How Kamala Harris would trap people in poverty
By: Patrice Onwuka (The Hill)
Social Security is in trouble because Democrats, in particular, have been using the program as a backdoor UBI. FICA taxes on the middle class have been used to fund all sorts of DEI dreams instead of retirement plans.
Kamala Harris' populist benevolence depends upon taking money away from someone's future. Bleeding the middle class dry with more taxes and fewer benefits sounds like more of the same. And we know how the middle class has fared since Bill Clinton declared an end to Big Government. So, who is Kamala Harris planning to leave behind? Or is Harris just making it up as she goes?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Vice President Harris has yet to propose solutions to address poverty in America. If we fill in the blanks based on her past policy support and legislative proposals, we find a champion for ideas that keep people locked in poverty, rather than set the unfortunate on a path of upward mobility.
Hard-left policymakers like Harris posit that universal basic income (UBI), which gives people a standard welfare payment with no work requirements, is the solution to economic insecurity. Instead of growing earnings potential or human capital, UBI advocates want to grow the poor's dependence on government.
However, they never seem to consider how people change their behavior when they receive no-strings-attached cash. Recent research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, studying the impact of $1,000 monthly UBI payments on low-income households, found predictably negative outcomes: Fewer recipients worked, hours worked each week fell, and overall income (excluding the cash transfers) fell.
The intuitive folly of UBI is probably why public support for it — even among lower-income individuals — is lower and has declined recently. In 2020, the Pew Research Center found that less than half of Americans supported the idea, even amid double-digit unemployment during the pandemic. As of October 2023, polling from the State Policy Network shows support is down to 35 percent.
Would Vice President Kamala Harris, as president, seek to implement a demonstrably unpopular and economically destabilizing UBI program nationwide? Her record suggests she would. It just may not be called UBI.
As vice president, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to expand the child tax credit through the inflationary American Rescue Plan. Democrats and the Biden-Harris administration hiked the tax credit to $3,600 per young child and $3,000 per school-aged child from $2,000. By making the credit fully refundable and doling it through monthly checks to households, regardless of tax liability or work — a departure from how the credit worked previously — they test-drove a back-door UBI.
If made permanent, the warped Biden-Harris tax credit would create massive disincentives to work, according to scholars at the University of Chicago: they estimate that 1.5 million working parents would drop out of the workforce. Expect Harris to push for a backdoor UBI through an expanded child tax credit, since it was included in the Biden-Harris 2025 budget.
That wasn't her only UBI attempt. As a senator, Harris sponsored a bill spending upwards of $16 trillion to give each adult and dependent (up to three) in most U.S. households $2,000 per month for the duration of the pandemic. With no work requirements or other restrictions, this benefit would have been in addition to — not instead of — other public benefits. Poor and middle-class households would have suddenly had thousands of dollars more to spend on top of stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, and deferred rent and student loan payments.
These Harris bucks would have fueled consumer spending when supply was restricted, triggering inflation even worse than what we experienced and still grapple with today.
Additionally, in 2019, then-presidential candidate Harris aimed to lift poor and middle-class households with her $3 trillion LIFT Act. This signature bill proposed creating a refundable tax credit of $3,000 for single working adults or $6,000 for couples earning less than $100,000 per year to be added on top of the Child and Earned Income Tax Credits.
Believing that the way to address poverty is for government to flood household bank accounts until they reach some arbitrary level of financial security is naive at best. At its worst, it could be devastating. This paternalistic approach erases individual effort and choices.
Furthermore, the government's financial support could never end. (And, by the way, how would it be funded?) Individuals would not be motivated to seek careers and employment to better themselves. UBI is a band-aid; it does not get to the root cause.
Data tell us that there is one surefire way to prevent people from falling into generational hardship and guarantee them a spot in the middle class: the three-part success sequence.
Ninety-eight percent of people who obtain a high school diploma, work full-time, and marry before having children stay out of poverty. In contrast, three-quarters of those who don't do those three things are in poverty at any given moment. And this is true of all races, ethnicities, and ages.
It is doubtful that Harris's fealty to the politics of the far-left would ever allow her to advocate for education, work, marriage and parenthood, in that order. Old-school norms such as personal agency, delayed gratification and personal responsibility are absurdly considered racist today by those pushing modern victimhood politics.
America needs solutions that work, not just those that are easy. We can champion the success sequence without blaming those stuck in a poverty trap and shape policies to support its adoption. To hide the truth and blame society robs poor individuals of the chance to create a better life for themselves and their children.
If Harris cares so much about children, as we heard during the Democratic convention, I challenge her to promote the success sequence rather than send another government check.
Patrice Onwuka is the director of the Center for Economic Opportunity at Independent Women's Forum and co-host of WMAL's O'Connor & Company.
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Social Security can't continue to be used as a DEI piggy bank. The middle class retirement has already been spent. So, what's the plan Kamala? You do have a plan, don't you? Or is Kamala just making this up as she goes?
Hard-left policymakers like Harris posit that universal basic income (UBI)
Like Harris? Is that the best you can do? Just curious since UBI is not a policy that has even been mentioned in her campaign.
So, because she hasn't given a proposal to address poverty, Republicans are going to make one up for her by reading the tea leaves of the past to make assumptions on what she'll do as President while also trying to scare the shit out of voters with stuff she never actually proposed.
Just more unfounded supposition. We know what Trump has planned because he's said it, massive tax cuts for the wealthy, doubling down on broken trickle-down economic policies. But instead of talking about that, Republicans focus on fabricating a false narrative about what Harris "might" do.
Oh, now I get it, this is just some dumb fuck rightwing religious conservatives attempting to push their ideology on the rest of Americans claiming, without any evidence, that everyone must get traditionally married to be successful. To prove it they just say "Data tell us" without any sort of link to any study or the supposed "data". If they did of course it would get picked apart for the fraud it is. No doubt this moron is referring to the " Millennial Success Sequence" pushed by the religious conservative group "Institute for Family Studies".
Institute for Family Studies – Bias and Credibility
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Need a link for that BS.
Same old shit every time. Everytime there has been a tax cut, I got a piece of that pie also. It's a bullshit cop out
Well, that assertion is not true. While Harris hasn't proposed or endorsed the idea of UBI, her campaign proposals are replete with expanding existing programs and creating new programs that address poverty. Harris is promising universal child care, education, health care, housing, food security subsidized in whole or part by the Federal government. Claiming that these proposals by Kamala Harris is not intended to address poverty would be false.
Democrats have been using FICA taxes to pay for their programs to address poverty. Democrats have been using Social Security to provide a limited UBI. Now Social Security is going broke so Democrats are trying to create an artificial baby boom by trucking in immigrants to pay FICA taxes.