The Stimulus Package Is Not a Reason to Hate the Poor; A Rebuttal to "Biden Brings Back Welfare,”
The Child Tax Credit, Out of Touch Authors, and The Dying Days of Reaganomics
The Child Tax Credit Enhancement is a marquee piece of President Biden’s Stimulus Bill. The plan will look to lift up 4.5 million of the 11 million American children currently living in poverty, and 1.1 million children out of extreme poverty. The CTC Enhancement has received broad support from the public and won some bipartisan support, ad hoc, in government. Deficit hawks have criticized the price tag of the stimulus bill at large while progressives have fought for more, but broadly speaking, the CTC is popular enough to avoid most direct attacks. That’s not to say there aren’t critics to be found.
YES, bubbling up from the muck and the mire are ghouls fiendish enough to make a case against delivering assistance to families in need during our current economic crisis. They echo the Reagan era bumper sticker slogans that convinced a generation of Christian folk to resent the poor. One can only hope that their current spat is the death throes of a now intellectually and morally bankrupt tradition. A trust which, from my keyboard to god’s ears, ought to finally be laid down to rest next to the Gipper. Specifically, I am responding to the opinion shared by Mickey Kaus in a piece entitled, “Biden Brings Back Welfare,” both as an insight into this frame of thinking, as well as a forecast of puttering last stand for Reaganomics likely to continue over the course of Biden’s administration.
Since Kaus’ piece is meant to enrage not inform, let’s get on the same page about the actual legislation. The CTC enhancement raises the current child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,000 per child, and extends the age cutoff to 18 rather than 17. This benefit is raised additionally for young families. Parents with children under 6 will receive $3,600 per child. The tax credit phases out for single parents making over $75,000 and families making over $150,000. Half of the payment will come through a tax deduction and the other half in monthly checks. The IRS has targeted July to roll out this program which will continue until the end of the year.
Now, many speculate that come end of the year, lawmakers may push to continue this program into the future. Doing so would lead to one of the most meaningful expansions to the country’s social safety net in decades. Kaus seems to assume that it’s continuation is likely, so as an exercise in anticipation of the battles to come I will work on that assumption as well.
Off the bat, Kaus isn’t interested in discussing the CTC on merit. No, he knows his audience. He targets their soft spots. Rather than directly critique the CTC, he instead rails against the long defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children. A key conflation he relies on, and must hope readers will buy.
Evoking the AFDC, he reminds a decaying suburban white male constituency of their hatred for the dreaded “welfare queens.” Kaus writes, “It wound up sending cash to single moms who'd never married, who did little formal work themselves (though many took jobs on the side without telling authorities) and who often wound up staying on welfare a long time.” It smells of MTV, VHS, D.A.R.E, “Super Predators”, and “The Inner Cities!” Oh, the Nostalgia! I can just see the veins bulging on the foreheads of aged yuppies everywhere.
Kaus tells a revelatory tale of poverty in America after AFDC was replaced by TANF in 1996, “poor single moms went to work in historic numbers. Welfare rolls fell by half. By 2006, the number of “underclass” areas had sharply declined…” and “By 2019, child poverty was at record lows among all races.” There’s a lot one could go off on here. His timeline is massive. I would say the economy has changed just a bit between 1996 and 2019. The AFDC in 1996 had a yearly cost of $23 billion and amounted to well under 1% of the US federal budget, but to Kaus this program is the deciding factor in poverty in America if not the general health of the economy. I could go on, but to do so is to fall for his strawman.
The fact of the matter is the CTC IS NOT the AFDC.
Now, it’s not as if Kaus ignores the fundamental differences between the two programs. In fact he lays it out quite clearly. First, the CTC is not targeted at those in poverty, as he states “Yes, this time checks go to middle class parents as well as poor parents — payments won't start to phase out until an individual makes $75,000 a year.” Secondly, the CTC isn’t tied to unemployment. This is a massive hole in Kaus’ argument that he just brushes off. He writes“ Child-check supporters... pretend that the problem with welfare wasn't that it paid you to stay at home but rather that when you did try to earn some income, you lost some of your benefits — a problem Biden's scheme avoids.”
