Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute pans Kamala Harris’ child tax credit proposal.

Vice President Kamala Harris recently announced an economic plan for her presidential campaign. A centerpiece is the transformation of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a child allowance. If it became reality, the policy would discourage parental employment and risk harming the long-run prospects of children. These unintended consequences together with the plan’s cost should lead voters to reject it. 

The existing CTC provides up to $2,000 per child and is only available to parents with a tax liability or earnings. The Harris plan would increase the credit to $6,000 for newborn children, $3,600 for children age 1 to 5, and $3,000 for children age 6 to 17. Just as important, Harris would delink the CTC from work by delivering the full amount to families who pay no taxes and have no earnings. 

Delinking the CTC from work would turn back the clock on decades of progress improving the safety net. In the 1990s, bipartisan welfare reform moved the country away from unconditional cash welfare to a safety net that required and rewarded work. Defying the predictions of skeptics, the policy shift was tremendously successful in leading single mothers in particular to go to work. Child poverty fell as more resources were brought into homes, and children’s long-run outcomes — as later research demonstrated — improved as well. 

Harris’ CTC plan would risk undoing this progress by going a long way toward bringing back welfare as we knew it. A non-working single parent with two children would receive between $6,000 and $9,600 from Harris’ child allowance. This is in addition to the $9,000 they currently receive in food stamps, totaling around $15,000 to $19,000 in guaranteed assistance not tied to work. … In other words, the Harris plan would increase the amount of guaranteed cash or near-cash assistance paid to non-working families beyond what they received the year prior to welfare reform, even before accounting for the growth in the rest of the safety net over the past 30 years.