Strong families and hard work have formed the foundation for healthy development, meaningful relationships, and economic well-being ever since America’s inception. Now, President Joe Biden has a new vision: one in which progressive politicians and government bureaucrats sit at the helm of American families, financed through $1.8 trillion in new taxpayer spending.
Article by Marie Fishpaw, Lindsey Burke, Doug Badger, Matthew Dickerson, Leslie Ford, Rachel Greszler, and Robert Rector from Daily Signal.
Through a laundry list of proposals, the Biden administration’s so-called American Families Plan would significantly grow federal bureaucrats’ control of some of the most personal aspects of family life.
While asserting more government control over Americans, this proposal also fails to address the real child care, education, family leave, and health needs of families.
Here are five of the key features of the American Families Plan, and why lawmakers should reject them:
1. New Child Care Spending and Programs
Paid Family Leave—While private sector employers have already made enormous strides in providing employees with paid family leave—doubling the provisions of both maternity leave and paternity leave benefits since the 2017 tax cuts and reduced regulations—Biden’s plan would create a nationwide paid family leave program.
A one-size-fits-all government program would be restrictive, unresponsive, and less generous than existing employer-provided programs.
And despite Biden’s claim that a government paid family leave program will keep mothers in the workforce (a decision that should be made by families without the influence of politicians), a growing body of evidence shows that it can have a negative impact on women’s labor market outcomes and largely benefits middle-income and upper-income families (despite taxing workers of all income levels).
Government-Subsidized Child Care—At the same time, despite its emphasis on paid family leave, the proposal encourages parents not to stay home with their children by favoring center-based and government-run pre-kindergarten over family care. Such policies prioritize maximizing tax revenues and measured economic output by having all parents work full time while growing the government’s involvement in raising children.
Many policymakers claim that child care subsidies are an investment, yielding a positive return, but that argument focuses on government tax revenues and economic outputs, as opposed to children’s and families’ well-being.
The government’s role should be to protect environments in which families can pursue the choices that they desire instead of those that certain politicians desire. Taxpayer-subsidized child care would instead drive up child care costs, limit choices, and unfairly shift the burden to families who do not use child care.
2. Unprecedented Education Spending and Massive New Government Programs
Universal Preschool—The American Families Plan would spend an astounding $200 billion on “free” universal preschool for all 3-year-old and 4-year-old children, based on the premise that children benefit academically from preschool. However, the most rigorous research shows that government preschool programs consistently fail to produce any sustained benefits for children and actually have some negative effects.
We don’t have to imagine what Biden’s universal preschool plan would look like, as Americans already have half-a-century of evidence on the ineffective Head Start program. A 2021 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that Head Start had little to no impact on the cognitive, social-emotional, and health outcomes of participants. The fact that Head Start is the closest existing analog to any new or expanded federal preschool program does not inspire confidence.
“Free” Community College—The American Families Plan includes an unprecedented $109 billion proposal to finance two years of “free” community college, available to first-time students and “workers wanting to reskill.” This is a questionable investment.
The completion rate stands at just 34% for community college students. To improve these statistics, the proposal aims to send an additional $62 billion to community colleges to increase retention and completion. After decades of lackluster outcomes, more federal spending is unlikely to improve performance.
3. Permanent Expansion of Obamacare Subsidy Increases
The American Families Plan would make permanent a $40 billion expansion of Obamacare that Biden signed into law in March 2021, which is set to expire in December 2022. This is a costly and unjustified government incursion that further subsidizes health insurance companies that neither appreciably reduces the number of uninsured nor boosts economic recovery.
It also does nothing to address the real problems behind Americans’ top concerns over rising health care costs—simply sending more money to health insurance companies to benefit them at the expense of taxpayers.
The subsidies could also threaten employer-sponsored coverage for millions of Americans, forcing them into Affordable Care Act plans that generally have narrower networks, higher cost-sharing, and higher deductibles than their job-based insurance.
4. Permanent Expansion of the Welfare State
Biden is proposing that two major means-tested welfare programs be permanently expanded. First, the administration would extend the expansion of the refundable child tax credit program until 2025. This change is depicted by the Biden administration as providing tax relief to families; in reality, most of the proposed cost would send unconditional monthly welfare checks to families who owe no income tax.
Second, the administration would increase the refundable earned income tax credit, also a cash welfare check, for childless workers.
These proposed changes would make existing problems in the welfare state worse by undermining work and marriage.
We’ve been down this road before. For example, before the bipartisan welfare reforms of 1996, government benefits discouraged work among low-income parents: nearly 9 in 10 families on welfare were workless. Most of these families were stuck in long-term poverty. Two-thirds of families received welfare benefits for more than eight years. Unwed births rose year over year for decades. And all of this made intergenerational child poverty worse: 1 in 7 children were dependent on welfare benefits.
The 1996 welfare reforms broke this cycle of despair. It required recipients to work or prepare for work, and it was dramatically successful in reducing child poverty to an historic low. Policymakers should reject Biden’s plan to overturn the fundamental principles of this reform and to lay the groundwork to replace it with the second-largest increase in welfare in American history. Otherwise, we will see fewer low-income Americans rise and flourish.
