This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
More white people are eligible for the Child tax Credit than those from any other ethnic group.
$63 a year per child makes it hard for Reagan’s welfare queens to keep driving a Cadillac and the strapping young bucks to buy a T-Bone steak. But I guess that’s the point of GOP hatred of all things not rich, old, conservative and white.
Lots of crap from lifelong career politicians like Grassley, who exclaimed that any assistance would be spent on booze and movies. Before politics, Grassley came from farming, an industry full of government subsidies and other assistance.
GOP is the party that stacks the deck to make parenthood happen.
Grassley just doesn’t want Amazon to pay even $1 in income tax to help those children have a chance at a decent life.
I am unsure why people continue having children. Just stop. Get a hobby. Do something else with your life other than having and raising children. Once society starts to collapse for lack of replacement generations in the queue maybe sensible child care policies will be enacted.
QUIT HAVING KIDS!!!
Sheesh.
If a women can’t keep that aspirin firmly gripped with her knees, why should the GQP have to pay for everything?
In Utah, for example, so few families seeking TANF are approved or eligible for the aid that many parents I’ve spoken to in my reporting say they feel they have to seek help from the LDS Church instead. There, they are sometimes pressured to get baptized, work for the church or read aloud from the Book of Mormon in order to receive assistance.
Hardly a new idea.
A tax credit happens quietly and privately.
TANF allows some people to feel superior when they see “those people” using the TANF cards or coupons in the grocery checkout. Much more satisfying and useful politically.
While your comment is unquestionably true, I bet the perception of most people and especially Republicans is much different. Or to put another way, stupid is as stupid does.
Since Lyndon Johnson extended New Deal and other programs to all Americans, the view of the poor changed from “there but for the grace of God goes me” to “why am I paying for those people”. Furthermore, this is especially true among poor Whites.
Or to put another way, as laws changed that created the original link between Class and Race, the link while still present is not as telling as it was in 1970 when less then 15% of Blacks were middle class or better. Today, over 70% of Blacks are in or above the middle class but in the minds of most White people, poor people are mostly of color and less deserving.
So like Obamacare whereby the big winners is White people with a high school diploma or less, those who stand the most to gain are its biggest opponents believing that benefits are going to people less deserving.
“Before politics, Grassley came from farming and assisted Charles Ingalls, father of Laura Ingalls Wilder, in setting their first crops in Iowa in the Spring of 1876.”
But you could improve TANF, WIC and other programs to remove the stigma, without switching everything to fungible cash, where there’s no say in whether our tax dollars are actually going to the intended target or somewhere else.
Even California’s $409 per year is not exactly going to keep you high on the hog. That’s less than $8 a week per child.
If you read the tax cases you will discover the ChildlTax Credit is considered to be a form of welfare. The beauty of the Child Tax Credit is it is provided to parents who do work. It subsidizes companies like Walmart and McDonalds.
From your mouth to God’s ears, your prayer has been answered.
Recently released official U.S. birth data for 2020 showed that births have been falling almost continuously for more than a decade. For every 1,000 women of childbearing age (15 to 44), 55.8 of them gave birth in 2020, compared to 69.5 in 2007, a 20 percent decline. The “total fertility rate,” which is a measure constructed from these data to estimate the average total number of children a woman will ever have, fell from 2.12 in 2007 to 1.64 in 2020. It is now well below 2.1, the value considered to be “replacement fertility,” which is the rate needed for the population to replace itself without immigration. . . .
(Brookings concludes)
U.S. fertility rates are likely to be considerably below replacement levels for the foreseeable future. This is driven by more than a decade of falling birth rates and declining births at all ages for multiple cohorts of women, not simply the aftermath of the pandemic-induced reduction in births. Furthermore, the simulated fertility rates we report in this essay are similar to those observed in virtually all other high-income countries. This evidence leads us to expect that U.S. birth rates and total completed fertility rates are not likely to rebound any time soon. Further research is needed to better understand the reasons for the long-term decline and what, if any, policy responses are warranted.
Except for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders every ethnic group is signficiantly behow the 2.1 replacement rate. Total fertility rate by ethnicity U.S. 2021 | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista
Can we spend some time educating ourselves about the real issue facing America and stop talking about yesterday’s myths. AMERICA IS NOT PRODUCING ENOUGH CHILDREN AND IT ISN’T GOING TO CHANGE ANY TIME SOON.
Worse, the trend toward’s lower birthrates is world wide. We are going to have a devil of a time solving the problem with immigration.
