The Daily - A Safety Net for American Children

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Even as recently as a year ago, even the most cleareyed analysts thought it was a long shot. But this week, a child tax credit is expected to be passed into law, as part of the economic stimulus bill.The child tax credit is an income guarantee for American families with children. It will provide a monthly check of up to $300 per child — no matter how many children.We look at why this provision is so revolutionary and what has changed in the policy landscape to allow its passage.  Guest: Jason DeParle, a senior writer for The New York Times and frequent contributor to The Times Magazine. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package moving through Congress advances an idea that Democrats have been nurturing for decades: establishing a guaranteed income for families with children.What’s in the stimulus bill? Here is a guide to where the money will be going. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bilbaro. This is The Daily. Today, deep inside the economic stimulus bill that is expected to become law this week is a revolutionary provision that would lay the groundwork for a European-style social safety net for children inside the U.S. My colleague, Jason DeParle, on how it works and the plan to make it a permanent part of American life. It's Tuesday, March 9th. Jason, as this stimulus package hurdles towards passage, it was just passed in the Senate, it's about to be passed again in the House, then it will become law.

Our colleagues at The Times have begun to describe it as the most sweeping anti-poverty effort in generations. And that's what we want to talk to you about. You write about poverty for The Times. So what makes this stimulus package such a historic change in the way that the U.S. government seeks to help the poor? Oh, gosh, the bill does lots of stuff. It provides direct payments to most American families. It extends unemployment insurance., expands food assistance.

But the thing that I think is really revolutionary about it is something I think most listeners probably haven't heard of. And that's called the child tax credit, which is really a guaranteed income for families with children. Tell me about this guaranteed income for children. I mean just that. The government is guaranteeing income for all families with children by sending them checks on a huge scale. The parents of 93 percent of American kids, 69 million people, would be getting monthly checks of up to $300 a month. $300 per child, no matter how many children? $300 per child, no matter how many children?

No matter how many children. And what exactly can this money be used for? That's another really unusual thing about it. It can be used for whatever the parent wants. They can use it to subsidize their rent. They can use it to put food on the table. They can use it to pay for the music teacher. They can use it to take the kids out for pizza. It's their money.

They can do with it as they see fit. Okay, so walk me through some quick math here. A parent with three children, how much money are we talking about? If you have three children under the age of six, you're talking about an annual benefit of nearly $11,000. Wow, real money. Yeah. And for low-income people, that would be on top of anything else they might qualify for, like food stamps or other forms of assistance.

Okay. And is there an income threshold? It starts to diminish once a family with two parents hits an annual income threshold of $150,000. So all but 6% or so of American families would get a benefit. Got it. So basically, almost all American parents with children will be touched by this new benefit. Yeah. And beyond the money, it's really a big deal philosophically because it really shifts the way government thinks about children in the United States. And this essentially provides a guaranteed income for every family with children. It's the government saying that, you know, there's just a level beneath which no child should be able to fall in the United States.

It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about what children need and what the government's responsibility is in providing it. way of thinking about what children need and what the government's responsibility is in providing it. I know I just asked you about how this would work for a theoretical family, but I wonder if you've applied it to an actual family. Yeah, let me tell you about a woman I talked to for the story named Nikki Haupt, a single mother in suburban Atlanta who seemed to become an emblem of a working-class driver before the pandemic. She had a job as a letter carrier at the post office. She had just bought a house in the suburbs in a school district that she thought would be good for her kids.

She'd started a small business on the side. And then the pandemic hits and her kids go to virtual learning. She has two boys, teenagers, and they're not doing well. In fact, doing really poorly. The school's calling and complaining. She tried to hang on to her job for six months, waiting for the schools to open. And finally, she felt like she had to choose between her job and her boys. And she quit to stay home with them. She says if she had monthly checks from the government through the child tax benefit, she would have been able to hire a babysitter to come in a couple hours a day in the afternoon to make sure the kids were doing the homework, to put a meal on the table for them. And it would have allowed her, she argues, to keep her

job rather than lose it in the time of crisis. When she lost the job, everything unraveled. She fell behind on the rent, she got an eviction notice, family ran short on food, things really fell apart. Jason, how much money would she have gotten from this benefit? She would have gotten $500 a month. Which is $6,000 for the year and a meaningful difference for her financially. And one that will be available, as you just told us, to nearly every parent in the country when this legislation becomes law in a few days. And that makes me think that you were right when you said that this provision of the stimulus bill has not gotten perhaps as much attention as it should have given the difference it's going to make in people's financial lives.

