The Morning Dispatch: Romney’s Child Poverty Plan

Happy Friday! Go…Chiefs?

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Biden announced Thursday that the United States’ support for Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen will come to an end. He also said he is appointing career diplomat Timothy Lenderking as an envoy to conduct peace talks to end the conflict.

• Johnson & Johnson formally requested emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An FDA panel will meet to review the vaccine’s clinical trial data and make a recommendation on February 26.

• The House of Representatives voted Thursday afternoon to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her two committee assignments in light of her history of violent and offensive comments. Greene made a speech earlier in the day distancing herself from some of her previous statements. Eleven Republicans joined Democrats in supporting the resolution.

• Initial jobless claims decreased by 33,000 week-over-week to 779,000 last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday. About 17.8 million people were on some form of unemployment insurance during the week ending January 16, compared with 2.1 million people during the comparable week in 2020.

• President Biden announced yesterday his administration is planning to increase the annual cap on refugees allowed into the United States to 125,000, up from the current 15,000 level. The change would go into effect next fiscal year, beginning in October.

• The United States confirmed 119,564 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 7.3 percent of the 1,646,249 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 4,977 deaths were attributed to the virus on Thursday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 455,657. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 88,668 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1,325,456 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, bringing the nationwide total to 35,203,710.

Romney’s Plan to Reduce Child Poverty

Marriage and birth rates have been steadily declining for decades in the United States, both reaching a nadir in 2018—the last year for which we have accurate data. According to the World Bank, the American fertility rate is 145th out of the 200 countries and states measured. 

Many factors have contributed to these trends, including longer life expectancies, increasing educational attainment, and a decline in religiosity. But there’s another, simpler reason: Raising a family in 2021 America is an incredibly expensive proposition.

On Thursday, Sen. Mitt Romney introduced a deficit-neutral legislative framework aiming to eliminate some of these obstacles to families by reforming the federal welfare system that was last meaningfully updated in 1996. “Now is the time to renew our commitment to families to help them meet the challenges they face as they take on [the] most important work any of us will ever do: Raising our society’s children,” Romney said. 

The proposal is relatively simple, as far as federal welfare programs go. Parents would receive monthly cash benefits—$350 for children ages zero to five, $250 for children ages six to 17—and they would become eligible for them four months prior to a child’s due date. A family’s total annual benefit would be capped at $15,000, meaning the program’s diminishing returns begin to kick in after four or five children. Payouts would begin to slowly phase out at set income thresholds: $200,000 for single-filers, and $400,000 for joint-filers.

According to an analysis from the centrist Niskanen Center, the Family Security Act would reduce the child poverty rate in America by a third (2.8 million children) and cut the deep child poverty rate in half (1.2 million).

Importantly, the policy is designed to maximize uptake and minimize the number of people who slip through the bureaucratic cracks. The monthly benefits would be distributed through the Social Security Administration (SSA) rather than the IRS. The SSA is already equipped to deliver monthly payments, and many low-income families don’t file taxes and have no existing relationship with the IRS. To avoid unnecessary complexity, the monthly cash would be sent to all families—regardless of income—and those above the aforementioned income thresholds would reconcile the difference in their annual tax return. There are no limits or restrictions on how the money could be spent.

On a call with reporters Wednesday, a Romney aide emphasized the importance of meeting families where they are. “Our view is that it’s a better policy if we take it from a neutral stance on whether or not families work or don’t,” he said. “We do think that the benefit is large enough that it would significantly help those who have childcare costs, but it also is designed so that if you do have a stay-at-home parent involved, we’re not tipping the scales one way or another with this approach to say we have a preference for families to specifically work to get this particular benefit.”

