I see that inflation of common goods chart a lot, but it seems inadequate to me. The goods that have increased in price seem more like necessities, while the things that have decreased seem more like luxuries. If the inflation calculation gives luxuries and necessities equal weight, then inflation will tend to disproportionately impact poorer people than wealthier ones, since poor people will eliminate luxuries from their purchases so that they can afford necessities. They will then not experience the counterbalancing effects built into the inflation calculation because they will be spending more of their money on expensive necessities. It seems like this graphic would benefit from a luxury-necessity weighting, so that inflation could be calculated in a way that actually makes sense. Poor people don't spend money the same as wealthy people. This curve is only accurate if everyone spends proportionally similar amounts on each of the types of goods represented.
I really like the idea of giving money to less-well-off families in a straightforward way that doesn’t try to tell people how they should live their lives, or whether they should work, etc. I have a lot more faith in parents making the best decisions for their kids than the government decreeing that one must work to receive benefits. It just seems like a no brainer to me.
I’m not even mad that eliminating SALT probably means it would be a net negative for my (fairly well-off blue state family) - if it efficiently helps lower-income people at the expense of myself I’m all for it.
Is Cameron Hildritch really a preeminent member of the "center-right Takes Class"? I've been reading National Review for a few months to get a balancing dose of conservative takes, but I quickly learned to skip his articles. He writes mostly-good and generally well-researched stuff, then throws some judgmental Christian or smug libertarian side notes completely out of the blue with no support or relevance to the topic (case in point: the first sentence of the article Matt linked - semantically debatable, but almost completely irrelevant here).
Related: Are there better conservative outlets than National Review? All their writing on Trump was very measured and rational, but with him gone they've slipped into being pretty reactionary.
"We have Social Security to make sure that people can enjoy a decent retirement. And for broadly similar reasons, we ought to have a child allowance — Social Security for parents ...."
We have Social Security and Medicare for people who are too old or disabled to work. Both of these systems are designed so that participants pay into the systems for decades, and then later start getting a return for having paid in. The Social Security benefit is directly related to how much one paid into the system during one's working years.
No system of paying people for choosing to have children can be remotely comparable.
What is the mechanism by which a Democrat actually gets punished politically for eliminating the SALT deduction? Obviously the people in safe seats are fine, nobody is getting primaried over this. So is the fear that a Republican challenger in a purplish suburban district accuses them of, basically, agreeing with Republicans about SALT?
I mean I guess the play is for the Republican to just lie and claim they don't also support eliminating the the deduction, but that doesn't exactly seem like a devastating line of attack.
Matt says that if Jake the Job Creator were subject to higher tax rates then instead of being discouraged to work, he would work more to maintain the same after tax income (“income effect”). Well, if that’s the case then wouldn’t that add to income inequality? Likewise if Jake was a superstar athlete who had the bargaining power to command a higher salary to compensate for the higher taxes – which ultimately get passed on to less wealthy ticket buyers.
So far in these comments we've had "parents will just quit their jobs and raise 6 kids on $15,000 a year" and "$15,000 a year is so little money that it's just an insidious waste of time".
Well, I'm here to say that I think the child allowance is a great idea to improve society somewhat and that it won't ruin society but we should not do pay-fors that leave poor people worse off. Nuance!
Lyman Stokey has done some modeling that shows that, even with the pay-fors, virtually every recipient would be net better off w/ Romney's plan than in the status quo, including both parent and childless EITC recipients. Replacing a less-generous, administratively onerous benefit with a more-generous, administrative-simple one is a clear win for recipients -- especially the sizable minority of EITC-eligible people who don't actually get the benefit today!
I think there are VERY narrow income bands where that is partially true depending on marital status -- lots of complicated factors at play! -- but I'd encourage you to read the thread and see.
I agree that if the pay-fors do leave poor recipients worse off, they should be retooled until they do not.
Yeah, I saw that and it's encouraging. Another thing I don't get: Stone presents encouraging marriage as a worthy policy goal. I get that we wouldn't want to penalize marriage but what's the benefit of encouraging it? Not all partnerships are marriages, not all marriages are happy, and I would assume not every single parent wants to marry the mother/father.
