Congress May Have a Deal on Expanding the Child Tax Credit

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Hey, we actually get to start today with the fact that there may be some surprising good news for a change coming out of Congress, especially for Americans with children, especially low-income families with children who ironically, some of you know this, some of you experienced it, saw child poverty rates drop dramatically at the start of the pandemic, but have since gone back up.

For more than a year now, Democrats in Congress have been trying to strike a deal with Republicans to revive the policy known as the Child Tax Credit, or at least extend the Child Tax Credit that still exists. In exchange, in a deal that is reportedly very close now to being struck, Republicans want to renew some corporate tax breaks that had recently expired themselves.

Well, yesterday, two of the main lawmakers on tax issues, these are Senate Finance Chair, Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon, and House Ways and Means Chair, Jason Smith, Republican from Missouri announced the two parties, at least the leaderships had struck a deal. Now, the new deal is, well, the same as the one they had tried to pass over a year ago, at least the Democrats did.

Democrats would get a limited version of a child tax credit in exchange for greater incentives for domestic research and development and faster depreciation of certain kinds of capital investments for business. I know that sounds wonky, but it affects a lot of people directly and we'll explain. By no means is this a done deal. What? You're talking about a deal, but it's not a done deal.

Yes, Congress has a tight deadline to implement any changes to the tax code that would be effective for the 2023 tax filing season which is upon us from now until April 15th. Joining me now to break down the negotiations and who they stand to benefit is Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent and lead writer at Vox, who wrote an explainer on a lot of this. Dylan, thanks for coming on to this. Welcome to WNYC.

Dylan Matthews: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get into some of the specifics of the Wyden-Smith deal named after those two lawmakers I mentioned in the intro, but first what basically for people who don't know, is the child tax credit.

Dylan Matthews: The child tax credit has had a long and strange life. It began in 1997 as a middle-class tax cut that was agreed to by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Basically, Gingrich wanted to cut capital gains taxes for wealthy people with investments who pay taxes on it. I think he was aware that it would look bad if he did that without doing anything for middle-class families. He and Clinton cut a deal on a credit that was just $400 for families that owed taxes with children.

It started there and it was a very modest credit, and it's just continually expanded. It was expanded a little bit in the 2001 tax cuts by George W. Bush. It was expanded a lot in 2009 by Obama as part of the stimulus, and then that was extended. It really was expanded pretty dramatically. It was doubled actually in 2017 under the Trump tax cuts to become the main tax break for families with kids, but it always had a limitation that it was meant for families with earnings and initially, it was meant for families that owed taxes. That excluded a lot of people at the bottom.

We can get into what happened in 2021, but a lot of the fight on the Democratic side has been to take it from just being a tax break for upper-middle-class families to one that actually targets the poor.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Do talk about what happened at 2021 or generally during the pandemic. Some regular listeners know. We've had Congressman Richie Torres from the Bronx on the show several times talking about this. He represents the poorest most low-income congressional district in America, and he said the impact of the pandemic-era child tax credit on child poverty rates in his district was dramatic, so talk about that.

Dylan Matthews: Sure. One piece of international context that's useful to note here is that most countries around the world, rich countries, have what's called a child allowance. That's money that's paid to parents usually without regard to income for being parents. The US has never had this, and there's been an effort by anti-poverty advocates for a while to try to turn the child credit into this by making it not based on income at all, sending it out monthly, just making it a regular check.

New York listeners might be interested to know that a lot of the effort behind the scenes was done by people in New York. Columbia has a lot of researchers who worked on this. There's a guy named David Harris, who's a New York-based philanthropist and activist who I think is the real unsung hero of this. They were able to persuade the Biden administration to include a measure in the 2021 stimulus.

This is the second year of the pandemic, Biden has just become president. They want to do a new round of stimulus checks to everybody, but activists on the outside and in Congress convince him to increase the child tax credit from $2,000 up to $3,600 for parents of young kids and $3,000 for parents of older kids and to make it what's called fully refundable.

That might sound a little wonky, but it just means everybody gets it no matter how poor you are. It arranged for at least half the year for it to be sent out as a monthly check. From July to December 2021, parents were getting checks in the mail as opposed to getting a big lump sum in their tax return come March or April of the next year.

