Category: reason

President Joe Biden and Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) are both pitching significant overhauls to the safety net programs for American families by proposing direct monthly child allowances paid to parents.

While the plans differ somewhat in their specifics, both aim to subsidize the costs of raising children in a more direct way than the federal government currently does, a noble goal that would likely boost the economic prospects of poorer parents who may not be able to access the full value of benefits provided via the current tax credit system. But with the country more than $27 trillion in debt, both plans ultimately amount to a promise to hike taxes on the very children that the government would go deeper into debt to subsidize—although Romney’s plan does offset some of the new costs by shuttering existing welfare programs—and both may unintentionally hobble the incentives for poor parents to remain in the workforce.

Biden’s plan, currently included as part of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill the House is drawing up, would send parents an annual total of $3,600 per child under age 6 and $3,000 per child aged 6-17. The payments would phase out for single parents earning more than $75,000 annually and for couples who earn more than $150,000. Although it is officially just a one-year program (payments would be allocated beginning in July and based on 2020 income taxes), The New York Times reports that the goal is to eventually make the change permanent.

Romney’s plan offers slightly larger benefits that would extend to a more expansive set of parents, but it would also abolish other welfare programs that Biden’s plan would maintain. Romney would pay parents an annual total of $4,200 for every child under the age of 6 and $3,000 per child aged 6-17, with the payments phasing out for individuals who earn more than $200,000 annually or couples earning more than $400,000. It is intended to be permanent from the start.

If a parent (or parents) qualified for the full payments during all 17 years of a child’s eligibility, he or she would receive a total of $57,600 per child under Biden’s plan and $62,600 under Romney’s.

As with any expansion of the federal welfare state, the first question that should be asked is how much will this cost and who will pay for it. Romney’s plan comes with an estimated price tag of $254 billion annually, but the senator says those costs are fully offset with a series of changes to existing welfare programs. The child allowance would replace the existing child tax credit program and require a significant overhaul of the current earned income tax credit (EITC), which offsets taxes for low-income families. He would also permanently abolish the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which mostly benefits upper-income residents of states with high taxes. It would also eliminate the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which is what most people typically think of as “welfare”—a joint federal-state program that provides direct cash assistance to poor families.

Biden is not proposing any cuts to existing welfare programs as part of his child allowance plan, which would cost an estimated $120 billion annually with the full amount added to the large and growing national debt. (Remember, Biden’s plan is less generous than Romney’s, hence the lower total cost.)

On that front, then, Romney’s plan is clearly preferable—although his promise that the child allowance would be revenue-neutral should be scrutinized by independent analysts like the Congressional Budget Office.

Some progressive policy wonks also argue Romney’s plan is better. “It’s clear that Romney’s proposal, due to its generosity and administrative simplicity, is an improvement on the Biden proposal,” writes Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, a progressive think tank. He’s on board with some of Romney’s proposed offsets, including abolishing the SALT deduction and the TANF program, which has been beset by waste and abuse for years and fails to deliver much in the way of benefits.

Notably, however, he also advises Democrats to swap out some of the “unsavory” offsets Romney has proposed, effectively saying that Democrats should aim for the higher promised benefits and then try to undercut the means of paying for them. That would add to the staggering levels of debt that America’s future generations will have to deal with—a bill that will come due in the form of higher taxes and lower economic growth.

As long as the benefits are offset with cuts to other welfare programs, a shift to a child allowance system could provide larger, more predictable benefits to needy families without adding to the national debt. That ought to be the goal. If Democrats are unwilling to agree to all the offsets Romney has proposed, he should dial back the promised benefits. There’s ultimately no need to subsidize families earning up to $400,000 annually.

One problem worth considering with both plans is how they would alter the existing incentives for poor parents to work.

To understand that, you first have to understand a little bit about how the current child tax credit program works. Right now, parents can qualify for up to $2,000 in tax credits (up to $1,400 of which is refundable, which means it is paid even if the parent owes no federal taxes) for every child under the age of 17. But there’s a small catch: The individual or couple filing taxes must report at least $2,500 in income to be eligible for the child tax credit. In other words, parents who earn no income cannot claim the benefit.

