The Child Tax Credit: One Small Step Toward Universal Basic Income?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Remnick talks with Senator Michael Bennet, of Colorado, who campaigned for the Presidency in 2020 advocating for the child tax credit, which is now a centerpiece of the Democratic agenda. Bennet describes why direct cash payments make such a big difference. Our economics correspondent Sheelah Kolhatkar describes the policy as a scale model of universal basic income. She moderates a conversation between two academics on different sides of the issue: Michael Strain, a senior fellow and the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Amy Castro, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Plus, Radio Hour listeners go toe to toe in a round of The New Yorker’s Name Drop, a new quiz.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.5	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.1	Over the last couple of months, more than 35 million American families received checks in the mail from the federal government, payments for
0:22.0	the child tax credit. The idea of a family tax credit is not new. What's new is this. The money
0:28.8	doesn't show up once a year at tax time. Instead, the government gives some of it in advance in predictable
0:34.8	monthly payments. And this can make a very big difference in people's
0:39.0	lives. The shift in policy owes a great deal to Senator Michael Bennett, a Democrat from Colorado.
0:46.4	Bennett is now pushing to make the changes become permanent. Senator, you ran for president in 2020
0:53.4	largely on this issue. And let's just say that it didn't
0:58.5	propel you to the top of the heap. And now here we are, here we are. And it's this issue,
1:03.9	not Medicare for all, which has become one of the huge signature issues on which Joe Biden really is trying to project himself as the
1:13.5	second coming of FDR. It's surprising. Well, what's surprising is that you noticed that I ran for
1:20.9	president. Almost nobody did. But you're right. I ran for president on the idea that we could cut childhood poverty nearly and a half
1:31.1	with some changes to the child tax credit.
1:34.2	And I actually believed during that campaign that I was right where the American people were
1:41.6	on a number of issues, including this issue.
1:46.3	And that this issue,
1:53.2	for example, would be transformational and also politically doable in a way that Medicare for all, just to take that as an example, would not be. And here we are fighting to try to make
1:59.6	it permanent or extended.
2:04.2	The payments are expected to have child poverty this year.
2:05.1	In what ways?
2:11.8	Well, that's just the number of kids that are going to be lifted out of poverty. I was with the two tribes in Colorado this weekend,
	...

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