Study after study has demonstrated that providing parents with a guaranteed basic income both helps them and pulls children out of poverty. Yet an expanded Child Tax Credit, which removed millions of children from poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic, has not been restored since Congress allowed it to expire at the end of 2021. The current CTC provides $2,000 per eligible child.
SCOTT SANTENS; scott@scottsantens.com, @scottsantens
Santens is an author on universal basic income and the founder and president of the Income to Support All Foundation.
Santens has compiled a thread devoted to the evidence behind Unconditional Basic Income. He told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “I don’t see any value in doing more of these small pilots with, say, 100 people where the target is parents with kids and where the amount is around $300 per month. That’s the Child Tax Credit (CTC). We did that for 40 million families in 2021. That was a massive amount of data. We already know from policies like that around the world that it’s a good policy. When it comes to [programs that mimic the CTC], there is no reason to do pilots. We should just restore the Enhanced CTC.
“Certainly, there are [UBI] pilots to be done in novel ways that are more interesting to look at, like the one in Gainesville, Florida that focused on people who were recently released from prison. [Recently incarcerated people normally] get a $50 debit card and that’s it, and then they have to go find a job, and we know it’s so much harder to find a job with a record. If we can provide people coming out of prison with a basic income floor of a solid amount––at least $500 or $1,000––then those amounts are interesting, and can actually reduce recidivism.”
The Bipartisan House Compromise Bill, which would have included an expanded Child Tax Credit that would have gone to about 16 million children in low-income families, passed the House but languished in the Senate until just recently. The tax benefit failed in the Senate due to Republican opposition. “The compromise,” Santens said, “would have improved upon the existing CTC and [would have resulted] in a 7 percent reduction in child poverty.” The 2021 expanded CTC, by contrast, reduced child poverty by 40 percent.
Just two weeks after the compromise bill failed in the Senate, “J.D. Vance talked on the campaign trail about giving parents a tax credit of $5,000”––150 percent more than the current CTC. “But we don’t know the details that Vance is talking about. As president, Kamala Harris would bring back the 2021 expanded CTC and provide $6,000 for parents with kids in their first year of life––and get that to pregnant moms. This issue is going to come up in the vice presidential debate in particular. [Gov. Tim] Walz will talk about the details of the CTC.”
For more information, please contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Lily Meyersohn; lilymeyersohn@gmail.com
September 4, 2024
Institute for Public Accuracy
accuracy.org • ipa@accuracy.org
@accuracy • ipaccuracy
