President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address included the expected (a rebuke of Russian President Vladimir Putin) and the unexpected (a failure to reset his domestic agenda despite its demise on Capitol Hill). But the night might have been most noteworthy for its open display of the splintering Democratic coalition. Biden’s address was followed by three speeches offered by Democratic elected officials representing the far left, centrists, and the Congressional Black Caucus. The most interesting of those addresses, by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), included a full-throated call for new welfare spending far beyond what even President Biden has rejected as unobtainable.
Tlaib, a self-described “lifelong Democrat,” presented her address on behalf of the Working Families Party, of which she also counts herself a member. That’s an ironic moniker for an organization that seems most devoted to expanding the American welfare state in the direction of “universal benefits” flowing even to nonworkers. For example, the party’s “People’s Charter” (signed by Tlaib and fellow “Squad” members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Cori Bush (D-MO), among others) calls for “free and universal” health care, “universal child care,” “affordable housing for all,” and “home and community based services for everyone,” among other massive government expansions. All that’s missing from the manifesto is Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion that “economic security” is owed to those “unwilling to work,” as she put it in her Green New Deal.
Like President Biden, Rep. Tlaib touted last year’s massive American Rescue Plan, designed to “deliver emergency relief,” including direct checks. The only problem, according to Tlaib, was that the massive government check-writing operation ended too soon. The reason? The President’s trillion-dollar Build Back Better legislation — which would have extended and expanded key benefits in the March 2021 law — was stopped by “just enough corporate-backed Democratic obstructionists” to prevent the legislation from gaining a majority in the Senate.
Rep. Tlaib’s
vision for a big-government future remains undaunted.
Unsatisfied with simply reviving monthly child credit checks paid in 2021 for the first time to nonworking adults, she called for increasing those payments through the “End Child Poverty Act” she introduced last month. Under that bill, $250 or $300 per month checks (depending on the child’s age) would be replaced by $393 per month checks for all children until they turn 19. A summary suggests the benefit would be “universal and include no income phase-ins or phase-outs.” Translation: Full payments would flow even to parents who don’t work at all, forever eliminating both the work requirement and work incentive built into the longstanding child tax credit. That completely ignores the fact that the elimination of that work requirement was a key reason why the Build Back Better bill was derailed.
How much would these new checks mean for some families? In her speech, Tlaib spotlighted a single mother of seven in her district who benefitted from the expanded child tax credit in 2021. While that’s an admittedly exceptional example, under Tlaib’s legislation a single mother of seven in the future would collect an astonishing $627,228 (that is, seven children times $393 per month times 19 years). Her family’s total payments would peak at over $33,000 per year, which unlike earnings from work would be ignored for purposes of determining eligibility for other welfare benefits, and also would be exempt from income and payroll taxes.
Tlaib also urged President Biden to “change how we calculate the poverty line, so that more Americans become eligible for life-saving federal benefits.” Fellow Squad member Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation on that score in 2019, which she dubbed the “Recognizing Poverty Act,” premised on defining more Americans as poor. That would enhance the generosity of the calculation behind Tlaib’s $393 per month child checks, increasing those payments. And it would also expand the number of Americans eligible for other welfare benefits, as well as the amounts they would receive. Ocasio-Cortez’ legislation is open-ended, but it’s easy to imagine the number of New Yorkers counted as poor and on the dole under it would more than double.
President Biden’s domestic agenda has foundered because it was too expensive, discouraged work, and was “paid for” with gimmicks and loopholes. His chances of overcoming those hurdles are hurt, not helped, by colleagues who believe the solution lies in far more of the massive welfare spending that has already ground his agenda to a halt.
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