By CHRISTINE MARIE
One of the most painful displays of hypocrisy in the current presidential race revolves around the effort of each ticket to present their candidates as the best defenders of working-class families. While the Democratic and Republican parties are associated with sharply differentiated notions of the “family” and policies on abortion and bodily autonomy—and while they polemicize over how to fund health care, education, and housing—they have both put the Child Tax Credit at the center of their promises. An examination of this approach shows its limited character and demands a discussion of an alternative strategy to escape the financial crises facing working families.
Why do both tickets love the child tax credit?
The CTC is a neoliberal approach adopted over direct assistance to low-income households due to its minimal association with “welfare” to the poor. It was expanded during the COVID-era economic meltdown to meet protests from those losing income. The expansion gave out $3600 per child under six and $3000 per child between the ages of six and 18 in tax credits to households per year. This expanded plan also tweaked the neoliberal framework by allowing some families who paid little or no taxes and were previously excluded from such credits to receive some money. Because of this latter shift, the program was widely credited with lifting around 2 million children out of poverty. Still, the CTC provided a drop in the bucket of the emergency relief needed by working families.
To understand just how modest impact of the expanded CTC really was, it is worth noting that a non-profit called The Bridge, based on a needs assessment and in sharp contrast to the CTC payouts, gives out $1000 per month to low-income new mothers. And according to the Children’s Defense Fund, 11 million children in the U.S., not 2 million, are living in poverty. This means that during the historic high of poverty reduction attributed to the CTC expansion, the conditions of less than 1/5 of children in need changed significantly.
But that is not the whole story. While gains for the poor were relatively modest, the COVID-era expansion was wildly popular, especially among middle class voters. This is because the credit was made available to couples with an income of up to $400,000. It provided more to the middle classes than to essential workers, low-income workers, and the unemployed.
At the same time, liberal policy makers touted it because it allowed them to claim a win for restoring a kind of “welfare” measure long abandoned due to reactionary ideological shifts that deemed the poor unworthy of direct cash payments. It was not a huge outcome but one good enough to sell the approach. They could point to numerous authoritative studies of this economic period showing that cash transfers to low-income families were not squandered, as neoliberal orthodoxy postulated, but used to enhance the well-being of at least 2 million.
As modest as it was, Congress failed to extend the COVID-era CTC expansion. Nonetheless, congressional discussions of a return to a similar tax-based family support system, with sensitivity to limiting what should be given to the “unworthy poor,”—i.e., those not working or supposedly not working enough, has become ideologically acceptable and normalized among elite policy makers. A significant number of Democratic and Republican office holders consider talking about an improved CTC a politically acceptable way to show concern for “family” finances without riling up all of corporate America.
Thus, today, the Child Tax Credit is at the center of the policy proposals put forward by both big business parties. JD Vance, known for his reactionary pro-natalist advocacy of the “traditional family,” has advocated a CTC of $5000 per child and wants to extend it families earning more than $400,000. Kamala Harris, known for a more expansive view of the “family” to be rewarded, has proposed raising the credit $1000 higher, to $6000 per child for the first year after birth, and providing $3600 per child for every subsequent year. However, neither party has come out in support of guaranteeing the full CTC annual amount to households whose income is too low to tax, disappointing community-based advocates who actually care about those most in need.
Social reproduction and production
Not only is the CTC a fully inadequate solution, but the reality is that no proposals from the two big business parties come close to addressing the root cause of household financial misery. This should not be surprising because, in fact, the functioning of the for-profit system is predicated on the practice of making working people take up the vast majority of social costs necessary to keep the capitalist system humming. This includes raising and socializing the future workforce, caring for the elderly, and creating the circumstances that make it possible for the majority to work for private capitalists for only a tiny portion of the value that they produce on the job.
Socialists talk about these activities, mostly carried out as unpaid labor, as contributing to “social reproduction.” These activities, for the capitalists, are a pendant to “production,” during which the owners directly extract as profit the majority of the value created by those working in manufacturing, mining, and construction. Forcing the costs of social reproduction onto working-class households already victimized by the fundamentally exploitative relations of production for profit is foundational for historical capitalism. Profit could not be extracted without this approach to social needs.
There has not been a capitalism in space or time that did not require that the working classes struggle to secure their own welfare via the privatization of the fundamentals of life-giving activity, with households acting as individualized units of unpaid labor and units for the consumption of high-priced goods, health care, education, and basic care.
This is true no matter what the level of social welfare supports adopted by any capitalist state at a specific conjuncture under pressure from working people or portends of social breakdown. State commitments to socializing some of the costs of care work, of life-giving work, are never permanent. Nor do they ever come close to alleviating the financial emergency faced by working people. They never really challenge the whole set-up in which the unpaid labor of caregivers of the working classes—to say nothing of the gender and racialized oppression that is inextricably intertwined—are organized and sustained for the needs of big business through myriad tax and spending policies.
Which way forward?
It is in this context that we must view the show of concern and modest reforms for child support that are being proclaimed by the Democratic and Republican candidates, all of whom remain committed to this system. Some reform is better than no reform, and a CTC that provides aid for any part of the millions left impoverished by the normal working of the system will be welcomed. New CTC proposals, however, do not signal a turn toward relieving the double burden on care givers in any fundamental way.
Our strategy for alleviating the crisis faced by our class must acknowledge that the functioning of capitalist society requires this unacceptable cost. The only way toward obtaining a dramatic upset of these arrangements is political action independent of those parties dedicated to the system.