1. Research consistently shows that children do better when raised in stable two-parent homes, and that married parents provide that much more frequently than cohabiting parents do. (link below)
There is plenty of debate as to whether that is really causation or merely correlation, and whether encouraging "the types of parents who cohabit" to get married instead would make any meaningful difference. But there is definitely research that says "marriage is better for kids" and while there are mitigating arguments, there is really nothing with which I'm familiar that suggests the opposite.
2. He is a social conservative, so I imagine that on a personal level he sees marriage itself as a good thing, and its normalization as a public good. There is value for individual families, but also, value in a social expectation that family formation is tied to long-term, til-death-do-us-part commitment. You don't have to share that view!
3. With so many tax and benefit programs intersecting in so many complicated ways, it may be impossible to be 100% neutral in all cases. So, if you "get that we wouldn't want to penalize marriage," but find that complex policy will inevitably create rewards or penalties in different contexts, the impulse is to /err on the side of not penalizing it/. Thus, it's not that we should explicitly subsidize marriage as a policy goal, but that if we are to avoid penalizing it, then it will inevitably be fairly neutral in most cases, with slight incentives in others.
I apologize if it sounds patronizing to say this, but people are really bad at thinking on the margin. It is of course true that there are very large numbers of people in the country that would say, "Hahahaha what you want to pay me $15k a year to have *six children* are you insane?" while simultaneously there are very large numbers of people in the country who are like, "Woah, $3k a year if I have another kid? That's a game-changer!"
People rely on their intuitions too much about this kind of thing, and your intuition tends to imagine that everyone is a lot like you or a few people you know.
Some people will absolutely have more children if there is a $3k/year child allowance. Matt has cited survey data a few times showing that lots of people wish they had more kids, if only they could afford them. Making it more affordable to have children allows people to achieve their actual goals.
I would go farther: encouraging people to have that marginal extra child -- because with $3k extra they CAN save for college, or move into that 2-bedroom apartment, or cut back on hours at work -- is one of the major BENEFITS of such a program. Help people have the kids they want to have! One Billion Americans!
That marginal child is likely a money-losing proposition even with a child allowance. Even at the maximum benefit, it would not be enough to replace labor income. But it's not nothing! And insofar as it enables families to choose to have children, and to raise those children without want, it is a big win in my book.
I think almost nobody would find having their first child for $3k a year as money-gaining proposition. A lot of people might find having their second or third child for $3k per year a money-gaining proposition (because they already have childcare that can absorb another child with no real monetary impact, ie one parent has already dropped out of the workforce or a grandparent is doing it or whatever).
Like you, I am not saying that this is a bad thing!
There will also be some scenarios in which that marginal 3rd or 4th child is enough to actually pull a parent out of the labor market as the delta between low-wage income and child care costs rises, and the child allowance provides a cushion. Parents who would prefer to stay home may well find that this makes it affordable to do so at larger family sizes, basically amplifying an effect that is already present.
I call the third child the SAH kid. In my social group a third kid is a signal that the wife (and it is always the wife) has no plans of returning to the workforce until all the kids are out of school. And even then it's not likely.
At a certain income level, a stay-at-home wife is a status symbol. I'm not sure $3k a year is a dealmaker at that level, but it's not going to hurt.
As someone who doesn't know from economics but knows a lot about arguments, I find Scott Winship's "I'm not going to help you because you were mean to me" thing so funny. Leave aside how pissy it makes him sound…who on earth thinks that you provide evidence to *help* anybody, as some kind of a favor? You provide evidence because that's what makes people give credit to your arguments! Maybe he was so annoyed he wasn't thinking what he was saying, or maybe in his intellectual world providing evidence is more of a courtesy rather than an obligation, since no one in his circles expects empirical observation to change the conclusion you're already ideologically committed to.
Would it be useful to think of this in terms of $ going to kids instead of $ going to parents? It is actually a universal policy moving forward---it will go to every person born in the US during their time as a kid to help provide them a better start in life, no matter the parents they are born with. (The only ones not covered are those who are now not kids. And those whose parents are very well off. And those whose parents waste it on other stuff, which is I guess the paternalistic argument for giving services and not cash, though I don't know of any evidence on the prevalence of this issue.) Maybe this is what those who call it SS for kids mean, but it didn't occur to me until reading the threads really zeroing in on parents vs. non-parents.