Brian Lehrer: That's different, the checks in the mail during the year, the monthly checks.

Dylan Matthews: Absolutely, yes. It changes how people interact with it, how they spend it. It had a huge, huge impact that I think child poverty fell quite dramatically. I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but at least a third maybe more like a half in just that year. It's a little hard to parse out because a lot of things were happening in 2021. As listeners, remember stimulus checks were going out, the economy was returning as a really dramatic time, but I think poverty experts would agree that this measure was very targeted at people at the bottom and made a big difference, and then it went away.

Brian Lehrer: Then it went away. If it had cut child poverty so dramatically, why did it go away? Why did they allow it to go away?

Dylan Matthews: I think it's worth underlining how dramatic a policy shift this was. In the 1990s, some listeners may remember there was a huge fight over welfare reform. What that fight was about was a program that gave cash to parents of children without an expectation that they work. This was considered so controversial and so politically toxic for the Clinton administration that Clinton signed a bill that effectively eliminated that program.

There's a lot of opposition. Pat Moynihan memorably said that we would be seeing children freezing to death on subway grades. We didn't see that in part because the economy in the late '90s was really good, but I think people had internalized a lesson that you can't just give money for nothing. That's how Democrats lose, that's how Republicans get us, is that they point out welfare queens and other people they think are unfairly benefiting from this.

Brian Lehrer: Different, and just to go back to something that you said a few minutes ago and tie it together, so different than in other western industrialized countries we like to compare ourselves to where the idea of government checks to families with children as a fairly routine thing is not controversial. Correct?

Dylan Matthews: Absolutely. I think also different from the American history, the story of child benefits is also the history of 20th-century feminism. The first programs we had like this were called Mothers Pensions. They were passed in the 1920s for World War I widows because the assumption in the '20s was if you're a widow of someone who died in the war and you have children, you shouldn't be expected to work because women generally didn't work, and so we'll give you money for nothing. It's so that you don't work.

Then eventually that program evolved and by the '70s and '80s, the assumption was women should work even if they're single parents, and so what was the point of the program in the beginning? It's a major flaw in what it got attacked for, but to fast forward a bit to 2021, I think people had thought we had moved past this, and I think activists thought we had moved past welfare reform politics and could give people money for being parents.

I think they were over-optimistic and there were people, I think Joe Manchin in the Senate most loudly, but I think a lot of people in the Democratic coalition thought this was going too fast, and that they were not actually comfortable with setting up a program that looked like they were reviving cash welfare. It became clear that extending it beyond 2021 there just weren't the votes. I think it was also a context of it was an emergency and this had been passed as part of an emergency program. That made it a little harder to extend because if the initial argument was we need this because this is a unique moment and then you're saying, "Well, I want to make it permanent," well, was it a unique moment or was this something that you want as a permanent policy?

Brian Lehrer: It's funny when you talk about how this ties to the history of feminism and the history of welfare reform. It wasn't that long ago in the, let's say the post-Clinton years when they did away with that subsidy known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children that you were talking about before, for low-income women, that traditional conservatives, we could call them traditionalist conservatives, were arguing this paradoxical thing that these middle-class mothers who are out in the workforce in the name of feminism, they're abandoning their children and they should go back home.

Middle-class women in the paid workforce should go back home but low-income women, especially single low-income women, they should be forced to work by government policy. What a paradox. That's where we landed or I guess we landed where just about everybody who wanted to and others who just needed to economically were going out to the workforce. There was that paradox that was front and center in conservative ideology for a while.

Dylan Matthews: Absolutely. I think it both fed on and revealed some cleavages within conservatism. There's religious conservatives who care a lot about the traditional family. There's free market conservatives who want lower taxes, lower benefit programs in aid to families with dependent children. They had an enemy they could both agree on. That it did have significant marriage penalties.

It implicitly favors single mothers over partnered couples. Traditional religious conservatives hated it for that reason and it was a major benefit program. The free marketers hated it for that reason. Sometimes the alliance would come apart. There's an amazing book called American Dream by Jason DeParle. That's a history of welfare reform that I recommend listeners check out.

