On The Concept of a American Child Allowance Policy
Part of Cory Booker’s plan to end child poverty as President is creating a universal per child allowance of $250-$300 per month. It’d go to every family, and would be payable in monthly disbursements. I offer some thoughts prompted by the plan and a conversation with a voter, but these are entirely my own opinions. For more information on the campaign’s plan, you can check it out here: corybooker.com/endchildpoverty.
Have you ever had any experience with the concept of a university child allowance program? I haven’t until recently. The US is rare among it’s industrialized peers in not having a universal or near universal child allowance program that would provide perhaps $200-$400 per month. It’s also no coincidence that our child poverty rate is second to only Bulgaria in some studies.
We may think of TANF (cash assistance) as the back-stop for families on hard times, but only a quarter of families in poverty actually receive TANF because it’s just so darn hard to get into with all the barriers enacted since the 90s.
EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit) is the closest we have to such a policy, and research shows it helps families at every stage of life (maternal health, school enrollment, college enrollment, work and earning, even helping their retirement through higher social security payments)…but EITC doesn’t do much of anything for parents without income, a total of 13 million families get no safety net support at all (food stamps, housing, cash assistance, etc.), and food stamps themselves can’t pay for rent, bus fare, gas or diapers. Can anyone seriously argue that enables a family to thrive?
As I was reminded yesterday, there’s an uncomfortable gut instinct among some (including those with more personal connection to the problem than me) to immediately think of single (black) mother for whom such a policy would discourage work and encourage more child-bearing. But the research suggests the larger effect is actually married moms opting to work more in the home because of how little additional benefit is gained from working outside given the cost childcare. And an increase in the fertility rate (which is likely) would result in a more solvent Social Security system as result to re-balance all the baby boomers retiring.
There’s bias at play that shapes how we view social welfare programs and it stands in the way. The reason I know that the foundation of this argument rests on the proposition that black recipients will be behave differently than the far greater number of white recipients in the program. If that were the case, it would be the socially-constructed role of race that was the explanatory variable and not the program (though it would pose some compelling questions on the program’s design). If it isn’t the case, there’d be no reason to have such a racialized view of the program and we could have a more honest conversation over the whether is good or not. This bias must be recognized and examined, it is likely most easily done by pointing out the racial makeup of the program’s participants and asking about the universalism of the concerns. We should continue to vigorously raise up and examine the policies on their merits.
Big picture, it’s a shame when we understate the extent to which we have gutted our safety net programs that were never adequate in the first place. This includes not just the popularly considered (but pejoratively misnamed) “welfare” programs, but also inadequate primary and secondary education, inadequate heath care and public health, and is compounded by both the racist and structural inequality that that continue to deprive equal opportunity to so many.
Additional Resources
- https://www.vox.com/2016/5/23/11440638/child-benefit-child-allowance
- https://ifstudies.org/blog/cash-for-kids-assessing-the-american-family-act
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-people-in-poverty-are-disconnected-from-the-social-safety-net-most-of-them-are-white/2019/02/04/807516a0-2598-11e9-81fd-b7b05d5bed90_story.html
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/04/15/map-how-35-countries-compare-on-child-poverty-the-u-s-is-ranked-34th/