I've been waiting days for Matt's twitter beef with Scott Winship to finally make Slow Boring. Too much of conservative economic theory is faith based. It's all seen as some sort of ecumenical argument between Keynsians and Austrians or salt water schools versus fresh water schools. It is theology with graphs. Only Winship doesn't even bother with the graphs.
For a soft pseudo-science, economics can get extremely dorky with its profusion of complicated mathematical models. Even having a surface level knowledge of obscure economic jargon is what lets charlatans like Paul Ryan flourish. Ryan managed to parlay an undergrad degree in Econ from Ohio's third most prestigious university into a reputation as a serious wonk. A development I still blame on the credulity of Vox cofounder Ezra Klein. That serious real experts like Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman have to waste their time refuting the neo-Randian nonsense conservatives spout without a scintilla of evidence is embarrassing.
This post depressed me because it's a well-reasoned and well-argued exploration of a vital issue in our national life and it was dropped into the policy desert that is and will continue to be that national life for some time.
The dynamic of that time is: an anti-policy Republican party all of whose energy is directed at -- well, I'm not quite sure what it's directed at; a razor-thin margin between the parties which means that marginal changes in electoral outcomes drive huge swings in political power; a Democratic party bursting with interesting ideas and debates none of which matter except to the extent that Joe Manchin and the Senate parliamentarian agree with them.
I think it's great that Matt is tilling the policy soil for that blessed day when the heavens open up, the rain cascades down, and grasses and flowers flourish on the valley floor. I admire his perseverance. I couldn't do it.
Could Romney's proposal boil down to: Increase taxes on the rich to pay for something that disproportionately benefits poor children, while simplifying the benefit system overall. Seems great to me. For progressives to oppose it seems like siding with the social-welfare bureaucracy over its intended beneficiaries.
First, states that have high taxes have services for the lower classes paid for by those taxes. Poor people in low tax states are materially, unequivocally worse off. Also, state services are a great source of middle class jobs. Low tax states have far greater inequality. Eliminating SALT means that rich people leave for low tax states... which was the ENTIRE intention of conservatives. So blue states have an incentive to cut their taxes and services for the poor. The poor lose, services disappear, middle class govt job disappear, and we're left with red state wastelands. SALT deductions are the opposite of regressive.
Second, Romney's money is a waste of time. College and health costs are the two biggest factors in having a kid. A few grand a year is a drop in the ocean when college costs 75k per year TODAY, and will likely be double that in eighteen years. And for people who might not care about that, whose medical insurance is likely to be worse, health costs become an extremely outsized problem.
If anything, it's insidious: the people these few thousand bucks will encourage to have kids are the people who almost certainly shouldn't be having kids.
It's kind of gross that you want to decide who doesn't get to have kids. I get the instinct to judge others' circumstances, and most of us have done it at times. But implicit in that is the idea that poor people can't afford to raise their kids the "right" way so they shouldn't have them at all. When in fact, maybe we should just make it easier for them to do so.
Why should we make it easier for poor people to have children that they can't take care of, when our educational and health systems are a disaster and the prospects of these kids are not good?
The point is that making it easier will make it possible for poor families (and also middle-class ones!) to take care of their kids, improving their prospects.
And a well-designed program will do just that. A program that catalyzes many births into large families that must depend on the benefit itself for basic financial stability, would not be a well-designed program.
The U.S. States (plus DC) with the highest Gini Coefficient are DC, New York, Louisiana, Connecticut, and California. These are the only 5 that exceed the national average Gini Coefficient, and of them only Louisiana is a low-tax state. Much lower cost-of-living in low-wage states is an important factor too. I don't know if Gini Coefficient tracks after-transfer income, but I do know that my siblings in Southern California have a much more difficult financial experience than those earning similar incomes in Texas, even after government transfers.
Also, what on earth are you talking about college costing $75k today? Average net cost per year (after financial aid) for tuition, fees, and room/board is $33k for a private school, and less than $20k for a public school. The average *sticker* price for a private school is only $54k.
Putting $200/month in a 529 investment account for 18 years would likely be more than enough to cover tuition, room, and board at an in-state public institution.
Obviously $250-$350/month isn't going to completely pay for child-rearing, but the idea that it wouldn't be life-changing for millions of working- and middle-class families is just bafflingly out-of-touch. Come talk to my friends with 4 kids sometime about whether $12,000 -- a 25% pay raise!! -- would be a "waste of time" or "insidious".
