Clinton Unveils Child Tax Credit Proposal As If This Were Normal Election And People Noticed 'Policy'

Surely there's something sinister about this picture

Just to keep the electorate off balance, Hillary Clinton on Monday actually offered a policy proposal, as if that sort of thing were still something people even pay attention to during presidential campaigns. It's pretty cool! Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has the quick-n-dirty summary:

In particular, she's proposing a two-part change in the child tax credit. First, instead of kicking in at $3,000, it would kick in at $0. This would help people in the deepest poverty. Second, for families with children under four, it would max out at $2,000 instead of $1,000. The chart below shows what families would get compared to the current CTC (in blue):

Oh, hey, and since it's a tax credit and not a tax deduction like Donald Trump's very bad childcare deduction plan, it would be available to all taxpayers with children aged four and under, wouldn't require taxpayers to itemize, and would reduce tax liability for low-income people, including those who owe no income taxes -- so it's a genuine anti-poverty, pro-child proposal. Amazing, huh? Trump's plan, by contrast, is a deduction, and would mostly help people who are already well-off. Needless to say, Clinton's plan, part of a larger package of middle-class tax relief, will be opposed by R's as a handout we can't afford, since we need to prop up oil companies. But since it will apply to millions of families with kids, it's likely to be widely popular.

Oh, but how will you pay for it, you darn socialists?

The Clinton campaign estimated the cost of the proposal at $150 billion to $200 billion over 10 years and said it would be funded by higher taxes on the wealthy already put forth.

“Rich people ought to be paying more federal income taxes to pay their fair share for our country,” Mrs. Clinton said Monday at a rally in Detroit.

There is, of course, a political downside, in that the added tax credit would increase the number of poors who pay no income tax, which will make the usual rightwing heads explode, but it would also reduce the number of children living in poverty, which seems well worth some rightwing brain spew. And when the whining about people "paying no taxes" revs up again, we can simply remind them that the poor pay plenty of other taxes, and often higher state taxes, so just shut up, Donald Trump.

Mr. Drum worries that by acting like she's campaigning in a normal year, Hillary Clinton's may be putting forward a fine idea that will only get lost in all the noise of the pussy-grabbing and the GOP's self-immolation:

The mainstream press pretty clearly couldn't care less about this, and I suppose that's hardly surprising given the Hindenburg-like dimensions of the meltdown of one of America's two major parties. Still, surely it deserves a little bit of attention?

We may just be one little mommyblog, but we too think it's a hell of a good idea, and worth plenty of attention, even with that flaming gasbag grabbing most of the focus. Crom knows, if there's anything we need to be shouting about poor kids, it's "Oh, the humanity!"

[ MoJo / WSJ / MoJo again]