemployment Insurance need to be federalized.
Even short of consolidation, cross-eligibility and other efforts to reduce administrative overhead would go a long way.
I agree that despite the rhetoric about state programs being a laboratory for experimentation, devolution of national programs to the states has unintended consequences, not just for the welfare of individuals, but for labor mobility and unification of markets. This is especially apparent in healthcare, but that is not the only instance. See https://www.niskanencenter.org/health-care-decentralization/
“...leaving states with the choice of increasing their own contributions to maintain current enrollments, or reducing coverage.”
Given that the federal government is financed through massive amounts of debt leaving it to the states sounds like a more honest way to do things.
Agree there a large downside to state-by-state variation in healthcare, but I think the problem is more on the provider side than the payor side (protectionist state regulations that impede interstate commerce in healthcare services, for example).
Healthcare is almost a fifth of our economy, way too large and complicated to be entrusted to just one central planning agency like CMS.
As well-intentioned as CMS may be, it's a politicized bureaucracy that's been struggling for years just to come up with some basic reimbursement reforms to reduce misaligned incentives of providers.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/new-cmmi-director-says-value-based-care-models-at-crossroads
Any analysis of conservative proposals is futile because they are not made in good faith. All Republican programs are bait-and-switch Trojan Horses. If Democrats ever adopted them, the goalposts would shift and Republicans would then oppose them. Case in point: The ACA which was based on Mitt Romney's tenure in Massachusetts but got branded as Obamcare rather than Romney care.
If you always assume the other side is dealing in bad faith and never give them the benefit of the doubt, you'll never make a deal. Better to evaluate the proposals on their merits rather than through a lens of trying to mind-read the motives of the people making the proposals. Who cares what their motive if the proposal is acceptable?
I mean we, as civilians, can evaluate merits all we like, but it’s pretty important for Dem lawmakers to figure out whether Republicans actually plan to work with them on these proposals or not.
Yes, for sure, but that's mostly a mostly a matter of imposing some discipline on the timeline so the Dems don't get strung along. If the Republican caucus can't seem to ever get to the finish line, at some point it matters less whether they're acting in good faith but just have internal dysfunction or are purposely trying to delay. Either way they're not a reliable negotiating partner and that's when it time to cut bait and move on.
Motives matter if ignoring them lowers the chances of any sort of bill getting passed.
Again, Dems saw this again and again when it came time to vote on the 2009 stimulus and the ACA.
There are no deals to be made with Republicans, at least on measures that cost substantial amounts. Thankfully it would appear most Democrats in Congress finally realize this is the case.
Medicare Part D was passed when Bush was President, which was a substantial increase. Republicans passed the CARES act last year, which cost $2.2 Trillion. So, I would disagree with your categorical statement.
A slightly more fair version of this is- who actually runs the Republican party are the media stars- Carlson, Hannity, used to be Limbaugh- and to a lesser extent the various activist groups. They are both demagogues, and also completely divorced from any policy consequences- they can just be against stuff, they don't have to present anything positive or accept consequences. If individual Senators start to move towards making a deal, the media & activist demagogues will whip up the party base against them. This most famously has happened several times over an immigration compromise, both under Bush & Obama, but it happens constantly.
Basically- we all have to update our mental model of the Republican party, the elected officials are not mostly not in charge. Tucker Carlson is in charge
What works for Massachusetts Republicans won't necessarily work for everyone federally
I'm hella partisan and cynical about the GOP, but I don't think it's quite applicable here. Since it's not clear what the best or most popular program would be, we're not in the normal territory of "GOP demands we cut spending, then runs ads about how terrible Democratic spending cuts are".
In what universe is it in the interest of Senate Republicans to give Biden a victory?
The details of the plans are forgettable enough that few swing voters will remember who stood for what. However, any plan that passes is likely to be really popular, probably more popular than the mortgage interest deduction. Passing any such plan would be a big win for Biden, especially when it would pass mainly with D votes. Rs ought to know their hold on the white working class is weak, and letting a D administration hand out this kind of sugar is not in their interest.
