Increasing the Child Tax Credit?

GOP hopeful Marco Rubio had the opportunity at the fourth Republican debate Tuesday night to share his plan for an increase in the child tax credit (adding $2,500 to the current $1000 per child, refundable from tax liability including, importantly, payroll taxes). As a devotee of both CST and Ross Douthat's Grand New Party, I've long been a proponent of this, as a up-front investment in the sacrifices parents make toward future generations (of citizens/taxpayers). Douthat makes a more recent case for the credit here and here. Both Douthat and EPPC's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry write that the tax credit--and the critique libertarian Rand Paul had of it at the debate--is emblematic of the broader GOP debate between libertarianism and reform conservatism. 

As relational feminists have rightly argued, children are a "public good"; women's disproportionate care of children creates a "collective or societal debt" toward women (or increasingly, both parents). Without this sort of care-oriented restructuring of the tax code to support those raising children, ours is a system of free-riders. Allowing American parents to keep more of their own income is paying it forward, investing in parents' investment in their children.  This seems to me a no-brainer for Catholics. And is certainly a more "conservative" [read: freedom-loving] approach than that offered by Democrats who seek rather to increase the child care tax credit, benefitting only those who contract out the care of their children to institutional daycare providers, excluding those who care for their young children themselves (or with the help of noninstitutionalized supports). 

The Wall Street Journal's editoral page is strongly opposed to the increase, calling it a new entitlement that merely panders, but doesn't grow the economy: "Mr. Rubio has let himself be swayed by a coterie of non-economist conservatives who view the tax code as an engine of social policy." Seems to this non-economist that the work of parents is an essential piece of that which grows the economy--in the long term, of course, but without their sacrifice of caregiving for future generations, we would be without the human capital on which this knowledge/service economy depends.  Further, for fiscal conservatives to simply dismiss the current stress on working parents--and the current market disincentives toward caregiving and anti-family distortions in the tax code--betrays a forgetfulness of the cultural supports upon which the market (and our republic) depends. John Kasich inelegantly attempted to make this point on Tuesday by referencing the work of "Catholic theologian Michael Novak" who, according to Kasich, argues that the market system needs to be "underlaid with values." He's right--and lifting the tax burden for parents is one of them.

By the way, the prolific Novak has a new book out this month, a topic for a future post.