POLITICS: Universal Child Allowance, Part I: policy is personal
By Isha Shah
This article is part of a series about universal child allowance (UCA), and the politics of the expanded U.S. Child Tax Credit.
First, a consequentialist evaluation
Let’s get this out of the way: The expansion of the Child Tax Credit and its design was triggered by the need for economic relief among pandemic-affected families, and will accomplish its goal.
Parents or guardians of children have lost many government services that have helped in the provision of care for their children — childcare, in-school breakfasts and lunches, after-school activities, in some cases essential therapies — in addition to any job losses or cuts in working hours.[1] Even those whose jobs were relatively unaffected likely experienced the time and mental stresses of simultaneous childcare and career requirements. Now more strapped for services, money, time, and mental fortitude than before the pandemic, it perhaps makes sense that the government would choose to provide support in the generalized form of direct cash assistance, to as broad a swathe of the population as possible. The additional $600 benefit per child and 17-year-olds to the eligible population, as well as the removal of means-testing, all make sense in this context.
And, in fact, the expansion of the credit is projected to be effective in this goal, cutting the U.S. child poverty rate in half from 13.5 percent to 6 percent.[2] According to the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Child Policy, of the over 5 million children who will be lifted out of poverty by the expanded credit, the majority will be from families who would have been ineligible the previous year because they did not file taxes.[3] The material impact of the credit is rounded out by the 20 percent increase in benefits for children 16 or younger and the newly-eligible families with 17-year-olds.
The case for the deontological
However, to take each provision of the expansion on a solely consequentialist basis is to miss the opportunity to interpret the deontic implications of a universal policy. Of all the U.S. federal policies in place, the expanded Child Tax Credit would only be the second universal one, behind Social Security.[4]
The deontic approach is one that Immanuel Kant defined as being “a matter of right.”[5] The mechanistic approach to evaluating the expanded Child Tax Credit, demonstrated above, would discuss the policy’s relative costs and benefits, differential impacts on different sub-populations, long-run sustainability, and efficacy in relation to other policies intended to promote the same end, among others.
A deontic approach, however, questions whether the universal child allowance is correct or an improvement upon the existing regime or alternatives as a matter of principles, rather than of consequences. Is it “correct” to have universal benefits, when different people may not be putting in the same effort to secure their own welfare? Is it “better” to have benefits going to everyone, even those who are financially secure enough to provide for themselves and their children, at the cost of having less for those who do not? While a teleological approach would ask whether the expanded Child Tax Credit was effective in reducing child poverty, the deontic approach would ask whether the expansion of the Child Tax Credit is correct as a matter of principle. If we accept the premise that policy can indeed be read deontologically [6], we can use it to understand the values we hold and are willing to put into action.
How to read policy: Lessons from James Baldwin and Paul Weiss
The practice of “reading into” policy to learn about one’s nation is not without precedent. In fact, it often yields systematically different results between three populations, characterized by their differing levels of power and direct contact with government policies in question: First, those who are the most marginalized, and who often have the greatest direct contact with welfare policies; second, the “silent” majority whose interactions with policies are not as direct and do not occupy positions of great power but are also not powerless (especially in aggregate); third, the powerful, whose actions have the potential to sway entire regimes and whose opinions are therefore among the most consequential for the cultural and ethical direction of the country.
A striking illustration of the ways in which policy has historically been used by constituents to learn about themselves and the values of their society, and yielded different results depending on their relative positions of power, is an exchange between writer James Baldwin and Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss on the Dick Cavett show in 1968.[7]
As Baldwin and Cavett are discussing Baldwin’s view on American race relations, Weiss is invited onstage to provide another “perspective.” This is exactly what he provides. Looking at the same policies, the same laws, the same popular representations of American race relations from two different vantage points — Baldwin from the position of a Black man, who has repeatedly come into contact with the implicitly and explicitly racist policies of his nation, and Weiss from a position of a white man, whose information about the Black experience has only come from these public sources, rather than personal experience — they come to two completely different conclusions about the Black American experience.
When Weiss asks Baldwin why he does not consider himself closer to the intellectual and literary class (of which Weiss is a part) than Black Americans writ large, Baldwin responds by describing the ways in which his personal interactions with policy have taught him about what America is:
“I don’t know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church that is white and a Christian church that is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church.
I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me — that doesn’t matter — but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to.”