You’d think the McConnell’s discovery of this would be enough for people to recognize that a presidential system with ideologically polarized parties is doomed to fail. But America isn’t ready for that conversation.
If it has the name of an ambitious Republican on it. Democratics shout just pass the Josh H proposal as it with his name on it.
Romney's plan seems to be clearly the best, obviously designed by economists to minimize work disincentives while still being available to families with no or very low income. Then on top of that it is deficit neutral and eliminates or consolidates other ineffective welfare programs. The Dems + Romney could pass it with reconciliation. But it would probably die in the House because of the pay fors.
All programs with income based phase-outs are hidden marginal tax rate increases which actually increase the rate at mid-level brackets and can be higher than the marginal rate the really rich people pay. At its extremes they can be high enough to actually discourage work.
The recent bill was a good example of this. It worked out fine, mainly because people can't time travel and it only applied to the prior year, but on a going forward basis, phasing out a benefit over $10k of income would be beyond ridiculous.
As someone who is both married and has with four kids, our benefit was $8,400. This would have phased out between $150k and $160k completely, resulting a in a marginal tax rate of roughly:
84% stimulus + 25% federal + 6% state +8%SS = 123%!!!
Jessie would be getting way to much under any plan
I doubt it, but this would be funny if this was really Bob Saget.
It's interesting that no one really knows what they want to incentivize with parents (mostly mothers) working. Both liberals and conservatives are a bit at cross purposes within their own parties.
I think Matt is wrong, however, that parental leave indicates that Biden is all over on workforce participation, having better parental leave should support parents staying in the workforce by making the commitment trade offs slightly less stark. Overall, I think we should looking at more flexible family friendly workplaces as a priority. Beyond some minimum paid leave, the feds can't really legislate that, but the federal government could become a leader in its own workforce policies including part time work that isn't automatically a career killer.
“...the federal government could become a leader in its own workforce policies including part time work that isn't automatically a career killer.”
Sure, the feds can do anything since cost effectiveness is not really an issue for them. The same is not true of for-profit companies.
I'm confused...the hypothetical above about college grads making $130k says they get nothing from Biden, but they'd be under the phase-out limit and get the full $3600 right?
They get nothing from the child care program, they still get the cash benefit.
I have a hard time seeing many Republicans coming to the table and handing Biden a bipartisan win unless they get something in return. The only votes I can see on this front are:
-Romney. Mostly because I suspect Mitt actually wants to DO something with his time in office
-Collins. Because her brand is getting things done and compromise.
-Murkowski. For Collins' reason, and also because she's up for re-election in a state that likely benefits a lot from this kind of program, and she can tout it in 2022.
Rubio/Lee/Hawley will chicken out.
This is mildly off topic. A lot of people on the edge of getting Hawley right. It isn't quite right to call his approach bad faith. It isn't a trap for Dems. It is more that it just doesn't matter whether or not it gets passed. Reality means nothing, optics and ideology are everything.
He was a crappy professor in law school, making his way by taking principled stances regardless of how much sense they make. His goal was never to be a good professor.
He is DEEP into dominion theology and making that ideology into reality is his primary goal. His method to get there is winning elections and he obviously wants to be president. He has correctly taken the position that passing actual policy means less than the appearance of being a bad ass that fights the man.
He started running for Attorney General promising that his primary goal was being Attorney General. He said he was going to focus on doing it well and doing it with integrity. He immediately starting running for senate. He used his office and state staff to help him win, likely breaking the law. Clearly his stated premise was false, it just doesn't matter. Then he said his goal was to be a good senator. Clearly that is also not true.
His goal is to win elections so he can be president. He will get there by creating the image that he is fighting against the man and for the people. Almost nobody is making a clear political argument that runs contrary to his claims. The policy itself passing or not passing has no bearing the goal, the goal is just to say he fought for the people. So he wins either way here.