This isn’t just a small concern, this is the crux of the whole argument. Criticism of AFDC hinged on the program providing disincentives to unemployed parents.
Caused by individuals who would earn less by entering the workforce than their benefits provided. The CTC is supplemental income for both workers and the unemployed alike. It is phased out at a tax bracket that, at worst, may force a worker to decide if it's in their best interest to take additional responsibilities in promotion or perhaps a new slightly higher paying job that would qualify them out of CTC payments. This is a decision between two different jobs not one dissuading workers from entering the workforce.
The actual arguments be damned, Kaus knows what the REAL argument was all along, “But surely the biggest disincentive to going to work isn't that the "phase out" of benefits will reduce your income by 20 percent. It's that you have to go to work.” It’s the opportunity to survive without work at all that is the attraction. Reader’s beware! The way Kaus sells this… I don’t know who wouldn’t want to live off the new dole.
“In many cases, though, the Biden benefits will be over $10,000. A mother with two young children would get $7,200 a year — plus she'd qualify for about $6,400 in SNAP food stamps, for a total of $13,600. Plus Medicaid. That's enough to barely survive on, without working, in many low-cost states. If you throw in off-the-books cash, it might be enough even in New York.”
I won’t belabor the point. If a hypothetical mother caring for two children “barely surviving in a low cost-state” is among your chief concerns— it is not that you are mean— you are a sociopath.
He fills the rest of his paragraphs with truisms about “work” and “the value of work” or “a culture of work.” All the hallmarks of WASPY-self-flattering justifications for America’s social hierarchy that are only two degrees separate from the ethnic superiority of the “the protestant work ethic.” This It is text that drips with condescension, patronization, and down right contempt for the poor. It’s hate plain and simple, but useful hate. It's the hate that says, “I am where I am because I deserve it! And you! You must suffer for that is what you deserve, too.”
Kaus has no time to examine the lives of the poor, why there is poverty, what are the material conditions that cause it. He knows all he needs to. He has already imagined a picture of how the poor must be! There is no concept of class, intergenerational wealth, or disparate economic outcomes to be found. We award merit in this country, don’t you know?!? To Kaus, charity comes in the form of advice: “How ‘bout work harder, ya bums.”
When it comes to making sense of this style Reaganite-greed-is-good banalities there’s a bit from George Carlin that has always stuck with me. Carlin says
That's all the media and the politicians are ever talking about, the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another. That's the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. They keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they the rich, can run off with all the fucking money. Fairly simple thing. Happens to work...
You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep them showing up at those jobs."
It’s not an intricate class analysis, but there is truth in its simplicity. Kaus follows the ruling class tact to a T. This is a case study in the methods that masquerade economic anxiety as a common good used to instill virtue into the otherwise virtue-less masses. This method requires not just a recognizable poor, but that the poor are VERY poor. The wretched of the earth is a key feature to neoliberal economics. Scapegoating is that much easier when it asks that we punch down. Kaus is taking part in an age old trick. “Keep your eyes on that poor sonofabitch over there, take no notice of what’s happening behind the curtain.”
Despite how enraging I found this piece, I did find some solace in how off base it reads. What audience is this for? If you allow me a moment of purely speculative opinion— there is not an electorally significant cohort of voters who feel threatened by programs that help the poor. In so much that such a cohort exists, they certainly are not undecided voters and they likely have half a dozen other more pressing issues. Politicians will bring up the specter of socialism before they attack the poor. For better or worse working class individuals are now vital to both parties, and people are well aware it isn’t the poor to blame. Dare I say it: it is unfashionable to hate the poor. This is progress of a kind! I say this only with extreme caution; politics can change quickly. However, if we do our best to root out the terrible opinions of people like Mickey Kaus we may finally put this era into the past.