Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Hi. One thing that I’ve been seeing a lot of recently is your tweet storm on fertility and the child tax credit. One of the criticisms that keeps coming up is that there’s no reason to think that the child tax credit would actually be an effective movement of fertility rates. So, two-part question: Do you think the importance of the child tax credit is mostly symbolic, or actually effective? And, second, if you were put on a committee and tasked with offering one piece of policy that would raise the American fertility rate in a sustainable way, what would that policy be? So those of us who are involved in the selling of the child tax credit to Republican politicians tended to make an argument that wasn’t per se about the fertility rate. There was an argument that this was a matter of distributional justice, that the tax code was penalizing parents in various ways because of their kids’ contributions to Social Security, and so on, through a rather elaborate schema — that I think was true and correct. That argument had some flaws, but I think, by and large, it was a reasonable argument. But it was also an argument sort of geared to satisfy the slightly sclerotic ideological preconceptions of the Republican party, and sitting here before you fine people tonight, I’ll just say the goal of the child tax credit is to help people have more babies. That should be the actual goal and when the Wall Street Journal accuses it of being social engineering — it is social engineering, and I’m happy to admit it, and maybe there’ll be a Wall Street Journal editorial about this tomorrow. But I think in the same way that the Wall Street Journal’s preferred economic policies, which they hope will spur entrepreneurship and new hiring and business formation and all these things, are also social engineering in a certain way. I don’t think that you can . . . I don’t believe in some pristine separation of the economic sphere (which isn’t social engineering) and your tax policies (aren’t social engineering) from the family. The baseline is, I’m in favor of giving people money to help them have the babies that they want to have. Now, would the child tax credit have accomplished that to the extent that it would have much effect? I would say it was a bare and very minimal effect. I think if you look at the literature, you need something much, much larger to have any hope of moving the needle. But I wouldn’t say it’s symbolic. I think it’s a step in the direction that I would like American society to take, which would take us towards something that wasn’t a $2,000 per child tax credit, but a $5,000 per child tax credit and so on, even upward from there. So those are my maximalist ambitions. Now, it is also true that cultural forms and assumptions and so on play a much more important shaping role in all this, and it might be the case that even if you got to my ideal number that it wouldn’t move the dial that much. But in that case, I would still favor it in part as a means of . . . I think there’s value in building the foundations in political economy for the cultural changes that you wish to see even if those changes haven’t arrived yet. So it might be that the child tax credit’s effect would be counteracted by the deranging influence of screams on people’s romantic lives, or something. That might be the case. But then the child tax credit would still be there waiting for the Butlerian Jihad of the future. [laughter] ging influence of screams on people’s romantic lives, or something. That might be the case. But then the child tax credit would still be there waiting for the Butlerian Jihad of the future. [laughter] The people who laughed are Dune readers and everyone else is not. It’s good; it’s important at some point in every public event to separate the Dune readers from the non-Dune readers. But until the moment arrives when we get a handle on our technological problems and achieve some cultural shift. But anyway, yes, the long story short, at least on the roster of plausible policies, that would be the policy that I would offer. And I think the goal is to . . . It probably wouldn’t have that much influence in its existing form, but the goal would be to get to a form where it did have a chance of having influence.…

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