Samuel Hammond, one of the authors of the aforementioned Niskanen Center report, believes the framework’s more universal approach—neutral to family structure, spending habits, and income (to a degree)—differentiates it from Democratic programs of yesteryear. It “looks a lot different than welfare bureaucracies that monitor your life,” he told The Dispatch. “The Johnson administration, the Great Society, take from the top and give to the poor kind of mentality. I think a lot of conservative critiques of the welfare state are really critiques of that model. It’s the model of medieval indulgences to the underclass, while simultaneously establishing these bureaucracies to tell them what kind of food to eat and how to raise their kids.”

That’s not to say there isn’t objection to Romney’s plan from the right. The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, who played a large role in the 1996 welfare reform push, was highly critical of the proposal in a phone call with The Dispatch yesterday. “Over 90 percent of the American public believes that an able-bodied adult who receives cash, food, housing, or medical care from the government should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of getting that,” he said. “You want the kids to grow up with a model of a working adult in the household.”

Sens. Marco Rubio and Mike Lee—who have spent years working to reform the Child Tax Credit (CTC)—also took issue with their colleague’s framework. “We do not support turning the Child Tax Credit into what has been called a ‘child allowance,’ paid out as a universal basic income to all parents,” they wrote. “That is not tax relief for working parents; it is welfare assistance. An essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work. Congress should expand the Child Tax Credit without undercutting the responsibility of parents to work to provide for their families.”

Critics of that approach argue that because the CTC is not “fully refundable,” it freezes out the poorest families in the country from realizing the entirety of its benefits. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 increased the maximum CTC from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, but households earning less than $2,500 are not eligible for it, and a family’s annual income must be about $12,000 to access the entirety of the benefit.

“We are prepared to hear from our conservative friends that this otherwise nominal change is somehow a deal-breaker—the creation of a no-good ‘entitlement’ where a perfectly fine ‘tax cut’ once stood. Don’t be confused by this argument, as it is based on an illusion,” Hammond and Robert Orr, also of the Niskanen Center, wrote in a recent white paper. “We believe the time is right to replace the CTC altogether with a bona fide child allowance.”

Romney’s proposal does just that, and it is paid for in large part by consolidating what it calls “overlapping and often duplicative” federal programs into one monthly payment. To remain deficit-neutral, the plan would eliminate the head-of-household tax filing status, Child and Dependent Care Credit, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, and the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction. It would also reform eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Democrats may balk at the complete eradication of some of these programs—particularly the SALT deduction—but all-in-all, Romney’s plan was received fairly well on the other side of the aisle. “Really looking forward to see what @SenatorRomney will propose here,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain tweeted yesterday. “An encouraging sign that bipartisan action to reduce child poverty IS possible.”

And Matt Bruenig of the progressive People’s Policy Project wrote that he liked Romney’s suggestion more than the one President Biden laid out in his American Rescue Plan. Because Romney’s proposal does not add to the deficit, it can be made permanent under budget reconciliation rules, which Democrats appear increasingly likely to take advantage of to pass another coronavirus relief package. Biden’s plan, which is deficit-funded, could only be enacted for one year. 

A Romney aide said his office has already been in contact with the White House and is interested in working with Biden’s team using the Family Security Act as a framework. “I don’t think that anybody goes into anything like this thinking that anybody—either there or on the other side—is going to swallow anything whole, we’re pretty realistic about that,” he said. “We’ll negotiate, and we have communicated that to them.”

Jon Schweppe, the director of policy and government affairs at the American Principles Project, was surprised Romney was the one to deliver this legislation. “This is something that you would expect to maybe come from one of the folks who have been talking about making this transition to becoming a working class party, a pro-family party, all that,” he told The Dispatch. “To come from Mitt Romney is something else.”

“Number one, it is a good policy,” Schweppe, an avowed populist, continued. “And number two, I think it’s a policy the party can actually get behind. It kind of checks boxes that populists haven’t really been able to do yet. … It’s pro-life, too! If you tell people who are on the edge, ‘Hey, if you have this baby, you’re going to start getting $350 checks a month’—I mean, that is going to move people.”

