RECOMMENDED READING
Advocates for an expanded child tax credit (CTC) did not expect to be in this situation.
A year ago, when Congress passed an expanded version of the policy that’s been around with bipartisan backing since 1997, some 35 million parents across the US began to see hundreds of dollars land in their bank accounts every month — money that they could spend however they saw fit.
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“I think people really forget the resistance to the CTC expansion in 2017,” said Wells King, the research director at American Compass, a center-right think tank. “Just go back and see what the Wall Street Journal editorial board was posting at the time, all thesearguments about why we shouldn’t have specific tax breaks for families.” Wells recalled one WSJ op-ed in particular that mocked the Rubio-Lee proposal derisively, suggesting Republicans instead pursue a canine tax credit to woo millennials. “I can’t fathom that kind of piece being written in today’s political environment,” King said.
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King says Republicans’ positions are backed by public opinion research. American Compass found white, college-educated Democrats were the only demographic that expressed majority support for maintaining the expanded credit with no connection to work. Focus group research of working-class parents in southeastern Ohio, Atlanta, and San Antonio yielded similar results.
Recommended Reading
What Family Policy Should Look Like in Post-Roe America
American Compass’s Wells King and Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies and AEI make the case for a conservative embrace of an expanded Child Tax Credit in a post Roe v. Wade world.
Extending the Child Tax Credit to Undocumented Immigrants Is Playing with Fire
Buried within the Democrats’ multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation package is a provision to extend the recently expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) to undocumented immigrants. This would be a grave mistake, and I say that as both a supporter of the CTC expansion and as a proponent of more liberal immigration.
Debunking Myths About the Tax Deal
The reformed Child Tax Credit isn’t “welfare”—it’s conservative family policy.