And I'm curious what your reaction was when you discovered that this universal child benefit was in this bill. I thought, are you serious, really? In the United States of America? I mean, this idea just seemed so unlikely for so long. It was astonishing. And why was it astonishing for you? As recently as a year ago, I think most clear-eyed poverty analysts would have said this wasn't even a long shot. Because the United States had always been very resistant to income guarantees and dismissed these kinds of ideas as European socialism. This seems like a really radical idea in the American context where I think cash aid has been viewed with lots of suspicion as having great potential for misuse and abuse.

It's actually quite common in other wealthy countries to provide a subsidy to families with children. These 17 wealthy countries have some similar version of this. Interesting. And where else is this in place? The UK, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany. It's prevalent throughout Western Europe. So this is going to be bringing the United States much more in line with the way that the European system treats children and the government's relationship to families with children. Yes. For better or worse, yes.

Jason, this child benefit affects almost every American, right? 93% of children? Correct. When we started this conversation, I asked you about poverty. So what will this do exactly for poverty if it is an almost universal benefit? It would cut the child poverty rate nearly in half and by more than half for African-American children.

It's a universal benefit, but it disproportionately helps families at the bottom. Well, help me understand that. Why exactly is that? Think about it like Social Security. Social Security, almost everybody gets Social Security. It's a universal program. But Social Security vastly cut the poverty rate

among elderly Americans. So when you put in an income floor, it helps everyone, but it helps the people closest to the floor the most. So this would be the parallel for children. Got it. So we should think about this as a universal income program for children, and we should think about this as an anti-poverty program. And I guess taken together, we should think of this as a pretty revolutionary way for the U.S. government to regard its relationship to children.

Perfectly stated, Michael. And that's really at odds with the way most of American social policy is done, which is a much more targeted benefit. We don't have universal health care. We have Medicare, a program for the elderly. We have Medicaid, a program for the poor. This takes the kind of opposite approach. This says we're basically going to help virtually all families with children except for the most affluent. So it is both a universal benefit and an anti-poverty program at once, which makes the politics of it, of course, very different.

We'll be right back. So Jason, you just started to hint at the politics behind this. And I am curious how a program that is so revolutionary came to be in this stimulus bill. What is the backstory behind this child benefit? Well, there have been debates about whether to provide an income floor for children for many decades. In fact, in the 1930s, in the New Deal, we created a program of income guarantees for poor children. It's called Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But the country took a very different approach in the 1990s.

We went the opposite direction. Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare what it was meant to be, a second chance, not a way of life. President Bill Clinton abolished that program, abolished Aid to families with dependent children, and began a system where we only aided families who were working. I believe we have a duty to seize the opportunity it gives us to end welfare as we know it. And what was the logic behind that, only providing that kind of assistance to families whose parents work? Some people are poor because of the value choices

that they make in their behavior. For them, they need some form of transformation to prepare them to take advantage of opportunity. There was a concern that providing people money without demanding anything in return produced negative consequences, that it was a disincentive to work, that it was a disincentive to marry, that it was subsidizing self-destructive behaviors.

There are powerful reasons to replace the welfare state with an opportunity society to re-engage all the moral forces in America. Rather than money being seen as the solution to the problem, government aid became defined as the problem. So it wasn't that we would provide less aid to the poor. In fact, aid to the poor grew, but it only went to families with earnings. It left fewer protections for families who, for whatever reason, didn't find or keep work and eroded the safety net for the children in those families. So what changed to get us to this current point with the universal benefit,

regardless of whether a parent works? I think one thing that changed was the recognition of how important early childhood was, that even a short stay in poverty could bring lifelong negative consequences, lower educational attainment, worse health, lower earnings, higher involvement in the criminal justice system. I think as a society, we gained an

increased appreciation of the importance of the formative years. I think a second thing to change was just the growing economic inequality, that poverty began to seem less like a phase and more like a fate, that I think broad sections of the American public began to lose some of the faith they'd had in upward mobility. The idea that anybody could work their way out of poverty, I think, became a bit of a harder sell. And so it sounds like this legislation that's in the stimulus bill, this universal child benefit, it kind of legislatively codifies that new thinking about the trauma of poverty and who should be protected against it. And it shouldn't just be that a parent working is the prerequisite for protecting a child

against poverty, that just being a child in the U.S., whether or not your parent works, is the prerequisite for being protected against poverty. Michael, I think in the 1990s, I think the broad worldview was that American society was generally prosperous and there was generally opportunity for most people, yet there was this minority who were unable to participate in the broader prosperity of society that were stuck somehow. And I think the framework now is really quite different. I think there's a shaken faith in how broad prosperity is and how much opportunity there is in American society. And this says that as people at the top flourish, we can't leave behind this large segment of families who find themselves going up and down the economic ladder and, you know, battered by income volatility.

