[ad_1]
I have been covering tax policy in the United States for over a decade now, and I can confidently say that the provisions of the tax code don’t often go viral.
Enter the Child Tax Credit, which was temporarily significantly expanded in President Joe Biden’s US bailout, with monthly payments hitting households starting July 15. Sudden deposits – up to $ 250 per child aged 6 to 17 and $ 300 per child under 6 – have been such a delight to many parents that the hashtags #childtaxcredit and # childtaxcredit2021 have exploded on TikTok, with tens of millions of views under each at the time of writing.
Paul Williams, economist and writer, was compile some of the best posts (many incorporating the popular dance “So on Dance” by Usim E. Mang) in a Twitter thread.
I have a soft spot for the mother-son version of @yellowha:
And the @ wifeandmomlife’s account, on the soul classic “Bound” from the Ponderosa Twins Plus One:
This is a continuation of a trend we also saw with the April 2020, December 2020, and March 2021 stimulus checks – when the government sends money like this, out of the normal process. tax return and to a larger population than those affected by programs such as SNAP / Food Stamps or Section 8 Housing Vouchers, this policy is entering the public consciousness. The checks are stored. People post dance videos about them.
As someone who has supported these stimulus payments and is a strong supporter of making the new child tax credit payments permanent and easy to access, this is extremely encouraging. This implies that check-based programs can avoid some of the worst pathologies of the US government and unlock one of the most powerful and positive forces in politics: political feedback.
Checks make us go overwhelmed
Usually when the US government decides to help people, it does so in a veiled, even impenetrable way.
Take accommodation. There is no government agency whose website you can go to, fill out a form, and receive, say, a check for $ 10,000 to help you put down a down payment for a house.
Instead, there are obscure measures and opaque institutions that aim to help. There is the Federal Housing Administration, which insures certain mortgages in the hope of making it easier and cheaper for buyers to get a loan. This agency runs two quasi-government companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which bundle mortgages and sell them to investors, hoping to indirectly make your mortgage cheaper. It also offers a tax deduction for your mortgage interest once you buy a home, but only if you itemize your deductions.
This system of indirect government interventions that are obscure or invisible to the average citizen is part of what Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls “the submerged state.”
The obscurity of the submerged state, argues Mettler, has significant costs for our democracy. it erodes the public’s belief in government effectiveness by hiding from view the government benefits that voters receive. Another example: Middle-class Americans who got subsidized student loans to pay for their education and deduct mortgage interest from their taxes also get government benefits, but those benefits aren’t perceived the same way as, say, social Security.
In addition to hiding the government’s role in improving lives, the overwhelmed state has another major cost. Georgetown political scientists Don Moynihan and Pamela Herd have convincingly argued that overwhelmed state-type programs impose major ‘administrative burdens’ on low-income people, demands to work in programs such as on-load food stamps. navigate the complex parameters of the earned income tax credit.
Johns Hopkins’ Steven Teles called the problem a “kludgeocracy” – a government held together by an “inelegant patch.”[es] set up to solve an unexpected problem ”rather than designed to work clean from the start. Teles argues that this piecemeal approach also results in exorbitant compliance costs, makes government administration more difficult, and makes it easier for companies to extract rents from government.
This problem has, for years, been a major concern for people who study the US government.
What is striking about the expansion of the child tax credit and the stimulus that preceded it is how it completely rejects the overwhelmed state model. Payments are neither hidden nor obscure to their recipients: they take the form of a big check in the mail, or a big, sudden deposit into your bank account. The IRS also sent letters to recipients explaining that they were going to get the money.
Plus, the payments all happen at the same time, making it a natural thing to post on social media, where your friends will experience the same thing and find it relevant.
This does not mean, of course, that the deployment of the child tax credit was perfect. The registration system for people who do not file taxes was far too difficult to use. But the process has been much more accessible than most government programs. If something is a meme on TikTok, it’s hardly part of the overwhelmed state.
How politicians can create new constituencies
Precisely because the expansion of the child tax credit is not very submerged, it could unlock a political dynamic that would allow it to survive beyond 2021. It touches on a powerful and intuitive idea in political science: policy feedback.
Berkeley political scientist Paul Pierson, in his classic 1994 book Dismantle the welfare state? and the 1996 article “The New Policy of the Welfare State” demonstrated that once a welfare policy is adopted and enough people benefiting from it are aware of it and able to defend it, this policy can be quite difficult to roll back.
“People who receive benefits, they’re going to react quite strongly to being taken away from them,” Pierson told me in 2017, when precisely this dynamic kept Republicans from repealing the Affordable Care Act. “A taxpayer pays for a lot of things and cares a little about everything, but the person receiving the benefits will care a lot. “
There is reason to believe that this dynamic has cooled down a bit in recent years, as parties have become more intense and ideologically polarized. Although the Affordable Care Act was not repealed, in large part because seven Senate Republicans were unwilling to repeal the ACA’s extension of Medicaid coverage, it did not. even approached, which never happened to previous programs like Social Security or Medicare.
Now the expansion of the child tax credit will expire in a year. Given its massive impact on child poverty, making it permanent should be a priority for Democrats. Given the polarization of Congress and its status quo bias, one should not be overconfident about the prospects for permanent expansion.
Having said that, a policy with a strong and vocal base of beneficiaries who can defend it is a strong policy. And, seriously, the TikTok memes on the child tax credit give me hope that the policy is building that kind of base of support. Look how thrilled all of these parents are – and think how furious they would be to have that support taken away.
[ad_2]
Source link