It’s like the Democrats didn’t learn anything from history. Years ago, the government introduced Welfare legislation that gave unmarried women with kids more money than a family with both parents present. The Welfare checks were also based on the number of kids someone had. More kids meant bigger checks.
Want to guess what happened? People immediately figured out how to game the system. So poor people started having more kids. Because that’s what got them more money. And, since they received extra bonus dollars if the mother wasn’t married, more unwed mothers were having kids.
Fun fact: Affluent and educated people have fewer kids than poor, uneducated people. Ironically, the more likely you are to be able to feed, clothe and educate your kids, the less likely you are to have lots of them.
Joe Biden is introducing a new child tax credit that is eerily similar to the previous, really bad plan. With his new plan, the government is going to pay families for each kid they have. The more kids, the more money they make.
For every kid under the age of 6, the bounty is $3,600. For kids between 6 to 17, the bounty is a mere $3,000 per child.
Does anyone want to make a guess about what’s going to happen this time?
I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen. Poor people are going to start having more kids. Because that’s how they can get a bigger check. It’s a simple concept really. If you give someone a financial incentive to have more kids, they’re going to have more kids.
Any idiot could figure this out. Which is how I know the idea must have come from Joe.
Here’s another fun fact: Affluent people pay more taxes than poor people.
Biden is calling this a “child tax credit”. I don’t know about you, but to me a tax credit is something that lets you pay less taxes. For example, if I’m supposed to pay $10,000 in taxes, and I get a $3,000 tax credit, my tax bill is only $7,000. Seems simple enough.
But people who don’t make a lot of money (i.e. poor people) also don’t pay a lot of taxes. What about them?
No problem, Joe has an answer for that too.
Using a couple of calculators I found online, I learned that if I made $30,000 per year, I would pay about $520 in federal taxes. However, if I have two kids under the age of six and one over (not an unreasonable estimate), I could expect to receive 12 checks of $850 each for a total of $10,200.
If this were a true tax credit, the most I could expect to get back would be the amount that I paid in, that’s only $520. So, how can I get back more than $10,000 when I only paid about 5% of that to begin with?
I’ll tell you why. Because this isn’t a tax credit. It’s a handout. Joe can call it whatever he wants, but it’s still a handout.
Another thing about this “tax credit” is that it’s retroactive. The “tax credits” will be automatically sent to anyone who filed a 2019 or 2020 tax return.
Think about that for a bit. Biden is retroactively changing tax laws for returns that were filed BEFORE he took office.
History tells us that paying people more money than they contributed to have more kids than they should isn’t a “tax credit”. It’s a mistake.
