It was the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. It is a big chunk of his $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. But not enough people are talking about the radical change to family policy that Biden included in these bills in an attempt to cement his legacy.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio circulated a memo last week, urging his colleagues to take up the fight against Biden’s sweeping changes to the federal government’s family policy, but not enough other senators are joining him.
The policy in question is Biden’s quest for a permanent expansion of the child tax credit. But as Rubio’s memo points out, calling this policy a “tax credit” is highly misleading. As modified by Biden, this benefit is given to all parents, whether they have any tax liability or not. So even if parents pay no federal taxes, they still get a check from the government under this policy.
Biden’s policy is so lax, in fact, that one need only parent to qualify. Just let the IRS know you have a child, and your check will be in the mail. In this sense, Biden’s supposed “child tax credit” is really much more of a universal basic income for parents. That should worry anyone who has followed family policy in the U.S. for the last 50 years.
Not long ago, there was a bipartisan consensus in this country that welfare benefits should be tied to work. In 1988, a Democratic presidential candidate even wrote a column explaining that the “welfare system has broken down” because “it only parcels out welfare checks and does nothing to help the poor find productive jobs.”
That presidential candidate was then-Sen. Joe Biden, who seems to have forgotten not only Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s name, but also the very bipartisan consensus on welfare reform that he was once part of.
True, the federal government is dependent upon future generations of taxpayers, whom parents are currently raising. So there is a good argument that families deserve tax relief. And during the debate over Biden’s American Rescue Plan, Republicans did try to expand the child tax credit to $4,200 per child for households with at least one working parent. But Democrats rejected this actual tax relief for working families. Democrats appear intent on shifting family policy away from the creation of self-sustaining, married families with income from work, and back toward unmarried households, disconnected from the working world and collecting government checks.
By forty years ago, policymakers had already learned the lesson of happens when federal policy subsidizes unmarried, non-working households: it generates more unmarried, non-working households with children who are trapped in a cycle of broken families and joblessness. This is not the right direction for the nation.
Marriage matters. Work matters. These pillars are the key to turning around impoverished communities. Just consider the issue of income inequality, which the Left loves to discuss. Research shows that there is far more upward economic mobility in neighborhoods with more married households.
More senators need to follow Rubio’s lead and make the case for marriage, for work, and against Biden’s universal basic income for parents.