One of the most remarkable moments in it is when Republicans in Congress want to pass a bill that would ban for life all government benefits to women who have a child before the age of 21, just a blanket ban on any benefits to teens or early '20s mothers. They didn't pass it, not because of opposition that this was cruel or something but because anti-abortion groups begged them to not pass it because they understood that if you passed a law like that, it would lead to a surge in teen abortions. Even throughout that period--

Brian Lehrer: Aren't there some conservatives who, in some states, argue against the child marriage laws where you have to be a certain age in order to even legally get married? Those laws are meant to prevent the exploitation of girls. Some conservatives say, "No, this should be up to the families, up to the choice." There's another paradox arguing for legal young teenage marriage but then prohibiting benefits to those same girls if they have kids.

Dylan Matthews: Absolutely. It's interesting in that you don't see these paradoxes to the same degree in other places. Israel has really interesting welfare politics in that an overwhelming share of low-income families there are Haredi or ultra-Orthodox. You have a synergy behind them wanting more welfare benefits for families with kids because they have a lot of kids. You see that to some degree in Utah. Utah has a fairly generous welfare state for a republican state in the US because Mormon families have a lot of kids and have specific needs.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. You were talking about the international comparisons. Someone just posted a comment to me that says, "I just saw a video vlog by Anita living in Finland who's pregnant. She received a care package from the government full of goods for a baby. Absolutely blew my mind." This person writes it was full of clothes bedding and other little essentials. Again, an international contrast, right?

Dylan Matthews: Absolutely. I think that's called the Baby Box program. I think a few cities in the US, I think in New York and DC have experimented with it. Part of what's fun about that is that the box that Finland actually sends all these goods in is usable as a crib. That it's a safe place for newborns to sleep. It's doing double duty.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. I even think about the term child tax credit in this context. It's somehow politically toxic to say the government is giving money like the word subsidy to families with children. If you call it a tax credit, then other people don't react like, "Oh, they're taking my money and giving it to other families. Why aren't those families as self-sufficient as I am if you call it a subsidy?" If you call it a tax credit, then the politics of that term are, "Oh, well, the government isn't taking as much of people's money. That's a good thing."

Dylan Matthews: Right. I think this applies in context beyond the child credit and child poverty. What this is being paired with as well is what's paying for it is a rollback of a COVID program called the Employee Retention Tax Credit which was a credit to businesses to keep people on their books during 2020 and 2021. That doesn't have to be a tax credit. They could have just had a subsidy program the businesses apply to that gives them money to keep people employed.

It was implemented as a tax credit because I think the US has a lot of experience implementing social programs through taxes and because if they sell it as a tax break, that seems more appealing to businesses and to lazy fair activists than if it's just a straight government subsidy for businesses. It makes it seem like you're taking less from them rather than giving them something.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who has a question or perhaps a personal experience to share regarding the child tax credit or these business tax credits that may be dealt in exchange for extending their child tax credit in this new deal in Congress that's being struck by at least one Democrat and one Republican? We'll see if it goes through and doing a great job of explaining this to us as Vox often does as they do explainers so well, is Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent and lead writer at Vox.

Listeners, your experiences, personal stories, questions, comments, welcome at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. I guess one thing we should say in addition to what we've already said about the child tax credit before we get a little more into the business tax side of the deal is that, and correct me if I'm wrong, this deal would be about expanding the current child tax credit, not going back to the more generous subsidies at the height of the pandemic. Correct?

Dylan Matthews: That's correct. I think one way to think about this is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities which is a slightly less leaning group that does studies of budget policy. They estimate that this deal, the Wyden-Smith deal would lift about 400,000 children out of poverty this year in 2024. They had estimated that the 2021 credit, the early Biden credit lifted about three million children out of poverty each year.

