Mitt Romney’s Plan to Pay Parents Up to $15,000 a Year

By Yuval Rosenberg

Mitt Romney’s Plan to Pay Parents Up
to $15,000 a Year

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) on Thursday proposed sending
American families a cash benefit of at least $3,000 a year per
child as part of a plan that he says would immediately lift nearly
3 million children out of poverty.

Romney’s plan represents a Republican response to
President Joe Biden’s call to provide more support to families
struggling through the pandemic, signaling some bipartisan support
for the idea. Romney’s plan provides more generous benefits than
Biden’s, though it also proposes to eliminate some other popular
benefits.

The details: Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus
rescue plan calls for temporarily increasing the child tax credit,
which now provides $2,000 a year for children up to 16 years old,
to $3,600 for children under 6 and $3,000 for older
kids.

Under Romney’s Family Security Act, parents of children up
to 5 years old would get $350 a month, or $4,200 a year. Parents of
kids ages 6 to 17 would get $250 a month, or $3,000 a year.
Families would become eligible for the payments four months before
a child’s due date, and the maximum monthly payment would be
$1,250, or $15,000 a year. Like the current Child Tax Credit, the
benefits would begin phasing out for individuals earning $200,000
and couples making $400,000. Any overpayments or underpayments
would be reconciled through annual tax filings, meaning parents
would still get monthly payments and would have to pay back any
overpayments when they file their taxes.

How Romney would pay for his plan: Romney says his
proposal wouldn’t add a dime to the deficit — meaning that it could
be made permanent under the reconciliation process rather than
creating a temporary benefit, as Biden’s plan does.

To make his plan deficit neutral, Romney would eliminate
what he calls “overlapping and often duplicative federal policies,”
including the Child Tax Credit, now worth up to $2,000 per child
for parents with income over $11,000, and the Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families (TANF) welfare program. He would also revamp the
Earned Income Tax Credit, cutting spending under the program by
nearly $50 billion, and eliminate the State and Local Tax Deduction
(SALT) and head-of-household status for tax filers.

In total, the Romney proposal represents a significant
overhaul that would remake federal child support benefits,
delivering monthly payments from the Social Security Administration
instead of an annual tax credit and other benefits. You can find
Romney’s summary of his plan
here. An
analysis by the right-leaning Niskanen Center
think tank includes this breakdown of pay-fors:

The effects on child poverty: “The calls for
upping aid to families with children come as the U.S. wrestles with
a child poverty rate well above the average for wealthy countries,”
CNBC’s Tucker Higgins
reports. “About 17% of children in the U.S. — or
12 million kids —
lived in poverty as of 2019, a number that had
been slightly declining before the Covid-19 pandemic, according to
the Kids Count project at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.”

Romney’s plan would bring more than 5.1 million people out
of poverty, reducing the poverty rate by 14% overall and by nearly
a third for children, according to the Niskanen Center
analysis.

What’s next: The Romney plan garnered some praise
from analysts across the political spectrum.

“The Romney plan is an improvement over the Biden plan in
three ways,” Matt Bruenig, an analyst at the progressive People’s
Policy Project think tank, wrote in a
blog post. “First, it provides more benefits.
Second, it uses the Social Security Administration, which should
increase participation, among other things. Third, it likely phases
out at a higher income level than Biden’s plan does, which will
make the program easier to administer and more universal in its
coverage.”

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain tweeted that Romney’s
proposal is “an encouraging sign that bipartisan action to reduce
child poverty IS possible.”

But it’s not clear yet whether it can win the support of
lawmakers in either party. The elimination of existing benefit
programs and the SALT deduction may be a sticking point for
Democrats.

“Take a deep breadth [SIC] folks,”
tweeted Gene Sperling, who directed the National
Economic Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
“YES, it’s a big sign of progress for a Republican like Romney to
back a child allowance. But, NO, we shouldn’t accept for a second
that the way to pay for it is slashing EITC, SNAP & TANF instead of
raising taxes on top .1%”

A White House spokeswoman told CNBC that the
administration welcomed Romney’s focus on cutting child poverty
hoped to work with Romney and others on a bipartisan plan that
would provide aid on a permanent basis, and not add to the
deficit.

