August 3, 2023
Another Pandemic Legacy: Removing the EITC’s Work and Earnings Requirement
Since its origin in the 1970s, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has been the premier federal program promoting and rewarding work by low-income adults. As displayed below, taxpayers have devoted rapidly growing resources to the EITC since the 1980s. Overall, between 1975 and 2022, the EITC cost taxpayers a total of $1.8 trillion, which…
July 26, 2023
How Worker Benefits Turn into Welfare
The disparity between what the federal government collects in taxes and what it spends was never greater than during the pandemic, when annual deficits peaked at $3.1 trillion in 2020. Even today, when the president swears Bidenomics is “working everywhere,” annual deficits exceed $1.5 trillion, and are expected to only grow. One little-noticed driver of record deficits was…
July 17, 2023
The Latest Extraordinary Findings on Pandemic Improper Payments
A recently released US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report benignly titled “A Framework for Managing Improper Payments in Emergency Assistance Programs” serves as a forward-looking guide for policymakers responding to future emergencies. It also includes a number of extraordinary facts about how badly government programs were abused during the pandemic. The following highlights what GAO found: 1….
June 30, 2023
Democrats Call Biden’s Economy “Savage” in Attempt to Revive Child Tax Credit
With unemployment near record lows and President Joe Biden running for reelection, some Democrats recently offered an unexpected take on the U.S. economy: It stinks, especially for low-income families. During a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) thundered that parents are currently “scraping by … in this savage economy,” burdened with “some of the lowest…
June 27, 2023
House Republican Plan Penalizes Marriage
If there was something liberals used to hate most about welfare reform, it was policies that promoted more work and smaller welfare caseloads. For example, during debate about 1996 reforms, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) asked what would happen to families if they didn’t meet proposed work requirements: “Do we put them on trains and send them out West?” Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said those reforms “can only encourage a…
June 16, 2023
The Missing Context Behind “Cuts” in Fast-Growing Welfare Programs
Official Washington just completed a heated debate on the debt limit, punctuated by intense partisan differences over strengthening work requirements for key welfare programs. On one side stood House Republicans, who on April 26 approved legislation that would have strengthened work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents (dubbed “ABAWDs”) collecting major welfare benefits like food stamps and…
May 31, 2023
Ending the Small Checks Scam
It’s no secret that strengthening work requirements for key welfare benefits has been a flashpoint in the debt limit negotiations. House Republicans, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), insisted on including stronger work requirements in any agreement that raises the debt limit. Meanwhile President Joe Biden vacillated. At first, he noted his past support for work requirements and seemed open…
May 23, 2023
The White House Defender of Welfare Work Requirements
If someone asked you to name a US President who also was a longtime defender of work requirements for welfare benefits, whom might you guess? Ronald Reagan? Donald Trump? George W. Bush? These are good thoughts, but contrary to popular wisdom the answer is a Democrat. That might make you guess Bill Clinton, who signed…
May 17, 2023
Is President Biden About to Triangulate Democrats on Welfare Work Requirements?
On Sunday, President Joe Biden signaled his openness to expanding work requirements for key welfare benefits as part of the debt limit deal he is currently negotiating with Congress. Of those work requirements, Biden said: “I voted for tougher aid programs that’s in the law now. . . . And so I’m waiting to hear what…
May 11, 2023
The House Acts to Recover More Pandemic Unemployment Fraud
FacebookTwitterLinkedIn This week, the House is considering Republican-authored legislation (H.R. 1163, the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act) designed to promote more recovery of fraudulent unemployment checks paid during the pandemic, among other purposes. That’s long overdue, since little of potentially $400 billion in such misspending—including an estimated $60 billion or more in fraud, according to the Government Accountability Office—has…