When House Republicans released a report on the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, they essentially argued that these perverse incentives are the main reason we haven’t made more progress in reducing poverty, that anti-poverty programs “penalize families for getting ahead.”
There are good reasons to be skeptical about such arguments in general: Relatively few people actually face the extreme disincentives to work that conservatives like to emphasize. In any case, however, these arguments don’t apply at all to child tax credits, which wouldn’t be withdrawn as families’ incomes rose, even if they made it well into the middle class and beyond. To be a bit sarcastic, should we be worried about reducing children’s incentive to choose more affluent parents?
Furthermore, there’s extensive evidence that the real source of the “poverty trap” isn’t lack of incentives, it’s lack of the resources needed for adequate nutrition, health care, housing and more. As a result, helping poor children doesn’t just improve their lives in the short run, it helps them escape poverty.
As one recent survey of research put it, there are “positive long-run benefits of having access to safety net programs in childhood, leading to improvements to both health and economic productivity in adulthood.”
So there’s a compelling case for expanded child benefits — compelling enough that Mitt Romney has proposed a similar plan, although he wants to pay for it by cutting other safety net programs.
But in this as in other things, Romney seems to have little support within his party.
It may come as no surprise that the ever-shrinking Marco Rubio, who has in the past called for more aid to children, immediately lashed out at the Romney proposal, calling it “welfare assistance.”
More surprising, perhaps, is the opposition of many (though not all) right-wing policy intellectuals. For example, the American Enterprise Institute’s director of poverty studies warned that giving families additional income would “take us back to the bad old days,” by allowing some adults to work less. Aside from the fact that this effect would probably be minuscule, why is letting parents spend more time with their children a self-evidently bad thing?
What seems clear is that the real reason many on the right oppose helping children is that they fear that such help might make low-income families less desperate. And the very reason they hate this proposal is the reason the rest of us should love it.
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