Poor people in low tax states are not unequivocally worse off. One of the points that Ezra and Matt made on a podcast was that while states like California have better benefits for poor people, it is counteracted by the failure in housing policy to actually allow them to have a home there. Serious question - would you rather have higher benefits and be homeless or have worse benefits but be able to find a place to live?
Secondly - college and health care costs are not the two biggest factors for having a kid if you aren't middle or higher income. First, a majority of people still don't go to college so that can't be a major cost for them. Secondly, healthcare costs for most kids are actually pretty low and are generally already covered by CHIP etc.
What is actually the real cost for most people is childcare! Either forgoing income by having one parent stay home with a kid(s), or paying for someone else to care for your kid(s) while you work is very expensive!
Blue state failures on housing policy are a separate question from whether or not blue-state Medicaid systems and other benefits for the poor are more generous; it's pretty clear that they are. The best of both worlds would be a place with the high taxes and spending of Blue America and the high rates of homebuilding that the Sunbelt allows, while some of that additional tax revenue went into better mass transit that made dense apartment living more appealing and 70-mile hypercommutes on 12-lane highways less appealing.
I mean, everything is separate and nothing is separate. But the grandfather comment to yours says, "Poor people in low tax states are materially, unequivocally worse off." That seems like a holistic statement to me.
I feel like there are a lot of people who have had "healthcare costs are so high" shoveled at them for so long that they kinda don't realize that most non-elderly people... don't need much healthcare. Vaccines are cheap. Most kids don't need any healthcare beyond vaccines.
Some do, and we should tackle that issue, but not if it means losing sight of the fact that most people don't need it. (Also, remember the whole thing where giving people more subsidized medical care in Oregon didn't produce better health outcomes? https://www.nber.org/programs-projects/projects-and-centers/oregon-health-insurance-experiment?page=1&perPage=50). A few hundred bucks a month is plenty of money to cover most kids' healthcare needs.
Just to be clear, that study does indeed show no impact on health outcomes, but it did reduce household debt and depression (I wouldn't be surprised if those 2 things are also inversely related to each other):
"Medicaid coverage resulted in significantly more outpatient visits, hospitalizations, prescription medications, and emergency department visits. Coverage significantly lowered medical debt, and virtually eliminated the likelihood of having a catastrophic medical expenditure. Medicaid substantially reduced the prevalence of depression, but had no statistically significant effects on blood pressure, cholesterol, or cardiovascular risk. Medicaid coverage also had no statistically significant effect on employment status or earnings."
Yep! It's a bit concerning that it increased outpatient visits, hospitalizations, and medication without improving health outcomes (besides depression).
It's a ridiculously high bar for one state level program to have to have statistically significant effects on long term biometric outcome batteries. There's a lot of noise in the real world and demanding that level of outcome proof would nix [insert_your_favorite_government_program_here] without a doubt. As JFO mentioned, Medicaid access certainly did seem to have a positive impact on test subjects, as common sense would suggest it would.
They had $x in medical bills. After the intervention, they had $x + $y in medical bills, but those were all taken care of, so they were $x richer. $y appeared to be essentially wasted, except perhaps for people who were depressed.
I don't agree that asking to see medical benefits for a group of 10,000 people in a variant group paired with 10,000 people in a control over two years during which time they did make detectably higher use of medical resources is a "ridiculously high bar."
Yeah, I'd love to see more convo about broadening education. Personally, I think my college was useful for getting out and living with a diverse group of people from around the country, and for the fact that I can put college on my resume. Lots of other ways to accomplish those things!
I see that inflation of common goods chart a lot, but it seems inadequate to me. The goods that have increased in price seem more like necessities, while the things that have decreased seem more like luxuries. If the inflation calculation gives luxuries and necessities equal weight, then inflation will tend to disproportionately impact poorer people than wealthier ones, since poor people will eliminate luxuries from their purchases so that they can afford necessities. They will then not experience the counterbalancing effects built into the inflation calculation because they will be spending more of their money on expensive necessities. It seems like this graphic would benefit from a luxury-necessity weighting, so that inflation could be calculated in a way that actually makes sense. Poor people don't spend money the same as wealthy people. This curve is only accurate if everyone spends proportionally similar amounts on each of the types of goods represented.
