Exactly how much will I receive? I'm not becoming a Communist Party for free!
Kamala Harris Will Pay You Not to Work
She has endorsed several measures that resemble Universal Basic Income.
By Matt Weidinger, WSJ
Aug. 14, 2024 4:17 pm ET
A recent study confirms that universal basic income—no-strings-attached benefit checks offered to recipients regardless of need or contribution to the program—discourages work. That’s relevant to the presidential race. Kamala Harris has called more than once for paying UBI-like benefits.
Participants in the UBI program worked nearly 1½ hours less a week on average, and unemployment rose. Other adults in recipient households reduced their work effort, too. Overall, the study found for every dollar in benefits, “total household income excluding the transfers fell by at least 21 cents.”
As vice president, Ms. Harris cast the deciding vote to create a temporary UBI for parents through a significantly expanded child tax credit in 2021. Tens of millions of households collected these payments, which grew to as much as $3,600 a child, even as the program’s work requirement and work incentive features were suspended. A University of Chicago study calculated that if the change were made permanent, it would result in 1.5 million parents exiting the labor force. But the temporary policy lapsed when Sen. Joe Manchin refused to support its extension without a work requirement. The administration’s fiscal 2025 budget would revive the costly 2021 expansion, but they aren’t the only ones flirting with budget-busting proposals. On Sunday, Sen. J.D. Vance called for increasing the child tax credit to $5,000 and making it available to “all American families,” though he didn’t say whether he would make it conditional on work.
As a senator, Ms. Harris proposed two even larger UBI programs that would have displaced more work. In 2019 she introduced her “signature” bill proposing a UBI for lower-income adults, including childless adults. According to a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta report, high effective marginal tax rates on modest-income work (due to progressive tax rates coupled with phasing out current benefits) already “effectively lock low-income workers into poverty.” The phaseout of Ms. Harris’s new $3 trillion entitlement would only increase current disincentives to work and advance.
In 2020 she proposed a pandemic UBI program to issue most Americans $2,000-a-month “crisis payments.” That reckless proposal would have doled out a total of $84,000 to each adult and up to three children in households with adjusted gross income under $200,000 (or $150,000 for single-parent households). The total cost would have been $21 trillion.
Most voters, even Democrats, say benefit recipients should engage in work or training if they are able to do so. Ms. Harris obviously cares more about showering Americans with federal cash than the employment disincentives built into her ideas.
Mr. Weidinger is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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