As a part of its attempt to appease Ivanka Trump, a faction of the GOP began to embrace Reformacon policies such as paid family leave and expanding child tax credits over the past four years. Although the senators pushing bills like paid family leave claimed their proposals were budget neutral, most were obviously unable to pay for themselves, relying on pure mathematical fiction.
But Mitt Romney has released a cash-for-kids bill that is not only actually budget neutral but could also potentially reduce the deficit in the long run.
The Family Security Act proposed by the Utah senator is simple enough. Families would receive $350 per month for each young child and $250 for each school-aged child in a home. To finance it, the bill would eliminate the SALT deduction, eliminate head-of-household status, eliminate the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, eliminate the child and dependent care credit, and change eligibility categories for SNAP.
Unlike “conservative” paid family leave proposals to take from Social Security now but promise to take less from it later (yeah, right), the Family Security Act would pay for itself right now in a few crucial ways. The obvious way is eliminating the $21.2 billion we spend on TANF and the CDC credit we spend each year and accruing $41.7 in extra revenue through eliminating the SALT deduction and head of household status. Tack on the $3.1 billion saved by making SNAP eligibility standards more stringent, and that brings the total spending offsets to $66 billion, making up the gap between our current spending and Romney’s proposed spending.
But in less explicit ways, Romney’s bill could actually reduce our deficit trajectory in the long run.
For starters, consolidating the labyrinth of our complicated welfare programs into a single office that sends checks every month would obviously save overhead. Then, the intended effects of bill — incentivizing more two-parent households by eliminating marriage penalties, removing disincentives to work, and making having more children less financially onerous — would all promote the sort of economic and population growth required to reduce the burden of our Social Security and healthcare spending in particular and the deficit overall.
Given the SALT deduction’s heavy favoritism toward high-tax blue states and the GOP’s optical issue of authorizing a new welfare program (even though it would slash old ones), Romney faces an uphill battle in trying to get the mere simple Senate majority that he needs to pass the act through reconciliation. But it’s not quite dead on arrival.
President Biden’s chief of staff tweeted favorably about Romney’s plan. Between Andrew Yang mainstreaming the concept of a universal basic income and Congress’s coronavirus stimulus checks, the idea of simplifying our welfare system to a single, pro-child and pro-family direct payment system seems much more politically appealing than it would have seemed even two years ago. And when Romney makes the argument that this isn’t just another right-wing plan to sneak further deficit spending into our federal budget, he will be correct.