400,000 versus 3 million. It's a lot smaller. It's maybe a sixth the size. It's also different in philosophy. The philosophy of the 2021 credit was everyone gets cash no matter what. We send it monthly. It's not based on whether you have earnings or not. This is very much based on whether you have earnings. What it does is it increases the benefit relative to how much earnings you have that in the parlance of tax wonks, it phases in faster. That matters. That could mean thousands more dollars in the hands of families earning $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a year. That really matters. It's not a huge game changer the way that the credit from a few years ago was.

Brian Lehrer: Do you know how much this version is projected to lift kids out of poverty compared to what the studies found happened in 2021 which you said it cut child poverty from a third to a half according to the experts?

Dylan Matthews: Yes. This is not anywhere near that level of impact. My back-of-the-envelope guess would be maybe a 5% to 10% decrease in child poverty. That's not nothing. That matters a lot to those kids. I should also emphasize that when we're talking about reducing poverty, we're talking about the number of kids who go above a certain line. Going above that line really matters, but being closer to that line also matters. There's millions more kids who will be less poor because they get this money. Even if they're still below the poverty line, their lives will be better. It's significant but it's not the credit that anti-poverty advocates and some Democrats have been fighting for for a long time. It's very much a partial measure.

Brian Lehrer: That implies a whole other conversation, which is why should anybody who works full time in the paid workforce be under the poverty line? Why aren't the minimum wage laws, living wage laws, whatever we want to call them, enough to guarantee that if you have a full-time job, you are not in poverty in the United States. That's a related but different discussion. How many people fall through the cracks in this respect?

You write about two in five American households owe $0 in income taxes or get money back on net. It reminds me of one of the reasons Mitt Romney lost the presidential election in 2012 to Barack Obama because he got caught on tape saying that 47% of Americans were basically mooches because they made too little money to pay income taxes. That's similar to the two in five figure, that's 40% that you cite. That is to say, enough people are poor in America that their federal income tax bill is zero that it equals 40%.

Dylan Matthews: Yes. I think Mitt and I are getting that number from the exact same place which is figures put out by the Tax Policy Center. It was 47% when he was talking. It's 40% now. I think part of what was ironic about him saying that is that I think Republicans deserve some degree of credit for that number being so high. One of the things the Trump tax credits did, for instance, is that they more than doubled the standard of deduction.

For a married couple now you could get a standard deduction of $27,700. I know this because I was working on my taxes earlier. If you earn less than that as a married couple, no income taxes, and then you can get credits on top of that, like the child credit. There are other deductions and things you can add. That all put together results in a lot of people not owing. Another group to mention are retirees. Some social security benefits are taxable, a lot aren't. Some pensions are taxable, a lot aren't.

If you have Roth savings that's generally not taxable. All these measures, many of which were supported by Republicans as part of broader tax cut packages have added up to a significant share of Americans not owing income taxes. I feel obliged to say here, most of these people pay Roth taxes. Almost all of them pay sales taxes on a local level. I think the implication of mooching is not fair. It does raise questions about programs like the child tax credit and whether they should be limited to people who owe taxes if the share of people who don't is large and has risen a lot in recent decades.

Brian Lehrer: You've been comparing the United States to European countries in this respect, and we are lucky enough to be getting a call from Europe. Here is Mari in Switzerland, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mari.

Mari: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'm very interested in this topic because we are immigrants from the US to Switzerland and our family used to get a child tax credit for our daughter when she was living with us. She's now older than 18 and she moved back to the US, but for the three years she was here, we got money back from the government. It is treated as totally normal and a great policy to encourage people to have kids and to make things a little bit easier for them. I'm a fan. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Mari, thank you very much. Brett in Brooklyn wants to expand the conversation a little bit, I think from this one particular kind of child credit or subsidy to the broader category. Is that right, Brett? Hi, you're on WNYC.

Brett: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I was wondering if the concept of universal basic income would be more politically palatable to Americans than just cash grants or checks each month.

Brian Lehrer: Brett, thank you very much. Universal basic income. Some people may remember Andrew Yang ran for president on that platform four years ago. Obviously, he didn't make it. Universal basic income, which some people say is needed because of automation, chasing jobs out of the human economy, and for various other reasons. How about UBI as more or less acceptable? I would guess it's less because that's kind of the same thing, but much bigger and less targeted than the child tax credit for low-income families.