We need more security for a broader group of the population. Jason, what you're describing is a very systemic rethinking of government assistance for families. And I'm curious why such a dramatic change is being passed within an emergency economic stimulus package rather than outside of an economic emergency. What is the thinking there? A significant part of the left was never bought in on the idea of a safety net that was so tightly targeted to workers and left out other people. There have been proposals for a broad child allowance going back at least 10 Congresses. Wow. So 20 years.

Exactly. The economic crisis caused by the pandemic has really changed the policy environment. With so many more people needing aid, the politics of providing cash assistance has lost some of its stigma. I think another factor that's changed is the racial environment with the unrest of the past year. The Democratic Party in particular is looking for ways to address structural racism and historic injustice. And this is a policy that, while universal, has greatest effect on reducing poverty among Blacks and Latinos. And that enhances its appeal. In other words, this is something that progressives and Democrats have wanted for a really long time. In other words, this is something that progressives and Democrats have wanted for a really long time. And the pandemic and the need for government assistance in the pandemic has offered them a very unique opportunity to get it passed.

Yeah, I think, you know, political scientists would call it a classic window of opportunity where something's been building for 20 years and then a crisis erupts in society and gives it the opportunity to sail through. Mm-hmm. As we know, the stimulus bill is not being supported by any Senate Republicans and very few House Republicans, which would suggest that Republicans don't support this specific provision of a universal child benefit. Is that right? Certainly it's being pushed forward by the Democrats. I think what's been telling so far is how muted the conservative opposition has been.

Not that there's been a lot of conservative support, but in the past, any proposal to give unconditional cash aid to the poor would have drawn sharp conservative attack as so-called welfare. What's been surprising about this is how little of that there's been. In fact, at least one Republican senator, Mitt Romney, is proposing a child benefit that would be even larger than that that the Democrats have passed. Well, what do you make of that? The lack of conservative opposition to this, and in the case of someone like Romney, enthusiasm. Part of me thinks it's early and they'll get to it,

and that the backlash is coming. And part of me thinks it's early and they'll get to it and that the backlash is coming. And part of me wonders if maybe things have changed. I think there's a populist wing of the Republican Party that is looking to do more for blue-collar workers. I think there's also elements

of a child allowance that would appeal to social conservatives. This is a program that would benefit stay-at-home mothers who might be left out of work-oriented programs like child care. If you're a mother and you're home with two or three kids, homeschooling, you would receive a significant benefit from this. There's also a potential fertility effect. We're in a time of declining fertility rates,

and we've dipped below replacement, and this subsidizes child rearing. So conservatives who fear we're not having enough children might look favorably on this as a subsidy for having more. But those are, of course, very long-term concepts. Fertility, child rearing over a very long period of time, and the accrual of this money for families. And given that this is an emergency stimulus package, how long is this benefit expected to last? In the law that President Biden is expected to sign this week establishes the benefit just for a single year. But Democrats have made clear they see this as the future of social policy. I mean, this is a seed that plants what they hope will be a revolution in social policy.

They want to make it permanent. And what do they think that the odds of that are, being able to put this in temporary legislation, get the country acclimated to it, and then turn it into a permanent fixture of American government? I think they're betting in part that it's harder to take something away from people than it is to give it to them in the first place. And once you get over that hump and establish a benefit, you develop a constituency for it. I'm certain that if Republicans want to let this run out in a year, the Democrats will frame it as a huge tax increase on poor and working class people. poor and working class people. I think, again, they're looking to the social security system, which Republicans vowed to get rid of once FDR left office and never did.

The Democrats hope this will follow along the same lines and become just a fixture of the social safety net and seem as unremarkable to future generations as social security does to ours. seem as unremarkable to future generations as Social Security does to ours. Thank you, Jason. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance on how fully vaccinated Americans can interact, saying they may gather indoors in small groups with other vaccinated people without precautions such as masks. The guidance also said that vaccinated people may interact with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks and physical distancing, as long as the unvaccinated are in low-risk groups. In practical terms, the Times reports, that means vaccinated grandparents may visit healthy unvaccinated adult children and healthy unvaccinated grandchildren of the same household. The CDC emphasized that vaccinated people should continue to wear masks and socially distance in public spaces. socially distanced in public spaces. And documents obtained by The Times show that the number of unaccompanied migrant children detained at the U.S.-Mexico border has tripled over the past two

weeks to more than 3,250. As a result, the administration is struggling to find room for the children in shelters, creating an early test of President Biden's vow to treat unaccompanied minors more humanely than President Trump. Today's episode was produced by Aastha Chaturvedi and Daniel Guimet. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and engineered by Dan Powell. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.