Weiss, on the other hand, seems to prioritize only those policies that were in the mainstream, public eye — the 14th amendment, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Brown’s victory in Brown vs. Board of Education. Of course, while these policies were fundamental to the progress of racial justice in the U.S., they did not in any sense guarantee it. To consider them as panaceas would be uninformed and naive. What’s more, while these policies merely provide a sense of security to moderate individuals like Weiss, they provide cover to those with more malicious and active intent. The KKK has a right to cross burning, for example, because these amendments, acts, and rulings make it so that no harm can truly come of their behavior. Baldwin eventually emerges with the keener insight, because of his more personal experience with the policies he and his community face repeatedly:
Now this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.”
So, why is the expanded Child Tax Credit any different? Why is the expanded Child Tax Credit a policy that, like those that Weiss observed, not one that is mere lip service and serves the purpose of persuading the silent middle and the powerful that equality is not only real but actively pursued by the powers that be in the U.S.? Why is it not an empty and simple rhetoric, allowing them to become complacent in their pursuit of income and racial justice?
Why the expanded Child Tax Credit talks
In plain terms, it is because the expanded Child Tax Credit, along with any other universal and direct benefit, is just too simple. It is a direct transfer of cash from the government to its constituents, without any conditions. This clarity is its power. Any of the policies cited by Weiss involve countless ambiguities of phrase and execution, but there is hardly anything more unmistakable than the arrival of a monthly sum in one’s bank account every month as long as one meets the basic eligibility criteria of having a child under 17 and having a social security number. In fact, there is a term for the complicated and obscure way in which many government benefits work — the “submerged state.”[8]
“The submerged state,” is a term introduced by Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler to describe the system of government interventions that are complicated and not readily visible to non-recipients, and often difficult to navigate for their recipients.[9] As a result, these “submerged state” policies result in the “silent middle” represented by Weiss receiving no messaging about the policies that their government is supporting, while recipients receive the message through the laborious and onerous process of applying for these benefits that they should not have to be leveraging them in the first place. Programs that do not require means-testing, such as the expanded Child Tax Credit or Social Security, stand in direct contrast.
What the expanded Child Tax Credit says
By eliminating the obscurity and complexity of submerged state policies, universal policies illuminate the values behind the policy - their deontic reasoning. The expanded Child Tax Credit conveys three messages to the American public: (1) The federal government is present in their lives and is capable of making a difference in it, (2) the federal government believes every child is worthy of support, not just those whose parents file taxes, and (3) seeking financial support for child-rearing from the federal government is not a behavior to be discouraged.
First, the universality and directness of the expanded Child Tax Credit makes clear to the recipients that they are receiving the benefit, and are assisted by federal government policies even when they do not directly apply for them. In a poll by the Cornell Survey Research Institute, 57 percent of the 1,400 respondents denied that they had “ever used a government social program.” After a series of questions that asked whether they had ever used any of 21 federal policies including Social Security, unemployment insurance, federal student loans, or the home-mortgage interest deduction, it was revealed that 94 percent of respondents had in fact used at least one government social program — in fact, the average respondent had used four.[10]
Without the knowledge that they are even using these programs, constituents are hard-pressed to interpret them correctly — the worthiness of the people receiving them, for example, of the extent to which they make a difference in the lives of these recipients. When additional hundreds to thousands of dollars show up in one’s bank account, the fact that one is a recipient of government benefits is hard to miss. If oneself and one’s children are receiving the benefit, then federal intervention is clearly important to the lives of many beyond only the highly marginalized.[11]
Second, the purpose of the policy itself is more obvious — for the federal government to support the care of a child, including those whose parents do not meet the $5,000 annual income threshold to file federal taxes. Since the expanded tax credit is to be delivered directly to families on a monthly basis by default, it also draws a clearer connection between the intended use of the funds for the continuous care of a child, rather than a one-time lump sum. Further, everyone receives these payments at once, meaning that Americans with children across the nation will have a point of commonality at least for one point in time which, in an increasingly diverging and polarizing nation, are few and far between. Questions of “worthiness” and “need” are put aside in favor of assuring that every child has a basic level of support.
