Why Republicans Should Pay People to Have Babies
Conservatives in the Republican Party must think outside the box if they want to regain power.
Here’s why…
Biden’s Child Allowance is Coming
Later this year, a new Democratic Party scheme will be unleashed across America.
This is one of those “under the radar” political schemes that nobody is talking about…yet.
Only a few conservative bloggers’ like Jon Schweppe have been warning the Right about what’s coming.
Schweppe explains the political tsunami about to hit America’s shores called the Biden Child Allowance:
Biden’s child allowance is a political game changer. Starting later this year, instead of a child tax credit, families will begin receiving $300/month per kid under the age of six, and $250/month per kid between ages six and seventeen. This monthly benefit will prove to be tremendously popular, and although it expires in 2022, it’s a safe bet that it will be extended, re-extended, re-re-extended, and then finally made permanent within our lifetimes. Monthly payments to families are here to stay. This is the new normal.
Republicans have a choice: they can live within political reality and try to compete with the Democrats by offering something similar that also reforms welfare and better incentivizes work and family formation, or they can pine for the olden days of small government fiscal conservatism, which are, for better or worse, no more.
As I see it, Republicans have three viable policy options to counter Biden’s child allowance: the Lee-Rubio child tax credit expansion, the Romney child allowance, and the Hawley Parent Tax Credit.
Jon Schweppe
This whole concept is going to be hard for “small government” conservatives to swallow. That’s understandable.
However, Schweppe is urging Republicans to look at the political and economic realities of 2021.
Many people are still out of work. Inflation has creeped up 2% in the last month.
People are hurting. And millions of Americans are going to end up falling in love with the child allowance.
If you have two children ages 9 and 11, would you turn down an extra $500 a month in cash, no strings attached?
Biden’s child allowance is already being marketed as a “pro family” policy. The appeal for this child allowance will cross over into both Democrats and Republicans.
The Republican Party can respond in one of three ways:
- Do nothing, which will cost them dearly.
- Try to convince Americans that the government should not be paying parents a child allowance. Yes, there are many credible reasons that could be used to try to convince folks that this is a bad idea. But, will that be a winning strategy?
- The GOP creates a better child allowance.
In his compelling article, Schweppe goes through three viable policy options. The first two – Lee-Rubio child tax credit expansion and the Romney child allowance – are the two weaker bills, according to Schweppe. He thinks both bills would still be big wins for the GOP.
But if conservatives want to “swing for the fences,” then this third option is the one to pass:
The Hawley Parent Tax Credit
On Monday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) introduced a plan to create a Parent Tax Credit (PTC). The PTC is beautiful in its simplicity: if you’re a single parent with a child under the age of 13, you get a $6,000 fully refundable tax credit. If you’re married parents, you get $12,000. This would be paid directly to families by the IRS in monthly installments of $500 or $1,000. The PTC would exist separately from the CTC, meaning it wouldn’t cancel the existing benefit. The PTC eligibility requirement is quite modest — a household must report earnings of at least $7,540 the previous tax year, the equivalent of 20 hours per week of work at the federal minimum wage.
I am not exaggerating when I say this might be the most pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-life, pro-adoption, pro-work, pro-everything-that-conservatives-love economic proposal offered by a Republican Senator in recent memory. If conservatives are serious about fixing our declining marriage and birth rates, or even in lessening the overall tax burden on American families, they’ll seriously consider supporting Hawley’s PTC.
Let’s start with the obvious: Hawley explicitly wrote a marriage bonus into his proposal, and it is significant enough to dramatically affect behavior. Unmarried cohabitants with young children will have to ask themselves: is avoiding the altar worth missing out on an extra $6,000 a year? Of course not. And will married parents with young children be as quick to divorce, or will there be an added incentive for them to work out their problems at counseling? Money talks.
What about creating a culture of life? Thousands of women seek abortion every year out of concern over their ability to financially support a child. If they learned they had an economic lifeline, might they reconsider? And there’s no question the PTC will incentivize adoption, which is prohibitively expensive for many families. According to one figure, the average cost of adoption is between $50,000-$60,000 in the United States.
While Hawley’s bill includes no advantage for having multiple children, it is implicitly natalist. Not only does it create a strong incentive for parents to have their first child, but it will encourage parents to lengthen the total time period of having children under the age of 13 in their household. Parents with only a ten-year-old-going-on-eleven might decide to try to bring home a brother or a sister, recognizing that a newborn could be worth an extra $132,000 in tax benefits!
Jon Schweppe
Working families are still THE most important voting block for the GOP. Do working families want to hear diatribes against “welfare” right now? Will talking about the Fed, money printing, and the value of the dollar be a winning message for 2022 and 2024 elections as the nation emerges from the pandemic?
Something for Republicans and Deplorables to think about.
I wonder what Trump thinks about the child allowance?