Dylan Matthews: I share your intuition on this, Brian. I think one place you can look is just around the world. There are a couple of truly universal basic incomes. Alaska pays out an oil dividend of a few thousand dollars a year to everyone, man, woman, and child. Iran interestingly, has started doing that in recent years with their oil money. It's much less common than a child benefit, which is as Mari points out in the Swiss context is pretty universal across Europe and Japan and Australia and other places.

I think that there's a cost concern if there's more people total than there are just children, but also I think in the US and in a lot of places, people sometimes make a divide between the deserving and undeserving poor. This is something sociologists have written a lot about and how these ideas get developed. I think children often fall in the deserving category for people inherently. You can't blame them if they don't have a job, they're children. It's a lot easier to come up with reasons to blame or not want to help certain categories of adults.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa in Maplewood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi. Hello. I have a question for your guest about if there's any work being done for people in poverty, but just working people in general about compensating parents for childcare. We know what that can cost when you have to pay for it. Do people ever talk about how many parents do the second shift, but they're not paid for that other job, or they're adding a lot of value to the economy by taking care of kids, but we don't have a quantity or an amount of money for that.

Brian Lehrer: That's why I'm always careful to use the language of women who work outside the home or any parents who work outside the home or in the paid workforce as opposed to just who work, because obviously it's unpaid work, but it is work to be home with kids. Dylan, what do you say?

Dylan Matthews: Sure. I think there's a long activist history behind the idea of wages for housework. Sylvia Federici who's at Hofstra is I think this call our most associated with that idea. It was a major movement among radical and Marxist feminists in the 1970s and I think has a long and distinguished history. I think some have thought of the child credit and child allowances as a way of implementing that. I think this does get into a debate that sometimes happens in national politics.

There are some conservatives who are sympathetic to ideas like a child allowance on traditional family grounds that they want to encourage people to have more kids, they want to support families with kids so they're attracted to it. Those same people tend to be fairly hostile to direct subsidies for childcare for subsidies to childcare centers for nannies, [unintelligible 00:28:49] because they have a particular notion of what a family should look like and a particular model they want to promote.

They view subsidizing childcare outside the home as favoring one model of family over another or favoring working outside-the-house mothers ahead of stay-at-home mothers. I think there's more room for bipartisan compromise when it comes to just giving cash directly to parents regardless of their care situation. It's also true that the amounts of money we're talking about for the child credit, we're talking about $2,000 a year maximum. That doesn't get you very far in a childcare center in Brooklyn, say.

Brian Lehrer: We've got a few minutes left in the segment and I want to go to the other part of this deal if they're going to extend the child tax credit for a few years. The Republicans are getting roughly $33 billion in business tax breaks for what they call more favorable treatment of research and development expenses. For people in business out there wondering about that side of this deal, if it actually goes through Congress, what's in it?

Dylan Matthews: Sure. Most of the business tax provisions have to do with depreciation. Depreciation, if you've ever done business taxes is you buy, I think for your business, you buy a printer, you can expense it but do you expense it all at once in one year or do you have to deduct a cost over multiple years, which is generally worse for you. You want to make your taxes as low as possible right away. The package includes provisions for immediate expensing of US-based research and development. It also includes a provision called bonus depreciation which includes a bunch of other categories of goods and the things that you can expense all at once that you can deduct on your taxes all at once as opposed to spreading it out over a number of years.

My sense is that this is an area where economists disagree a lot over how important it is. There's some economists I talk to who think that immediate expensing is the most important thing in the world, and it gets businesses to invest a lot more. Other people I talk to think this is just a blatant giveaway for corporations who would spend this money anyway. Either way, businesses clearly want it. I think there's support both from Republicans and from some sort of business-friendly Democrats for these provisions. Definitely, something that the business community has been looking for. Whether it's corporate welfare or a reasonable economic growth policy your mileage may vary.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, I think Bill in Short Hills has another reason or argument that hasn't come up yet for the government subsidizing having kids. Bill, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Bill: Hi. How are you? Thank you for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Bill: Correct me if I'm wrong, but there was a reference made to the importance of increasing the population. I'm 75 and I grew up in the '50s and '60s. Back then one parent could work and the other parent could raise the kids, and you had a very comfortable life. The population back then is about a third of what it is now. What is the benefit of increasing the population? I would argue that we'd probably be better off in stabilizing the population if not reducing it.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, you're making the opposite argument of what I thought you were going to make. The opposite argument, just for the record, would be our aging population has skewed what the government has to spend money on so much that we're out of balance compared to a lot of other countries. We don't have enough young people compared to the number of old people. It's one of the arguments for large-scale immigration because the immigrants tend to be young.