Never heard of dominion theology. Creepy. 😳
"In many respects, the upshot of this is absurd. A family with two adults and one child gets more help than a family with one adult and two children. "
That seems like a great idea. We shouldn't be encouraging people to have children they can't afford to care for.
Sure but from societal point of view, punishing kids because their parents had more kids than they could take care of is kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face. There's not an easy solution to the problem of preventing irresponsible people from having kids that doesn't veer into dystopian impingements on peoples freedom. But in the scheme of things, that's a pretty small number, the tail that shouldn't wag the dog. For years I've represented kids in dependency and neglect cases - in a great many cases, giving the parents assistance to help the kids is the best solution for the future of the kids, even though the parents aren't exactly the most responsible or capable people and may not in any sense "deserve" the help. But once the kids are on the scene, it's question of whether to look forward to the next generation, or look backwards and focus on the mistakes of the prior generation.
No, Matt's on firm ground here. The country needs more children. Full stop. And if the US were a civilized country we'd provide robust help to the parents of children. Also, there's essentially zero probability any legislation that could conceivably make it to Biden's desk is going to somehow incentivize minimum wage workers to suddenly start having huge families. Those days are over.
Yeah, I agree with supporting people has many children as they want to.
I more or less agree with this but the global warming numbers about having a kid in a rich country are real and compelling. Ultimately, the reason we care about climate change is so we can keep the human race at its current level we would still have 70% of all existing land if all the ice melted.
One billion Americans are much more likely to figure out how to mitigate climate change better than 330 million (*at least* ~3x more likely, but probably much more). What the degrowth approach appears to not appreciate is that climate change is going to be addressed by technology, not rewinding society a few centuries.
Even taking your reasoning as good (which is debatable), what if you have a married couple who has a child, then the husband dies in a car crash? Of cancer? Is abusive and it's best for the wife and the kids to leave him forever?
Car crash or cancer? That's what SS survivors benefits are for.
"Specifically, more than 6.1 million Americans receive survivor benefits from Social Security, with nearly all of them being surviving spouses or children of deceased workers.
In total, recipients of survivor benefits get about $6.68 billion in monthly Social Security payments. That represents an average of $1,088 per month for every surviving family member getting Social Security benefits. "
Or getting bitten by a Cobra. Hiss
Maybe I don't know enough about survivor benefits, but if the husband had a low-wage job, are they really sufficient for families to have decent money?
And this still feels like it incentivizes women to stay with their abusers.
As someone who’s been the recipient of survivorship benefits, they are a terrible program which singlehandedly kept my mom from going back to work. The moment she started working full time (which, as she had been out if the labor force for a while as a stay at home mom, she’d be starting pretty low) she’d no longer receive benefits. It made the country poorer, and it probably made us poorer over the long term too. Frankly, I’m not even sure the program should exist at all - life insurance is a thing, and if you fail to prepare by buying life insurance or setting aside savings then you have reaped what you have sown - but if it does, it should be a lump sum payment or series of payments, without care as to income.
This doesn’t sound right. My wife’s previous husband died, and her kids got benefits all the way until they were 17, even after we were married.
Nicholas,
They must have changed it.
"To ease some of the burden of losing a wage-earner, the Social Security Administration offers one-time and monthly payments, known as survivors benefits. These benefits are provided in addition to any life insurance benefits the family may have had and are not contingent on income guidelines."
As someone who’s been the recipient of survivorship benefits, they are a terrible program which singlehandedly kept my mom from going back to work. The moment she started working full time (which, as she had been out if the labor force for a while as a stay at home mom, she’d be starting pretty low) she’d no longer receive benefits. It made the country poorer, and it probably made us poorer over the long term too. Frankly, I’m not even sure the program should exist at all - life insurance is a thing, and if you fail to prepare by buying life insurance or setting aside savings then you have reaped what you have sown - but if it does, it should be a lump sum payment or series of payments, without care as to income.