5. Tax Increases That Hurt Families
To finance this plan, Biden proposes tax hikes that would harm the economy. The fact sheet announcing the American Families Plan misleadingly claims that the president’s new welfare spending proposals amount to “tax cuts for America’s families and workers.” In reality, the plan includes significant increases in the taxes paid by America’s families.
Discouraging Investment by Increasing Taxes on Capital Gains and Dividends—The Biden plan would increases the tax burden on capital gains and dividends to 43.4% (including the Obamacare net investment tax) for households with incomes of more than $1 million.
Analysis from the Tax Foundation shows that this tax increase would actually reduce federal revenue by $133 billion over the next decade because the high taxes would disincentivize people from realizing gains and paying the tax. This policy would reduce the size of the economy, reduce wages, and cost jobs.
Elimination of Stepped-Up Basis: A “Second Death Tax.”—The plan would increase the tax burden on property left by deceased relatives to the next generation.
Under current law, when the owner of a piece of property dies and transfers it to an heir, the cost basis of the property is stepped up to its current fair market value for the purposes of capital gains taxation. The president’s proposal would eliminate the stepped-up basis for assets that are asserted to have a gain of $1 million or more.
A major problem with repealing stepped-up basis is its actual implementation. It could be difficult or even impossible to go back in time and correctly assess the original value of an old asset. A similar policy was in law for a short period in the 1970s but was quickly repealed. Even The New York Times called it “unfair and impossibly unworkable.”
The proposal has been decried as a “second death tax.” Instead of burdening families when a loved one dies, Congress should repeal the death tax. Repealing stepped-up basis would harm American families attempting to live the American dream by leaving their next generation better off.
A Better Way Is Needed
The president suggests that his plan is intended to help American families. In reality, it will undermine them.
Under the plan, the federal government would take more of Americans’ incomes and then redistribute the money in the form of benefits that politicians—not families—create, approve, and control. Such an approach would create new problems for families, leaving them with fewer opportunities.
A better, different approach is needed. Lawmakers should pursue reforms that will empower, not cripple, American families. The Heritage Foundation has a full report that outlines how Congress can implement a truly pro-family plan—read it here.
True policy reforms should support family formation and stability. Eliminating marriage penalties in our welfare system, encouraging flexibility in work and child care, offering more education options, and increasing access to better private health plans are promising starts.
‘The Purge’ by Big Tech targets conservatives, including us
Just when we thought the Covid-19 lockdowns were ending and our ability to stay afloat was improving, censorship reared its ugly head.
For the last few months, NOQ Report, Conservative Playbook, and the American Conservative Movement have appealed to our readers for assistance in staying afloat through Covid-19 lockdowns. The downturn in the economy has limited our ability to generate proper ad revenue just as our traffic was skyrocketing. We had our first sustained stretch of three months with over a million visitors in November, December, and January, but February saw a dip.
It wasn’t just the shortened month. We expected that. We also expected the continuation of dropping traffic from “woke” Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but it has actually been much worse than anticipated. Our Twitter account was banned. Both of our YouTube accounts were banned. Facebook “fact-checks” everything we post. Spotify canceled us. Medium canceled us. Apple canceled us. Why? Because we believe in the truth prevailing, and that means we will continue to discuss “taboo” topics.
The 2020 presidential election was stolen. You can’t say that on Big Tech platforms without risking cancellation, but we’d rather get cancelled for telling the truth rather than staying around to repeat mainstream media’s lies. They have been covering it up since before the election and they’ve convinced the vast majority of conservative news outlets that they will be harmed if they continue to discuss voter fraud. We refuse to back down. The truth is the truth.
The lies associated with Covid-19 are only slightly more prevalent than the suppression of valid scientific information that runs counter to the prescribed narrative. We should be allowed to ask questions about the vaccines, for example, as there is ample evidence for concern. One does not have to be an “anti-vaxxer” in order to want answers about vaccines that are still considered experimental and that have a track record in a short period of time of having side-effects, including death. One of our stories about the Johnson & Johnson “vaccine” causing blood clots was “fact-checked” and removed one day before the government hit the brakes on it. These questions and news items are not allowed on Big Tech which is just another reason we are getting canceled.
There are more topics that they refuse to allow. In turn, we refuse to stop discussing them. This is why we desperately need your help. The best way NOQ, CP, and ACM readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We are on track to be short by about $4100 per month in order to maintain operations.
The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. We had 5,657,724 sessions on our website from November, 2020, through February, 2021. Our intention is to elevate that to higher levels this year by focusing on a strategy that relies on free speech rather than being beholden to progressive Big Tech companies.
During that four-month stretch, Twitter and Facebook accounted for about 20% of our traffic. We are actively working on operating as if that traffic is zero, replacing it with platforms that operate more freely such as Gab, Parler, and others. While we were never as dependent on Big Tech as most conservative sites, we’d like to be completely free from them. That doesn’t mean we will block them, but we refuse to be beholden to companies that absolutely despise us simply because of our political ideology.
We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above.
As the world spirals towards radical progressivism, the need for truthful journalism has never been greater. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going.
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