We've talked about this on the show recently with respect to New York and the southern border and everything. That we need more young people, we need more children relative to the number of 90-year-olds in the country who are going to keep getting Social Security and Medicare on the taxpayer's dime. I guess you could argue it either way. Either the world has a population problem and we shouldn't be increasing the population, or we have a youth-to-aged-person ratio problem, and we should be subsidizing or incentivizing more kids. Dylan?

Dylan Matthews: Yes. I think that's one reason particularly some conservatives are interested in this. One point just for context is that the V1 projects that world population will peak sometime late this this century whether that's the 2070s or the 2080s. I will probably be dead. This isn't a problem I will have to deal with, but the population concern of the '70s and '80s was pretty successful.

Even in developing countries, birth rates are falling. One thing that means is we might be able to use immigration to plug some of these financing holes in the next few decades, but if the whole world's population is falling at some point immigration doesn't do much. The total stock of people is falling. That's blessedly a problem for after my time, but I think it's going to take up more and more of our politics as the century progresses.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, here's the opposite grievance from Sachin in Los Angeles. Sachin, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Sachin: Hey. Hi. Thank you for taking my call. My question is the single population is increasing significantly, and from some projections is going to be 40% to 50%. What I wonder is how is always the burden on single people? There's no tax credit for single folks. All the benefits that you see from taxes to school benefits, et cetera, that are removed from everybody's taxes, there's an uneven burden on single folks.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, the argument is these aren't tax credits or other benefits, so parents can go on vacation or something like that. It's that children are dependents and the economy such as it is in the private sector isn't enough to keep them all well fed and educated. The presumption is single people can much more easily fend for themselves.

Sachin: Again, this is a philosophy of responsibility. Everybody has a choice in terms of having kids and not having kids. My perspective is that I'm not saying you should not give benefits, but it should be equal across the board. It shouldn't be that one group or cohort gets penalized for the other one. That's not fair.

Brian Lehrer: Sachin, I hear. All right. So many points of view on the table as we come to the end of this segment. Dylan from Vox, tell us one other thing just on the politics. I said way back in the intro that even though this deal seems to have been struck between a leading Democrat and a leading Republican in Congress, it isn't done yet. If I'm reading this right, they only have until the end of the month to get it passed so that it would apply to the 2023 tax year that people are now starting to fill out their taxes for. What are the politics of this in Congress and are there factions who might block it?

Dylan Matthews: Sure. I think there's a couple of forms of opposition we've seen. One is Republicans who don't care particularly about the business tax cuts and oppose the child credit changes. I think we'll see some opposition from them. A more surprising angle is some Democrats have criticized it for not going far enough or for giving too much to corporations and not enough to children. Rosa DeLauro who has been a historically a big backer of the child credit has signaled that she might oppose the bill on those grounds.

Brian Lehrer: From Connecticut.

Dylan Matthews: From Connecticut represents New Haven. My very scientific view is that maybe has a 50-50 shot but Congress has passed things that affect ongoing tax years before. They did that in 2021 by changing how unemployment was treated so it could happen. I can say I volunteer at a tax site where we do tax preparation for low-income families. We're all bracing for if it suddenly changes in the middle of our tax season. While that might be a little more paperwork for us, it would be a win for our clients.

Brian Lehrer: Something to watch between now and the end of the month in Congress. We leave it there with Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent and lead writer at Vox. Now we know a volunteer for filling out tax returns for low-income families. Thanks so much for coming on, Dylan.

Dylan Matthews: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

 

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