Apr 24
Thinking Citizen Blog — “America Has Turned Its Back on its Poorest Families” (Ezra Klein, NYT)
Thinking Citizen Blog — Saturday is Justice, Freedom, Law, and Values Day
Today’s Topic: “America Has Turned Its Back on its Poorest Families” (Ezra Klein, NYT)
Is it true? Has America turned its back on its poorest families? What is the right metric of that callousness, if the claim is indeed true? What did Mr. Klein have in mind? What is to be done? What do America’s poorest families need most desperately? Is it money? Is it child care? Safe streets? Better schools? How can it be provided? Today, some excerpts from Mr. Klein’s article. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
KLEIN IS TALKING ABOUT THE “EXPANDED CHILD TAX CREDIT”
1. “It gave parents $3,000 for every child age 6 to 17 and $3,600 for every child under age 6.”
2. “There were no strings attached. It was just money. It could be used for child care, for food, for clothes, for anything. “
3. “It treated parents, even poor parents, as the experts on their family’s finances, a quietly radical idea in American social policy.”
NB: “It was a huge experiment, it was studied exhaustively, and we can now say this definitively: it worked.”
DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS LET THE TAX CREDIT EXPIRE — HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? THE “BROKEN SENATE”
1. “Biden’s Build Back Better plan would have extended the credit, but it also would have done dozens of other things. This made sense as legislative strategy, but it made messaging nearly impossible.”
2. “To me for or against Build Back Better wasn’t to be for or against the child tax credit or the climate policies or the pre-K policies or the Affordable Care Act expansion or the corporate tax changes or the R&D investments or any of the dozens of other items in the bill. To the extent anything defined the package in the public mind, it was the initial price tag: $3.5 trillion.”
3. “This wasn’t some inexplicable messaging error. It’s a product of a broken Senate that now does much of its major legislating through the bizarre budget reconciliation process.”
NB: “Because you can do only one or two reconciliation bills a year, you have to jam together everything you fear the other side will filibuster. Getting voters to pay attention to one policy debate, and hold their representatives accountable on it, is hard enough. Getting them to track six or 12, all of them tossed into one legislative sack, is impossible. This is another way the filibuster has made government more confusing and less accountable.”
ARE SENATOR MANCHIN’S CONCERNS MISGUIDED?
1. “If Democrats had won the 2020 Senate races in North Carolina and Maine, perhaps Build Back Better would have passed. But with a 50–50 Senate, they need a perfectly united caucus to pass anything without Republican votes and they don’t have one. Senator Joe Manchin, in particular was the pivotal vote, and the Democrats lost him.”
2. “Manchin had a particular problem with the child tax credit.”
3. “He held the view that it gave too much money to poor people who weren’t working, encouraging them to remain unemployed or leave jobs they already had.”
NB: “I’ve shown him the evidence that countries with higher childhood allowances have higher work force participation rates than our own country, and I’ve not persuaded him.” (Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat from Colorado, supporter of the child tax credit.)
CONCLUSION
Have you ever asked yourself the question: what do poor children need most? if so, how much time have you given to answering it? What have you come up with? Have you constructed the equivalent of an “Orion” to focus your mind and communicate your conclusions more effectively? If so, please share. So far, my three best, rather amateurish, attempts along these lines are the last three links below. But I’m still working at it.
PHOTOS — Klein (top), Manchin (middle), Bennet (bottom)
Opinion | America Has Turned Its Back on Its Poorest Families
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Manchin
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/3/24/muresianu-daily-katrina/
http://www.educationfirstparty.com
http://www.muresianuforsenate.com
For the last four years of posts organized by theme:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
Two special attachments below:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, 11/17/20
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to justice, freedom, the law or basic values. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to justice, freedom, the law, or basic values. Or just some random justice-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply about something dear to your heart.
