Last week’s vice-presidential debate was chock-full of references to the middle class and plans to improve conditions for the middle class. That’s also a common refrain to the stump speech of presidential candidate Kamala Harris: She touts that she comes from the middle class, supports the middle class, and values the work ethic that defines the middle class. Her ties to the middle class are the reason, she suggests, that “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” There’s just one problem. Key policies Harris supports are mostly about building up welfare, not the middle class.
When first unveiling her economic plans in August, Harris noted that she “grew up in a middle-class household” and promised to be “laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class.” In September’s debate with Donald Trump, moderators asked Harris, “Do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” She issued a non sequitur of an answer that began with, “So, I was raised as a middle-class kid.” Asked in an interview to describe “one or two specific things you have in mind” for “bringing down prices and making life more affordable,” she awkwardly began, “Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up in a middle-class family.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., parodied those answers at a recent rally in Michigan: “All you have to know is seven words, and you never have to admit to doing anything wrong again . . . I was born in the middle class.” The news-spoofing Babylon Bee similarly mocked Harris’s nonresponsive answers with the headline “‘I Was Born into a Middle-Class Family,’ Explains Wife When Husband Asks Why the Car Is on Fire.”
It all smacks of a career politician with significant income and assets trying desperately to appeal to middle-income voters. And it’s fair to ask exactly how middle-class Harris’s childhood was, given that her mother was a prominent biomedical scientist and her father was a tenured professor of economics at Stanford. Yet Harris’s emphasis on her supposedly humble roots reflects something more than standard political pandering. It’s also an effort to wrap middle-class respectability around proposals that are mostly welfare benefit expansions.
Take Harris’s plans for “restoring the expanded child tax credit” (CTC) — the first proposal in her recently released policy playbook, tellingly titled “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class.” It describes how the temporary 2021 CTC expansion “was one of the largest tax cuts ever passed for the middle-class” and “for millions of middle-class working families…helped them pay their mortgage or rent, buy food, and purchase basics for their kids, like books, diapers, clothes, and toys.” Her proposal would revive 2021’s “temporary middle-class tax relief” and permanently “provide a tax credit of up to $3,600 per child for the middle class and the most hard-pressed working families with children.”
Sounds like a winner, right? It might be, if that were an accurate reflection of the temporary 2021 policy Harris wants to revive. Take her claims of large tax cuts for working families. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the temporary 2021 CTC expansion provided around $20 billion in tax relief — just a fraction of the more than $80 billion in increased benefits it paid to parents who don’t work or earn enough to owe federal income taxes in the first place. The biggest individual winners? Parents who don’t work at all, who for the first time received full CTC checks, on top of tens of thousands of dollars in other welfare benefits they can already collect.
The changes resulted from temporarily suspending the CTC’s longstanding work requirement and work-incentive features, which effectively overturned bipartisan welfare reforms that Bill Clinton and Republicans in Congress enacted a generation ago. Back then, liberals wrongly predicted disaster from expecting low-income parents to work. Leftists have tried to torpedo successful pro-work welfare reforms ever since. The pandemic created their opening, aptly summed up in a 2021 Washington Post headline: “Goodbye, Clinton welfare reform. Hello, child tax credit.” Under that temporary CTC policy — which Harris would not only revive, but make permanent — the IRS briefly became America’s biggest dispenser of welfare checks,
You won’t find reference to exploding welfare benefits anywhere in Harris’s policy playbook, which cloyingly appeals to the middle class more than 40 times. Just as critics have noted of her nonanswers touting her middle-class upbringing, the misdirection is the point. But no amount of middle-class wrapping can conceal what Harris is really after: big new welfare checks for nonworkers and inevitably higher taxes for everyone else who has to pick up the tab.