Democrats Debate Tighter Limits for $1,400 Relief Payments

President Joe Biden says he has no intention of breaking his
promise to deliver $1,400 relief payments to millions of Americans
suffering amid the coronavirus pandemic, but he has indicated that
he is willing to send the aid to a smaller group of people than he
originally indicated in his $1.9 trillion Covid relief package.

Responding to concerns from lawmakers on both sides of the
aisle, Democratic policymakers are now discussing narrowing the
income groups that would receive the relief payments, The
Washington Post’s Heather Long and Jeff Stein
reported Thursday.

Under the new plan, which Long and Stein note is tentative and
subject to change, individuals earning up to $50,000 and heads of
household earning up to $100,000 per year would receive the full
$1,400 payment. In Biden’s original formulation, the limits were
set at $75,000 and $150,000, respectively. Under both proposals,
payments would drop off above those levels.

The new plan would result in 71% of Americans receiving the full
payment, according to Kyle Pomerleau of the American Enterprise
Institute, with another 17% receiving a partial payment. Under
Biden’s original proposal, 85% of Americans would receive the full
payment.

Children would receive $1,400 under the new proposal, so a
family of four that meets the income requirement would receive
$5,600.

In terms of federal spending, the new plan would cost
about $420 billion, according to calculations by Marc Goldwein of
the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Biden’s plan by
comparison would cost about $465 billion.

Quote of the Day

“It is nonsense and everybody should ignore it. It is boring
and it is the worst part of the United States Senate, but it is a
very important means to an end.”

– Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii,
describing the “vote-a-rama” that kicked off Thursday in the upper
chamber, part of the process that will allow Democrats to pass a
budget resolution and then try to enact President Biden’s $1.9
trillion fiscal rescue plan with just 51 votes, eliminating the
need to win support from Republicans.

During the vote-a-rama, which could stretch into Friday,
senators can offer amendments to the bill, most of which stand no
chance of being adopted. “While leaders and many senators tend to
dislike the vote-a-rama,” Bloomberg Steven Dennis
wrote, “it’s a rare opportunity for backbenchers
and potential future presidential candidates to put the Senate on
record on a pet issue or try to show off for their political
bases.”

Number of the Day: 7.4 Years

At the current rates of deployment, it will take 7.4 years to
vaccinate 75% of the world’s population for Covid-19, the threshold
for returning to something like normal life. That’s according to a

calculator built by Bloomberg News, which claims
it has “the biggest database of Covid-19 shots given around the
world, with more than 108 million doses administered
worldwide.”

The variation between countries, however, is enormous. Israel,
the world’s leader, is expected to hit 75% vaccination in two
months, while in the U.S., it will take 11 months. On the other end
of the spectrum, most countries haven’t even begun their
vaccination efforts yet.

“The pace is likely to accelerate further as more vaccines
become available,” Bloomberg’s Tom Randall wrote Thursday. “Some of
the world’s biggest vaccine-manufacturing hubs in India and Mexico
are only just getting started. More than 8.5 billion doses of
vaccine have been contracted by countries through more than 100
agreements tracked by Bloomberg.”

Chart of the Day: Government Shrinking and Growing

Most federal agencies shrank during the Trump administration,
but the total civilian workforce at the federal level is about 4%
larger today than it was when former President Trump first took
office, thanks to significant growth in a handful of areas, led by
Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security.

Although Trump was unable to shrink the government as much as he
may have wanted to, his efforts to reduce what he derided as the
“deep state” had real effects, The New York Times
reported this week, further damaging a federal
apparatus that has been neglected for decades.

“Our government has suffered literally decades of rust,”
Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, told
the Times. The effects of that neglect are visible today, Stier
said, and include an unemployment system that has trouble
distributing funds quickly and equitably, and a public health
system that is struggling to coordinate the production and delivery
of supplies during a global pandemic.

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