It's OK to Call a Bad Bill a Bad Bill
You do not in fact 'gotta hand it' to the GOP for putting in a few not-awful tax bill provisions
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So there’s a line commentators like Matt Yglesias and Kelsey Piper use which I find equal parts condescending and useful: good things are good, bad things are bad. It’s basically a way of saying, let’s not twist ourselves into pretzels trying to pretend something is different than what it is.
The Republicans’ reconciliation bill is bad. It’s awful, in fact, including for kids and families. I’ve written about how awful it is enough, and if you need a reminder, well you could click HERE or HERE or HERE or any of a dozen other places.
But here’s the challenge: not every single line in the bill is bad. So what’s one to do if there’s a narrow piece that actually advances one’s priorities? My answer: pull back, see the bigger picture, have moral clarity.
Here’s a good example: the Senate Finance Committee’s version of the legislation includes a modest improvement to the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. Basically, it will make it so that families can claim a higher percentage of their child care expenses, resulting in a hypothetical max credit increase of about $900 for many families. (I say hypothetical because the reforms do not make the credit refundable, meaning it will continue to lock out very low-income families, and most moderate-income families aren’t maxing out the credit as is because they can’t afford to shell out $6,000+ — the amount at which you can get the max credit, if you have two kids — during the year, so they cobble together other care options). The bill also has modest increases to the cap of Dependent Care Assistance Program (DCAP) accounts, the tax-advantaged accounts that employers and employees can pay into like a Health Savings Account for child care.
In a vacuum, fine. Not game-changing, but fine. But this isn’t happening in a vacuum.
What can happen when we get so myopic is we start praising the small advance we wanted even when it is utterly swamped by the badness of what surrounds it. At least one major early childhood group issued a statement praising the inclusion of these provisions without mentioning a single word about how much damage the Senate package will do to families.1
Moreover, the leader of the effort, Alabama GOP Senator Katie Britt — who, I want to say, has the potential to be a strong partner on family policy during what could be a long career in the Senate, and who I do believe genuinely cares about these issues (another useful if simplistic axiom: it is possible to agree with people on some things and disagree with them on others!2) — is getting something of a victory lap here. For instance, the Alabama news site Yellowhammer News ran a story, “Sen. Katie Britt scores win as child care tax relief added to Senate GOP economic package” while the Alabama Political Reporter asserted, “Expanded child care tax credits boost Britt’s pro-family GOP Senate agenda.”
Again: this is a bill that is going to throw millions of people (including child care educators!) off of their health insurance and spike monthly premiums for millions more; exclude millions of U.S. citizen children from the Child Tax Credit; and, but for the intervention of the Senate parliamentarian, throw millions of households — including those with children aged 7-18 — off of their food assistance. In that big picture, is helping a subset of American families realize a few hundreds dollars more in tax relief worth any praise?
Indeed, how can anyone or any organization that claims to have the backs of children and families do anything but be in full-throated opposition to this bill? It’s not a matter of partisanship or a matter of denying the Republicans a victory, it’s a matter of this is a terrible piece of legislation that will do enormous harm. As was the case with corporations and the bill’s baby bonds scheme, no minor improvement to a child care tax credit or a DCAP account can possibly justify giving cover to legislators who are going to vote ‘yes.’ Similarly, no reporter should be credulously writing about these provisions absent the bill’s larger context.
I’m not naive enough to think that a united front from early childhood groups is going to alter the final vote count — indeed, one of my strong pushes right now is that all interest groups should be trying their very hardest to find creative ways to make sure the 1 in 3 American adults who haven’t even heard of this bill know about it, rather than continuing to simply operate in the same Highly Engaged circles — but there is value in stating with moral clarity that this is wrong, even if that risks some relational damage with legislative offices.
Take, for instance, a piece that conservative family policy wonk Patrick T. Brown wrote for Compact on June 5th entitled “The Ugly Side of the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.” Brown’s bread and butter comes from his ability to influence right-of-center thought and have the ear of Republican policymakers. Yet Brown was willing to say publicly that, despite provisions he supports:
the bill in its current form imperils the GOP’s newfound claim to be the party of the working class. It would increase our federal budget deficit by $2.4 trillion over ten years, largely because of the expansion of tax cuts for higher-income individuals. And that tally is accounting for spending cuts, largely concentrated in domestic programs that serve working-class families … in practice, it’s hard to justify such a dramatic and rapid change to how food assistance supports low-income households … Raising the risk of school-age children looking for snacks in a barren pantry is an odd move for a party that would like to be seen as championing families.
I do want to be very clear about something: there is a big difference between trying to influence and shape a legislation AS it is being written, and taking actions to either support or oppose it AFTER it has been introduced and is moving toward passage. It’s the difference between giving input on a recipe as the chef is cooking (“that could use some more salt”) and evaluating the final product once it’s too late to change anything (“that is inedible”). Heck, I helped to host a bipartisan event in March on how the reconciliation bill could be used to make the tax code work better for families! That’s not the issue here.
The issue is that this bill is, on the whole and by any reasonable analysis, bad for families. Therefore, it should not be passed. It does not impinge on one’s bipartisan credentials to say so — it would be a bad bill and should not be passed if it was the Democrats’ bill, too! — and I would in fact argue that all of us, wherever we fall on the ideological spectrum, have an obligation to use every ounce of influence we have to make that clear.
Others, like the National Women’s Law Center, explicitly called out the inadequacy of these provisions.
Do you know who the main GOP family policy champion was in the Senate for most of the 1980s and 1990s, the person without whom we likely wouldn’t have seen substantial family policy advances from the Child Care and Development Block Grant to the Children’s Health Insurance Program to the advent of Early Head Start? Orrin Hatch! Not a guy that I had a lot of other policy agreements with.