I really like the idea of giving money to less-well-off families in a straightforward way that doesn’t try to tell people how they should live their lives, or whether they should work, etc. I have a lot more faith in parents making the best decisions for their kids than the government decreeing that one must work to receive benefits. It just seems like a no brainer to me.
I’m not even mad that eliminating SALT probably means it would be a net negative for my (fairly well-off blue state family) - if it efficiently helps lower-income people at the expense of myself I’m all for it.
Do look at the NYT comments on Douthat's post. Absolutely unhinged antinatalism.
Is Cameron Hildritch really a preeminent member of the "center-right Takes Class"? I've been reading National Review for a few months to get a balancing dose of conservative takes, but I quickly learned to skip his articles. He writes mostly-good and generally well-researched stuff, then throws some judgmental Christian or smug libertarian side notes completely out of the blue with no support or relevance to the topic (case in point: the first sentence of the article Matt linked - semantically debatable, but almost completely irrelevant here).
Related: Are there better conservative outlets than National Review? All their writing on Trump was very measured and rational, but with him gone they've slipped into being pretty reactionary.
"We have Social Security to make sure that people can enjoy a decent retirement. And for broadly similar reasons, we ought to have a child allowance — Social Security for parents ...."
We have Social Security and Medicare for people who are too old or disabled to work. Both of these systems are designed so that participants pay into the systems for decades, and then later start getting a return for having paid in. The Social Security benefit is directly related to how much one paid into the system during one's working years.
No system of paying people for choosing to have children can be remotely comparable.
The pithy line on this is that children are like little old people -- they can't work! So we need to spend money to support them until they can.
What is the mechanism by which a Democrat actually gets punished politically for eliminating the SALT deduction? Obviously the people in safe seats are fine, nobody is getting primaried over this. So is the fear that a Republican challenger in a purplish suburban district accuses them of, basically, agreeing with Republicans about SALT?
I mean I guess the play is for the Republican to just lie and claim they don't also support eliminating the the deduction, but that doesn't exactly seem like a devastating line of attack.
Matt says that if Jake the Job Creator were subject to higher tax rates then instead of being discouraged to work, he would work more to maintain the same after tax income (“income effect”). Well, if that’s the case then wouldn’t that add to income inequality? Likewise if Jake was a superstar athlete who had the bargaining power to command a higher salary to compensate for the higher taxes – which ultimately get passed on to less wealthy ticket buyers.
So far in these comments we've had "parents will just quit their jobs and raise 6 kids on $15,000 a year" and "$15,000 a year is so little money that it's just an insidious waste of time".
It's truly wild.
Well, I'm here to say that I think the child allowance is a great idea to improve society somewhat and that it won't ruin society but we should not do pay-fors that leave poor people worse off. Nuance!
Lyman Stokey has done some modeling that shows that, even with the pay-fors, virtually every recipient would be net better off w/ Romney's plan than in the status quo, including both parent and childless EITC recipients. Replacing a less-generous, administratively onerous benefit with a more-generous, administrative-simple one is a clear win for recipients -- especially the sizable minority of EITC-eligible people who don't actually get the benefit today!
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1357680478380261377
Thanks for sharing that. I have heard that it does leave some people with less money but I don't fully understand it so I don't know.
I think there are VERY narrow income bands where that is partially true depending on marital status -- lots of complicated factors at play! -- but I'd encourage you to read the thread and see.
I agree that if the pay-fors do leave poor recipients worse off, they should be retooled until they do not.
Yeah, I saw that and it's encouraging. Another thing I don't get: Stone presents encouraging marriage as a worthy policy goal. I get that we wouldn't want to penalize marriage but what's the benefit of encouraging it? Not all partnerships are marriages, not all marriages are happy, and I would assume not every single parent wants to marry the mother/father.
A few factors, I guess --
1. Research consistently shows that children do better when raised in stable two-parent homes, and that married parents provide that much more frequently than cohabiting parents do. (link below)
There is plenty of debate as to whether that is really causation or merely correlation, and whether encouraging "the types of parents who cohabit" to get married instead would make any meaningful difference. But there is definitely research that says "marriage is better for kids" and while there are mitigating arguments, there is really nothing with which I'm familiar that suggests the opposite.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/cohabiting-parents-differ-from-married-ones-in-three-big-ways/
2. He is a social conservative, so I imagine that on a personal level he sees marriage itself as a good thing, and its normalization as a public good. There is value for individual families, but also, value in a social expectation that family formation is tied to long-term, til-death-do-us-part commitment. You don't have to share that view!
