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From Whitehouse.gov:
The Child Tax Credit in the American Rescue Plan provides the largest Child Tax Credit ever and historic relief to the most working families ever – and most families will automatically receive monthly payments without having to take any action.For those with children, the American Rescue Plan increased the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child for children over the age of six and from $2,000 to $3,600 for children under the age of six, and raised the age limit from 16 to 17. All working families will get the full credit if they make up to $150,000 for a couple or $112,500 for a family with a single parent (also called Head of Household).
So . . . it's not actually a credit on taxes paid. It's just a government welfare program whose eligibility extends through the upper middle class.
Which reminds me: whatever happened to bastardy (a.k.a. "illegitimacy", a.k.a. "non-marital births")? This was an issue that was a very big deal, especially on the "neoconservative" Right, back in the 1980s and 1990s. The realization that the perverse incentives created by AFDC were driving an increase in un-wed motherhood animated first the "War on Poverty" of the 1960s and then Welfare Reform of the 1990s. But I haven't heard much commentary about it in a long time.
A quick glance at the stats show that illegitimacy rates stabilized for blacks at 70+% around 2004, and for whites at 30% around 2009. But weirdly, those same stats pretty much dry up around 2014. Does the government even track it anymore?
Back in the 1990s (IIRC), elements of the Left strove to drive a wedge between opposition to abortion and opposition to illegitimacy. Their argument went thus: if you want to reduce abortion, then stop stigmatizing illegitimacy, such stigmatization being a motivation for young women to abort embarrassing babies. I remember this line of reasoning having some effect at the time, but I missed the formal surrender by the Right on the issue.
The pace at which yesterday's perversity has become today's "New Normal" has accelerated over the last few years, but the disappearance of bastardy from our political dialog seems to antedate the Current Year. Any thoughts?
1 comment:
This is how conservatives lose. We pass a big reform bill that "solves" the problem, and then we go back to our lives. The progressive left claims that our big reform is racist, sexist, etc and will lead to the destruction of whoever, and then they go back to making little tiny carveouts until we are back where we started, with the only difference being that we now have the collective memory of already having "won" that battle. Then they keep going. They don't care if it takes them ten, twenty, fifty years to win because the goal is to win. It is only when they try to do things "bigly" that there ends up being pushback (evidence: the overreach by the current crop of Progs who think they have won to the point where they can do anything and do it now).
The problem, of course, is that the pushback will happen, we will think we won (I use "we" to mean the generally conservative side), and we will go back to our lives. This is why I am generally pessimistic about the long term.
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