Can't we just split the difference on every column? Let's say $3600 per child 0-5 if single, $3000 per child 6-15 if single, $5400 per child 0-5 if married, $4500 per child 6-15 if married, phase in at $3000, phase-in rate 15%, phase out start $150k single/$300k married, phase-out rate 5%, top age 15.
Why is the top age 15? Teenagers eat a lot!
Just splitting the difference between Hawley's 12 and everyone else's 17! Plus you can always send your 16-year-olds out to work the fields...
We can but we're not in Congress
And by column, I mean row.
I think Josh H program would be less cultural war and more likely to stay. It would not be something one party is trying to undermine. Can you imagine Democratic’s saying take away support for the kids of rich people.7.500 is barrier especially for single moms but it isn’t impossible and it is an easy bar for married people.
Yeah, I mean I would be very surprised if he's sincerely interested in pursuing this. But on the off-chance that he is, I think the generosity of the program is worth swallowing the earnings requirement.
I think they should pretend to take it seriously enough to match the price bid and then reshape most of the rest of it.
Also if you’re are not making 7500 a year you are probably getting disability and all the related services.
What all these programs are are stalking horses to allow the perfect to be enemy of the good. Conservatives can then oppose Democratic proposals as not doing enough while they have no intention of really ever doing anything.
I know that is why the Josh H proposal is awesome dude is conservative as all get out and this program doesn’t have all the things conservatives bitch about.
Thank you for this article -- I like both the way you both structured the conflicting objectives of the programs, and showed the distributions of benefits by household income.
Am I terrible for hating means testing in this case? (I fully admit that this is self serving in my personal case, although I do not have kids.) I usually support means testing vs universal programs for fiscal reasons, but it just seems needlessly punitive to phase these out in the 400-500k household income range, especially since the "pay for" is likely to include raising the top rate to 39.6%. According to the IRS tax tables, (https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-size-of-adjusted-gross-income), this is the top 1-2% of households. So this isn't even *that many* people or *that much* expense.
Final point on a more political note: This is really going to alienate those well-off moderate suburbs that went from voting Republican for years to voting for Democrats over the last 2 cycles. And for what? 1-2% of the total cost of the plan? Not worth it. Just make it a Universal benefit to support increasing the birthrate (as per Matt's book). It would be worth it, even if you had to raise the tax hike to 40% vs 39.6%. At least to me.
The piece that your article doesn’t mention is the objective to increase the birth rate. If you think of this as a poverty support program, that’s one thing. But if you’re already phasing the program out in the 400-500k household income range, this is no longer a poverty support program, and is a child encouragement program.
I might be misunderstanding you, but how is something that only impacts ~2% of the population total going to "alienate those well-off moderate suburbs that went from voting Republican for years to voting for Democrats over the last 2 cycles?"
On your comment below, if you make over 400k a year, getting a $3-5k subsidy is not what is impacting whether you have another child or not.
I think we might be in "what's the matter with Cambridge" here in those suburbs, where residents vote for Democrats based on cultural issues, rather than their precise economic policies.
I have some sympathy with conservatives trying to use the tax code to encourage two parent households. Kids are a lot of work, and it seems pretty obvious to me that on average you're going to get better outcomes on average if you have multiple adults raising a child rather than one. I never understood why many in progressive circles are loathe to admit this. Having grown up in a two-parent household that abruptly became a one-parent household, I can tell you. It. Really. Sucks.
The example of two parents with one child getting more than a single parent with two children seems like an unnecessarily cruel way to go about incentivizing coparenting, but surely there are other less punitive levers to pull. Wondering what you're take on this is Matthew Yglesias. Maybe I'm missing something?
I wish these charts included the EITC (especially since Romeny's plan eliminates it). It's basically a child benefit anyway, so it should be counted.