3. With so many tax and benefit programs intersecting in so many complicated ways, it may be impossible to be 100% neutral in all cases. So, if you "get that we wouldn't want to penalize marriage," but find that complex policy will inevitably create rewards or penalties in different contexts, the impulse is to /err on the side of not penalizing it/. Thus, it's not that we should explicitly subsidize marriage as a policy goal, but that if we are to avoid penalizing it, then it will inevitably be fairly neutral in most cases, with slight incentives in others.
I apologize if it sounds patronizing to say this, but people are really bad at thinking on the margin. It is of course true that there are very large numbers of people in the country that would say, "Hahahaha what you want to pay me $15k a year to have *six children* are you insane?" while simultaneously there are very large numbers of people in the country who are like, "Woah, $3k a year if I have another kid? That's a game-changer!"
People rely on their intuitions too much about this kind of thing, and your intuition tends to imagine that everyone is a lot like you or a few people you know.
Some people will absolutely have more children if there is a $3k/year child allowance. Matt has cited survey data a few times showing that lots of people wish they had more kids, if only they could afford them. Making it more affordable to have children allows people to achieve their actual goals.
I would go farther: encouraging people to have that marginal extra child -- because with $3k extra they CAN save for college, or move into that 2-bedroom apartment, or cut back on hours at work -- is one of the major BENEFITS of such a program. Help people have the kids they want to have! One Billion Americans!
That marginal child is likely a money-losing proposition even with a child allowance. Even at the maximum benefit, it would not be enough to replace labor income. But it's not nothing! And insofar as it enables families to choose to have children, and to raise those children without want, it is a big win in my book.
I think almost nobody would find having their first child for $3k a year as money-gaining proposition. A lot of people might find having their second or third child for $3k per year a money-gaining proposition (because they already have childcare that can absorb another child with no real monetary impact, ie one parent has already dropped out of the workforce or a grandparent is doing it or whatever).
Like you, I am not saying that this is a bad thing!
Sure -- I can see that.
There will also be some scenarios in which that marginal 3rd or 4th child is enough to actually pull a parent out of the labor market as the delta between low-wage income and child care costs rises, and the child allowance provides a cushion. Parents who would prefer to stay home may well find that this makes it affordable to do so at larger family sizes, basically amplifying an effect that is already present.
But, again, I'd see that as a feature!
I call the third child the SAH kid. In my social group a third kid is a signal that the wife (and it is always the wife) has no plans of returning to the workforce until all the kids are out of school. And even then it's not likely.
At a certain income level, a stay-at-home wife is a status symbol. I'm not sure $3k a year is a dealmaker at that level, but it's not going to hurt.
As someone who doesn't know from economics but knows a lot about arguments, I find Scott Winship's "I'm not going to help you because you were mean to me" thing so funny. Leave aside how pissy it makes him sound…who on earth thinks that you provide evidence to *help* anybody, as some kind of a favor? You provide evidence because that's what makes people give credit to your arguments! Maybe he was so annoyed he wasn't thinking what he was saying, or maybe in his intellectual world providing evidence is more of a courtesy rather than an obligation, since no one in his circles expects empirical observation to change the conclusion you're already ideologically committed to.
Would it be useful to think of this in terms of $ going to kids instead of $ going to parents? It is actually a universal policy moving forward---it will go to every person born in the US during their time as a kid to help provide them a better start in life, no matter the parents they are born with. (The only ones not covered are those who are now not kids. And those whose parents are very well off. And those whose parents waste it on other stuff, which is I guess the paternalistic argument for giving services and not cash, though I don't know of any evidence on the prevalence of this issue.) Maybe this is what those who call it SS for kids mean, but it didn't occur to me until reading the threads really zeroing in on parents vs. non-parents.
Correction: "the poverty rate for the elderly is lower than the overall national poverty rate, whereas the poverty rate for kids is much higher."
2019 SPM was 12.5% for <18, 11.2% for 18-64, and 12.8% for 65+ (11.7% overall). https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-272.pdf
I've been waiting days for Matt's twitter beef with Scott Winship to finally make Slow Boring. Too much of conservative economic theory is faith based. It's all seen as some sort of ecumenical argument between Keynsians and Austrians or salt water schools versus fresh water schools. It is theology with graphs. Only Winship doesn't even bother with the graphs.