In some ways, the Romney and Biden plans are best understood as attempts to ensure that even the poorest, non-working parents can collect federal benefits to help offset the cost of raising children. The direct child allowance payments will go to everyone; no need to demonstrate that you earned at least $2,500 to get it.

One obvious consequence of paying people who do not work is that you might give other people an incentive to stop working, warns Scott Winship, director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Child allowances are allowances for behavior that would be expected to hurt their own long-term prospects and, more importantly, the wellbeing of their children,” he writes, though he has also acknowledged that the consequences of that shift are, for now, largely unknown and likely to depend on other aspects of the policy.

Winship also worries that the proposed child allowances—which would be the same in all parts of the country—will seem proportionally larger in poorer places, a corollary to the argument for why a national minimum wage is a bad idea.

Winship also notes that both plans move away from one of the major accomplishments of welfare reforms passed in the 1990s, which were largely predicated on creating incentives to work. That’s been the defining feature of conservative welfare reforms for decades, and abandoning it is likely to create some Republican objections. Already, Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) and Mike Lee (R–Utah) have called out Romney for “undercutting the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.”

Any major shift in how the federal safety net operates is naturally going to have unintended consequences, of course. But the inverse of Winship’s prediction is possible too: The current welfare system rewards work at a low level but can punish those who try to move up the ladder by revoking benefits if they get a raise or find a spouse. A system of direct child allowance payments might encourage some people not to work, but it would also free up others to pursue better jobs without worrying about losing welfare benefits in the process.

The federal government should not be in the business of incentivizing people to have children, either with benefits doled out through the tax code or the welfare system. Nor should it pay people not to work, either by borrowing or by redistributing tax revenue from those who do. At their core, both plans are a form of social engineering that rewards people for choosing to reproduce—even if they cannot afford to raise children—instead of working toward other productive goals that don’t involve offspring.

But if the government is going to do those things, it has a responsibility to taxpayers (current and future) to do so in a fiscally responsible, efficient way. If Romney and Biden can streamline the tangled family safety net programs without adding to the national debt, they should be given a chance.

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The Israeli company Aleph Farms has just unveiled its lab-grown bio-printed slaughter-free fat-marbled ribeye steak. The steak is grown from living cow cells and then incubated to grow, differentiate, and interact in order to acquire the texture and qualities of a real steak. The company claims that it has “the ability to produce any type of steak and plans to expand its portfolio of quality meat products.” In The Washington Post, Aleph’s chief executive Didier Toubia said that the company plans to begin selling its meats in the second half of 2022. He said that the lab-grown meats would initially be sold as a premium product, but predicted that in five years cultured meats would cost the same as conventional meats.

Aleph’s news follows upon San Francisco-based Just Eat, Inc.’s announcement in December that its cultured chicken nuggets have been approved by Singapore’s food safety agency and are already being sold in restaurants. Numerous other startups are pursuing the production of cultured meats including Israel-based Future Meat Technologies and Dutch companies Meatable and Mosa Meat, and U.S.-based Memphis Meats.

These cultured meat companies face stiff competition from the burgeoning plant-based meat companies, including the delicious Impossible Burger from Impossible Foods.

While Singapore’s regulators have been quick to approve a cultured meat product, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Agriculture are still in the process of figuring out how they want to regulate lab-grown meats. Let’s hope that the FDA will move more swiftly toward approving safe cultured meats than the 24 years it took to approve the sale of salmon genetically enhanced to grow faster.

A switch to cultured meats and milk could have big benefits for the natural world. Currently, about half of the world’s habitable land is devoted to agriculture and 77 percent of that is used to raise livestock and produce milk. Although controversial, one preliminary estimate suggests that producing cultured meats cuts energy use by 7–45 percent, greenhouse gas emissions by 78–96 percent, land use by 99 percent, and water use by 82–96 percent. The end of farming could be in sight as real factories replace factory farming.

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Vice reports on an encounter between a citizen activist and police officers at the Beverly Hills Police Department, in which the latter played copyrighted music (“Santeria” by Sublime), in an apparent effort to prevent hte activist from livestreaming the encounter.

In a video posted on his Instagram account, we see a mostly cordial conversation between Devermont and BHPD Sgt. Billy Fair turn a corner when Fair becomes upset that Devermont is live-streaming the interaction, including showing work contact information for another officer. Fair asks how many people are watching, to which Devermont replies, “Enough.”

