The Child Tax Credit is actually dumb.
correct.
I have come to really dislike the tax credit way in which we do any social program. The old one was dumb the new one was dumb in its administration. Giving children and other non workers money to ensure that they are cared for is absolutely the right thing to do.
i agree with you on running everything through the tax code.
this is going to violate the non-political tag of this thread, but the ctc in particular is being very oversold. for example, the claim that it reduced "child poverty" makes it sound as if this was an independent measure of the effect. but of course it's not. it's just a calculation that if you give the amount of money given out, then mechanically this raises a number of families with children to an income that's over the poverty level. i have no doubt that there was a concurrent rise in the welfare of poor children whose families received the tax credit, but we shouldn't pretend that we've measured what that benefit was. we don't know.
the claim that the ctc was super cheap is also false. in fact, the cost is a big reason it wasn't renewed. it would have cost 170 billion a year to renew, which is more than twice as much as (the accounting value of mostly surplus and obsolete equipment) we've given ukraine (over a multi-year period). it's like 20% of the military budget (most of which is salary and benefits, which if cut would also increase child poverty). it's more than the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction act.
and most of that cost did nothing to reduce child poverty, because it was sent to taxpayers like you, simply as a payment from the government to people suffering no economic hardship, based on the dubious criteria of currently having a child under the age of 18.
https://twitter.com/MarcGoldwein/status/1701671372819214634meanwhile we shouldn't act like there are no tradeoffs involved in spending money. we are on track for something like a two trillion deficit this year. at a time when the economy is growing rapidly and the govt is spending like 5% (i'm guessing, didn't try to look it up) in interest on dept. we have to either raise revenues (seems unlikely) or cut spending (even less likely). the one thing we can do fairly easily to try and rationalize the budget is not take on new large spending programs. and we already have an extremely progressive tax code with a very low tax burden for lower income families.
https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1702131547833344285
