A top economic adviser to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign told C-SPAN Tuesday that he simply does not care for this expanded Child Tax Credit that’s a centerpiece of Kamala Harris’s plan to make life more affordable for American families, claiming that it would turn the poor into lazy takers and would hurt the millions of children whom it would lift out of poverty, because they too would be lazy and we can’t afford to just give money to people who are not big banks or oil companies.
Stephen Moore, the fretting supply-sider, is a Heritage Foundation economist, contributor to Project 2025, and rightwing jagoff Trump nominated to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2019, but who eventually got quitfired after he criticized Trump in public and not, mind you, because Moore was a racist, sexist bigot. So it really shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he’s against the federal government helping kids escape poverty, because they probably belong there.
Here’s the relevant C-SPAN clip of Moore lying about the expanded Child Tax Credit via the Kamala HQ Twitter account:
Following a bit where Moore enthusiastically endorsed gutting public education by shifting taxpayer money to send rich people’s kids to private schools — for “freedom” — C-SPAN host John McArdle asked Moore if he thought the Child Tax Credit helps children, giving Moore the chance to explain it is very bad indeed! He prefaced his very grave doubts about the CTC by insisting he’s “not against it,” by way of rhetorical throat-clearing. Then it was time to put those kids in their place!
“What worries me about the child credit […] I have some doubts about it, John. Here's the problem: We can't just keep giving people money! For a lot of people who get the the so-called credit, it’d be a cash payment. And a lot of the people getting it don't even pay taxes!”
Moore is, like so many Trumpers, so very close to getting the point: Yes indeed, as it worked in the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the version of the expanded CTC that Harris wants to revive, the $2600 credit was “fully refundable,” meaning that even families too poor to pay federal taxes received it, which is the whole point of an anti-poverty program. It gave families some breathing room so they could afford school clothes, maybe a summer activity or sport, or God help us, maybe even something nice and special like a computer or a bike, so Fox News could shame them over it. We think Harris should unapologetically say that yes, she wants to fight child poverty by helping parents be less poor.
Moore wasn’t finished, because simply missing the point wasn’t enough; he had to lie.
“I worry a little bit that if we keep just passing out free money to people you're going to discourage people from working. […] There’s five million people in this country who are not disabled, who are working age, who could and should be working, and one of the major reasons they are not working is we’re paying out so much money to people in free money. Whether it’s food stamps, whether it’s free health care, whether it’s cash payments. All of these things.”
Obviously, giving away vast sums of money to the rich in the form of tax cuts and corporate subsidies has the opposite effect, because the rich are not lazy and work very hard for their millions or billions with a B.
But here’s the thing, Guy Who Works Hard at Bloviating On TV: As a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities assessment of the 2021 expanded CTC found, the program certainly lifted millions of children out of poverty “and appears not to have meaningfully discouraged work among parents, numerous studies of real-world evidence suggest.”
Employment among both parents and non-parents rose by 1.7 percentage points in 2021, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Researchers at the University of Michigan examined part- and full-time employment and labor force participation and found “no significant employment effects for any outcome” — with several other research teams reaching similar conclusions.
The assessment also noted that Canada has a far more generous “child allowance” than the US’s briefly-expanded CTC, and that it’s available to folks who have little or no earnings — while Canada actually has a “higher labor force participation rate overall and among women than the US,” so please take your “child benefits make people lazy takers who must be whipped so they pull the plow” claims and stuff ‘em right up your “Tim Hortons.”
But then, what would you expect from a Trump Guy who claimed in 2021 that the original expanded CTC was a “backdoor” to sneaking a universal basic income into America, which would be the Worst. Possible. Thing. We all remember how an extra $2600 in one year led the poors to stop working and just whoop it up forever, right? (Oh, wait. That’s what the jackass MAGA idiots thought was happening when restaurant workers went off and found better jobs, long after the pandemic benefits ran dry.)
Clearly, only one thing will really end poverty in America: Elect the guy who’s promising more big tax cuts for the rich, vastly higher inflation via tariffs, and mass deportations to deplete the workforce. Besides, once Trump gets a second term, you won’t ever hear bad economic news again, just like you’ll be free of having to vote.
PREVIOUSLY!
[C-SPAN / CBPP / Common Dreams]
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Anybody that's ever been broke knows this and knows it for sure:
Being poor is extremely hard, demanding work.
Anecdote:
I know a bunch of people on SSI down in Pennsylvania. One of them, thanks to some severe budgeting (and the fact that he lives in a neighbourhood where you can buy a house for under $25000 if you don't mind a fixer-upper) owns his own home, pays taxes, shops locally and spends some of his time helping disabled folks. He is on SSI because he is legally blind and has a heart condition.
And he isn't the only one I know there who's being a good citizen.
If Moore called any of them 'takers' I would kick him so hard he'd taste scrotum. They contribute more to the quality of life in America than he ever would.