Fair then stops answering questions, pulls out his phone, and starts silently swiping around—and that’s when the ska music starts playing.

Fair boosts the volume, and continues staring at his phone. For nearly a full minute, Fair is silent, and only starts speaking after we’re a good way through Sublime’s “Santeria.”

Assuming that Fair wasn’t just trying to share his love of ’90s stoner music with the citizens of Beverly Hills, this seems to be an intentional (if misguided) tactic to use social media companies’ copyright protection policies to prevent himself from being filmed.

The idea here seems to be to play copyrighted music so that the algorithms employed by social media platforms will prevent the livestreamed videos from being played, and perhaps block the account of those attempting to post police conduct.

According to the story, this tactic is not endorsed by the Beverly Hills Police Department, though several officers have begun playing music when approached by citizens who sought to film their interactions. Thus far, it does not appear the tactic has been successful.

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An article by Jonathan Zimmerman (Washington Monthly); here’s an excerpt:

In Monty Python’s classic 1979 satirical film about Jesus, Life of Brian, a man is stoned for saying a blasphemous word. One of his accusers says the word, too, and the crowd turns on him. Then an elderly authority declares that nobody should ever say the word, but of course he says it as well. And he gets stoned, too.

I’ve been thinking about this hilarious scene during the dead-serious virtual stoning of veteran New York Times journalist Donald R. McNeil Jr., who as you’ve probably heard by now, resigned from the paper last week after reports surfaced of him using the N-word during a Times-sponsored trip for high school students in Peru in 2019. Like the accusers in Life of Brian, McNeil said the word during a discussion of when and how the word should be penalized. But when it comes to blasphemous terms, context doesn’t count.

That’s the best way to understand the McNeil stoning: as a case of blasphemy. Whereas Americans today probably associate that term with countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, it has an ugly history in the United States. And I fear we’re reviving it to revile those who violate ever-changing norms regardless of their intent….

For Prof. Randall Kennedy’s and my draft article on similar issues in universities (and especially law schools), see The New Taboo: Quoting Epithets in the Classroom and Beyond.

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It has been obvious for months that among the various strategies for reducing the transmission of COVID-19, frantically cleaning surfaces is not particularly useful. But American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten wants schools in Washington, D.C., to reopen only on the condition that a positive COVID-19 case triggers a 24-hour shutdown to allow for sanitization.

Public health experts have understood for quite some time that COVID-19 is an airborne pathogen that spreads from breathing, talking, and singing, not from casual surface-to-surface contact. Unfortunately, many people still wipe down everything they touch—even their groceries—because they have not updated their information since the earliest days of this pandemic. The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson has described this “bonanza of pointless power-scrubbing” as “hygiene theater,” and rightly points out that it wastes time and money on efforts that don’t contribute meaningfully to mitigation.

It’s thus disappointing to learn that Weingarten—who was recently glorified in a New York Times puff piece that hailed her as the savior of the school reopening effort despite the fact that she has thus far worked passionately against it—is hung up on surface-scrubbing. Shutting down an entire school might be necessary if there’s evidence of significant spread between students and teachers, but cleaning efforts that go beyond normal janitorial practices would likely be useless.

These are the kinds of disruptions that will mean that schools aren’t really consistently open in practice, even if in-person learning has technically resumed. Unfortunately, the Biden administration seems less committed to its 100-day school reopening pledge than ever: At a press briefing on Tuesday, Jen Psaki said the White House would consider its goal met if half of all schools were meeting at least one day a week by April 30.

White House: Our goal is to have 50 percent of schools open by April 30, 2021 — “at least one day per week” pic.twitter.com/7VNpG9i0Sx

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 9, 2021

Schools that expect students to show up for school four times a month tops—and fewer times if there’s mandatory extra cleaning—have not reopened in any meaningful sense.

In a recent interview with Axios, Weingarten blamed former President Donald Trump for spreading misinformation about COVID and leaving schools unprepared to reopen.

“Given all of the misinformation that the last administration did, you have a lot of fear, and we have to meet fear with facts,” she said.

If Weingarten wants to counter COVID-19 disinformation, she should refrain from spreading it herself. Many schools can and have reopened safely all over the country. D.C. schools should join them—and they don’t need any additional mops.

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