Finally, the receipt of this support is frictionless owing to the lack of means-testing and direct delivery, meaning parents are encouraged rather than discouraged from leveraging the benefit. Traditional means-tested programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, food stamps), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), require laborious processes for proving eligibility.[12] While these procedures may not have been designed to convey to parents with low income that they are less deserving of respect for using government entitlements, this is nonetheless the message that is ultimately transmitted when eligible Americans must seek professional help to even begin the application process. Despite the potential for government support to help benefit recipients to get back on their feet more ably than they would have been able to had they forgone the entitlement, the hassle it takes tells them that they are worth less for doing so.
Further, it tells those of the silent middle who are not direct recipients of these benefits — like Weiss — that their nation is doing enough to help those with less access or income. Meanwhile, it also provides cover for exploitative power brokers to continue their abuse of those with less agency because their victims can ostensibly seek reparations from the government. These provisions, as well as others, flout the traditional “submerged state” model to more clearly send a message that the support of U.S. federal policies is present and important in the lives of the majority rather than the impoverished few, and that providing a minimum level of support for all children matters more than parsimony or “teaching their parents a lesson.”
The tale continues
Policy almost always talks — and the expanded Child Tax Credit enunciates well. In a nation that shows every hallmark of a society that is polarized and only growing more so, two Americans can claim two different versions of reality, where perpetrators of every kind commit crimes and claim their intentions were good but the implementation awry, with so many talking heads issuing abstract interpretations of right and wrong, our direct observations of these policies within our lives is one of the few avenues from which we can still glean information. Lawmakers can offer all sorts of rationales why policies are made, but the intention and outcomes are generally simple — either people lose benefits or gain them, and who loses or gains tells us about who was deemed worthy or not worthy of government support.
Just as Social Security disability payments unambiguously tell us that we are a nation that believes that elderly people deserve care even after they have aged out of the workforce and people with disabilities deserve an equal quality of life, the expanded Child Tax Credit tells us that each child is valued — at least until May 1, 2022.
Tune in next week for Part II of TMP’s expanded Child Tax Credit analysis, featuring its sibling, Baby Bond.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/nyregion/coronavirus-homeschooling-parents.html
[2] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5743308460b5e922a25a6dc7/t/604aa2465cfc4a35b8a1c236/1615503943944/Poverty-Reduction-Analysis-American-Rescue-Plan-CPSP-2021.pdf
[3] Ibid.
[4] Social Security has a usage rate of 97 percent among Americans aged 60-80.
[5] https://www.britannica.com/topic/deontological-ethics
[6] Note: The deontic approach is not often taken in policy evaluation, but is the origin of the idea of governance itself. Without the tenet that humans are willing to give up their individual rights to be governed by elected representatives and that the will of the majority should, as a matter of principle, triumph, there is no basis for policy to begin with.
[7] https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/tony-norman/2017/02/17/Tony-Norman-The-furious-eloquence-of-James-Baldwin-I-Am-Not-Your-Negro-documentary/stories/201702170097
[8] Note: There are, of course, very direct ways in which policy can change national beliefs, but the UCA sends a message in a manner that is equally explicit, but requires less action on the part of the individual. A direct way in which policy can shape national self-perception is through the recruitment of its citizens to enact and enforce these policies, and the subsequent cognitive dissonance that it creates that must be relieved through the invention of an explanation that is affirming to the enactor and affirming of the issuer. For example, if a luncheonette owner in 1963 is by law required to have two separate water fountains and bathroom facilities, one for Blacks and one for whites, he or she is effectively recruited as an agent of the state in effecting a racist segregationist policy. Noncompliance becomes an act of rebellion for which punishment can be meted out in a legally sanctioned manner. Even if the owner is not inclined to think one way or the other about the segregation of water fountains, the effort expended in constructing two entirely different sets of facilities requires justification.
This phenomenon, in fact called effort justification, is the tendency for individuals to spin themselves a story about why they are putting in effort to align with or execute the policies of others. The story often leads to the invention of a positive reason — the owner, for example, could begin to believe, even implicitly, that the prohibition of racial mixing is indeed a worthy goal, that water fountains can, in fact, be “contaminated” by the color of one’s skin.
[9] https://www.russellsage.org/news/revealing-submerged-state
[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/opinion/our-hidden-government-benefits.html
[11] The extent to which Americans can be misinformed about the origin of the programs they have come to rely on was encapsulated in a 2009 town hall meeting in which an irate man told his congressman “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Ibid.
[12] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22280404/mitt-romney-child-allowance-tax-credit-biden