For a soft pseudo-science, economics can get extremely dorky with its profusion of complicated mathematical models. Even having a surface level knowledge of obscure economic jargon is what lets charlatans like Paul Ryan flourish. Ryan managed to parlay an undergrad degree in Econ from Ohio's third most prestigious university into a reputation as a serious wonk. A development I still blame on the credulity of Vox cofounder Ezra Klein. That serious real experts like Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman have to waste their time refuting the neo-Randian nonsense conservatives spout without a scintilla of evidence is embarrassing.
#1 is Case Western, #2 is OSU?
Whenever I use that line, I leave the top two to the imagination of the reader. Oberlin may or may not be in the mix.
I graduated from UC so I'm gonna say that is one of the top 2 lol
It reminds me of climate denial. I really think the Republican Party is just evidence free at this point tbh
This post depressed me because it's a well-reasoned and well-argued exploration of a vital issue in our national life and it was dropped into the policy desert that is and will continue to be that national life for some time.
The dynamic of that time is: an anti-policy Republican party all of whose energy is directed at -- well, I'm not quite sure what it's directed at; a razor-thin margin between the parties which means that marginal changes in electoral outcomes drive huge swings in political power; a Democratic party bursting with interesting ideas and debates none of which matter except to the extent that Joe Manchin and the Senate parliamentarian agree with them.
I think it's great that Matt is tilling the policy soil for that blessed day when the heavens open up, the rain cascades down, and grasses and flowers flourish on the valley floor. I admire his perseverance. I couldn't do it.
Well there's a novel concept, a Republican Senator who isn't completely useless. Could take some getting used to.
Could Romney's proposal boil down to: Increase taxes on the rich to pay for something that disproportionately benefits poor children, while simplifying the benefit system overall. Seems great to me. For progressives to oppose it seems like siding with the social-welfare bureaucracy over its intended beneficiaries.
Don't underestimate how much upper-middle-class Democratic primary voters love the SALT deduction... that's a big factor in Congressional support.
So I disagree with this. I'd raise two points.
First, states that have high taxes have services for the lower classes paid for by those taxes. Poor people in low tax states are materially, unequivocally worse off. Also, state services are a great source of middle class jobs. Low tax states have far greater inequality. Eliminating SALT means that rich people leave for low tax states... which was the ENTIRE intention of conservatives. So blue states have an incentive to cut their taxes and services for the poor. The poor lose, services disappear, middle class govt job disappear, and we're left with red state wastelands. SALT deductions are the opposite of regressive.
Second, Romney's money is a waste of time. College and health costs are the two biggest factors in having a kid. A few grand a year is a drop in the ocean when college costs 75k per year TODAY, and will likely be double that in eighteen years. And for people who might not care about that, whose medical insurance is likely to be worse, health costs become an extremely outsized problem.
If anything, it's insidious: the people these few thousand bucks will encourage to have kids are the people who almost certainly shouldn't be having kids.
It's kind of gross that you want to decide who doesn't get to have kids. I get the instinct to judge others' circumstances, and most of us have done it at times. But implicit in that is the idea that poor people can't afford to raise their kids the "right" way so they shouldn't have them at all. When in fact, maybe we should just make it easier for them to do so.
Why should we make it easier for poor people to have children that they can't take care of, when our educational and health systems are a disaster and the prospects of these kids are not good?
The point is that making it easier will make it possible for poor families (and also middle-class ones!) to take care of their kids, improving their prospects.
And a well-designed program will do just that. A program that catalyzes many births into large families that must depend on the benefit itself for basic financial stability, would not be a well-designed program.
What kind of additional federal incentives for states to raise their income tax rates, in addition to the SALT deduction, would you encourage?
"Low tax states have far greater inequality."
The U.S. States (plus DC) with the highest Gini Coefficient are DC, New York, Louisiana, Connecticut, and California. These are the only 5 that exceed the national average Gini Coefficient, and of them only Louisiana is a low-tax state. Much lower cost-of-living in low-wage states is an important factor too. I don't know if Gini Coefficient tracks after-transfer income, but I do know that my siblings in Southern California have a much more difficult financial experience than those earning similar incomes in Texas, even after government transfers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient
Also, what on earth are you talking about college costing $75k today? Average net cost per year (after financial aid) for tuition, fees, and room/board is $33k for a private school, and less than $20k for a public school. The average *sticker* price for a private school is only $54k.
https://www.collegedata.com/resources/pay-your-way/whats-the-price-tag-for-a-college-education
Putting $200/month in a 529 investment account for 18 years would likely be more than enough to cover tuition, room, and board at an in-state public institution.
