Posted by Jetson21 on 12/11/2021 12:37:00 PM (view original):
Posted by dahsdebater on 12/11/2021 11:19:00 AM (view original):
Posted by Jetson21 on 12/11/2021 12:56:00 AM (view original):
Id like to know whose problems and what problems will be worse because of build back better and what problems will be worse without it.
It reminds me of how republicans have always duped poor white idiots how the dems would raise their taxes when it was only the taxes of the wealthy.
The latest dupe of poor white idiots was how they voted to give very rich people gigantic tax breaks so that now it is difficult to give them programs that “they”
actually need like the child tax credit.
We have a seriously dumb country that is so close to becoming a has been democracy.
There is so much more important things going on then inflation.
Also that article was about the whole package not the scaled one we will get.
Why does anyone "need" a child tax credit they never had before?
Want, maybe. Need, obviously not.
Come on. I guess homeless people dont need a home because they dont have one. They dint need it they just want it.
Why with the need i mean wanting to nitpick.
They get the benefit because they need it.
Look, not that long ago I went after you with a purely semantic argument for no good reason. It was not my best moment. I'll own that.
I don't think this is a semantic argument at all. In a very real sense it marks the dividing line between the Northeast/mid-Atlantic mold of socially moderate to liberal Republicans - people like me, or, more notably, like Mitt Romney or Larry Hogan - and mainstream Democrats - people like you. Democrats, and particularly the progressive wing of the party, will tend to view wealth redistribution as an inherent good. I am much more concerned with ensuring that government spending is targeted and needs-based. This particular policy is the polar opposite of that; or, more precisely, it's targeted in quite a different way. In fact, it is quite targeted, and it's as cynical and anti-democratic a policy as anything Republicans pursued under the Trump administration.
Here's the thing. The child tax credit is being given indiscriminately to almost everyone with dependent children, regardless of any change in income/employment status or cost structure. The vast majority of these families, in fact, did not have any major structural changes in their income or expenses. If they could make ends meet in 2018, and 2019, and 2020 without an extra $2500 from the Federal government, they could probably have made ends meet in 2021, too. For people for whom this was not true, COVID relief/stimulus legislation had already beefed up Federal unemployment. programs to deal with the increase in income insecurity that came along with the pandemic. That was a totally different program. The child tax credit is inherently not needs-based. The assertion at the end of your post is the line that the party and its supporters have been feeding you, but it is transparently false. You don't get the money because you need it. They could restrict the money to people who need it. They didn't. Something different is going on here, so what is it?
You're a pretty well-read guy. You've got to be familiar with the currently popular notion of lifestyle creep, a real phenomenon based on the well-researched concepts of loss aversion and the endowment effect. When you don't have something, it doesn't seem necessary. Once you do have it, it becomes much more valuable to you, and after a surprisingly short interval of time you aren't willing to let it go. I know that I am in no wise prepared to go back to the wine I drank when I first moved to California. It's clear here why this is important. In 2020, most families would have loved to get an extra check for $200 every month, but they were getting by. They didn't
need it. By late 2022, after over a year and a half of getting used to that money and the added luxuries it can buy, those families
will feel that they need the money. The mere fact of having it for an extended period of time converts it from a luxury to a necessity. Now you've created millions of families that are dependent on their child tax credit for financial stability, even though they didn't need that money a year ago.
Now here's a fact that you can easily verify by looking at the websites of any of the major polling companies. And by the way, I don't think Joe Biden was thinking about this when he decided to support this legislation. I think the same is true of many of the Congressional leaders who championed it. They saw the legislation and, much like you, saw it as a victory for the poor and the middle class and got behind it. But it's a fact that, as I said, is easy to find, and which I guarantee you that the Democratic strategists who assisted in drafting the legislation were very well aware of. People in the age group who are most likely to have dependent children living in their homes - say, roughly 25-50 years old - have over a 40% chance of being registered as independents and something like an 18-20% chance of identifying as true centrists without a baseline political leaning. That makes them about 50% more likely to be un-leaned centrists than people under 25 and 100% more likely than their own parents' generation. Now think about this. What other tax cut can you remember that was issued in the form of a monthly check or deposit into the taxpayers' bank account? None? Yeah, me neither. Even if they thought that families for some reason needed the money RIGHT NOW in the midst of a healthy economic bounceback, they could have pushed a public awareness campaign encouraging such families to work with their payroll departments to correct their withholding, allowing them to simply see the extra money show up in their regular paychecks. But that doesn't achieve the end result of having a huge number of swing voters start getting used to getting a check in the mail every month from the Federal government, while at the same-time not-so-quietly telling them that if Republicans take over Congress in the mid-term elections these payments will not be extended.
Independent think tanks have suggested that the overwhelming majority of the benefit of the 2021 child tax credit, in terms of getting children above the poverty line and/or out of food insecurity, comes from the provision that allows for full availability for all families regardless of income. See, for example, studies from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities - a progressive think tank, far from a conservative source. This provision generally only impacts families with household income under $50-$60,000. Yet the current law doesn't even start reducing benefits until families go over $150,000 in household income. It's not targeted at people who need benefits. Everything about this law - it's lax benefit requirements, the monthly payout format, the short-term time horizon leaving an implied threat that a Republican majority could make it disappear at any time - make it very clear who it's targeting. It's actually incredibly transparent. Congressional Democrats are overtly and quite literally trying to buy independent voters with monthly payments. It's conceptually not all that different from Trump wanting his name on all the stimulus checks. As someone who has repeatedly complained about the Republican party being anti-democratic, you might want to take a more introspective look at the child tax credit before you blindly defend it again. It's about as anti-democratic as you can get. It's an obvious attempt to buy votes for, frankly, not all that high a price.