Obviously $250-$350/month isn't going to completely pay for child-rearing, but the idea that it wouldn't be life-changing for millions of working- and middle-class families is just bafflingly out-of-touch. Come talk to my friends with 4 kids sometime about whether $12,000 -- a 25% pay raise!! -- would be a "waste of time" or "insidious".
Both of these points are terrible.
Poor people in low tax states are not unequivocally worse off. One of the points that Ezra and Matt made on a podcast was that while states like California have better benefits for poor people, it is counteracted by the failure in housing policy to actually allow them to have a home there. Serious question - would you rather have higher benefits and be homeless or have worse benefits but be able to find a place to live?
Secondly - college and health care costs are not the two biggest factors for having a kid if you aren't middle or higher income. First, a majority of people still don't go to college so that can't be a major cost for them. Secondly, healthcare costs for most kids are actually pretty low and are generally already covered by CHIP etc.
What is actually the real cost for most people is childcare! Either forgoing income by having one parent stay home with a kid(s), or paying for someone else to care for your kid(s) while you work is very expensive!
Blue state failures on housing policy are a separate question from whether or not blue-state Medicaid systems and other benefits for the poor are more generous; it's pretty clear that they are. The best of both worlds would be a place with the high taxes and spending of Blue America and the high rates of homebuilding that the Sunbelt allows, while some of that additional tax revenue went into better mass transit that made dense apartment living more appealing and 70-mile hypercommutes on 12-lane highways less appealing.
I mean, everything is separate and nothing is separate. But the grandfather comment to yours says, "Poor people in low tax states are materially, unequivocally worse off." That seems like a holistic statement to me.
I feel like there are a lot of people who have had "healthcare costs are so high" shoveled at them for so long that they kinda don't realize that most non-elderly people... don't need much healthcare. Vaccines are cheap. Most kids don't need any healthcare beyond vaccines.
Some do, and we should tackle that issue, but not if it means losing sight of the fact that most people don't need it. (Also, remember the whole thing where giving people more subsidized medical care in Oregon didn't produce better health outcomes? https://www.nber.org/programs-projects/projects-and-centers/oregon-health-insurance-experiment?page=1&perPage=50). A few hundred bucks a month is plenty of money to cover most kids' healthcare needs.
Childcare is insanely expensive.
Just to be clear, that study does indeed show no impact on health outcomes, but it did reduce household debt and depression (I wouldn't be surprised if those 2 things are also inversely related to each other):
"Medicaid coverage resulted in significantly more outpatient visits, hospitalizations, prescription medications, and emergency department visits. Coverage significantly lowered medical debt, and virtually eliminated the likelihood of having a catastrophic medical expenditure. Medicaid substantially reduced the prevalence of depression, but had no statistically significant effects on blood pressure, cholesterol, or cardiovascular risk. Medicaid coverage also had no statistically significant effect on employment status or earnings."
Yep! It's a bit concerning that it increased outpatient visits, hospitalizations, and medication without improving health outcomes (besides depression).
It's a ridiculously high bar for one state level program to have to have statistically significant effects on long term biometric outcome batteries. There's a lot of noise in the real world and demanding that level of outcome proof would nix [insert_your_favorite_government_program_here] without a doubt. As JFO mentioned, Medicaid access certainly did seem to have a positive impact on test subjects, as common sense would suggest it would.
I think that report basically said:
They had $x in medical bills. After the intervention, they had $x + $y in medical bills, but those were all taken care of, so they were $x richer. $y appeared to be essentially wasted, except perhaps for people who were depressed.
I don't agree that asking to see medical benefits for a group of 10,000 people in a variant group paired with 10,000 people in a control over two years during which time they did make detectably higher use of medical resources is a "ridiculously high bar."
Yeah, I'd love to see more convo about broadening education. Personally, I think my college was useful for getting out and living with a diverse group of people from around the country, and for the fact that I can put college on my resume. Lots of other ways to accomplish those things!