Schweppe is right that the proposal represents a massive shift—both for Romney, and for the Republican Party. 

“So much of our welfare, poverty, and family policy has been anchored to that [1996 reform],” Hammond said. “The language we use, cultural references like ‘Welfare Queens’ and stuff like that, it all hearkens back to that period. And it includes a sort of cadre of policy experts who cut their teeth in the welfare reform debates and stuck around for another 20 years. And so a lot of those folks are being replaced with a younger cohort on the conservative side.”

Biden Ends U.S. Support for War in Yemen

President Biden announced an end to U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen Thursday, following up on a campaign promise and placing a renewed emphasis on resolving the country’s civil war through American diplomacy. In doing so, the administration reverses an Obama and Trump-era policy backing the Saudi Arabia-led intervention into Yemen to fight the Houthi rebels.

The cessation of American military and financial aid is aimed at quelling the “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe” resulting from the conflict. “This war has to end,” the president said in his address, “and to underscore our commitment, we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”

Part of the administration’s diplomatic strategy, according to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, will be to appoint a special envoy to Yemen. Biden later confirmed Tim Lenderking, a longtime diplomat with experience in Middle Eastern affairs, will fill that role. “He’s going to have his hands full, but he’s a very experienced guy,” Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, told The Dispatch. And the situation on the ground is far more complicated than simply limiting U.S. arms flow.

When Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen’s civil war on behalf of government-in-exile leader Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi in 2015, the conflict had been raging in some form for several years. Riyadh saw the instability on its southern border, as well as the Houthi rebels’ apparent ties to its regional rival Iran, as a pressing threat to national security.

More than five years later, the conflict has escalated into one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with Iran and Saudi Arabia using Yemen as an arena in which to confront one another indirectly. But some experts believe there’s no reason to assume Biden’s new approach will mitigate the crisis. In fact, they believe it’s likely to embolden the region’s bad actors and isolate strategic allies.

“It’s a conceit of Biden and U.S. progressives to believe that the only thing keeping the Yemen war going has been U.S. assistance,” Michael Rubin, a Middle East expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told The Dispatch. “Biden’s move is going to make the situation worse. Saudi bombing has been, at times, imprecise, but withholding intelligence won’t make it more accurate.”

Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna has been advocating for an end to U.S. involvement in the war for years. He was pleased with yesterday’s news. “Today marks the beginning of a new era in our foreign policy – one that prioritizes human rights and diplomatic solutions,” he said, calling on the administration to also reverse the Trump White House’s designation of the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization and ensure Yemeni civilians have access to food.

Yemen has long been host to Iranian military technology, as the pariah state seeks to establish a foothold on the Arabian peninsula with the help of insurgent groups. The Houthis—who control much of the Northern part of Yemen and its capital of Sana’a—have capitalized on Iranian backing to barrage Saudi Arabia’s civilian and infrastructure targets with rocket and drone fire. Just last week, Riyadh was attacked by missiles that some, including the State Department, have attributed to Yemen’s Houthis.

The Biden administration’s decision to cut off military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last week—compounded by the president’s repeated promises to return the country to some form of the regionally unpopular 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal—signals a reorientation of the U.S.’s Middle Eastern policy away from the Gulf states.

“To pull the carpet out from Saudi Arabia now in the face of Houthi aggression is akin to blaming Israeli retaliation rather than Hamas terrorism for the flareups along the Gaza border,” Rubin said. “It’s bad policy meant to appease those in Congress who put ideology above a commitment to reality.”

Worth Your Time

• On July 14, 1964—the day of the Republican National Convention—then-Republican presidential candidate and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller spoke on behalf of an amendment condemning political extremist organizations such as the Communist Party, the KKK, and the John Birch Society. The amendment failed, and Rockefeller lost to Barry Goldwater in the presidential primary. “But the fact that such a resolution was debated at all—in such a visible venue, with such high-profile advocates—also says something about Republicans today,” Ronald Brownstein writes in TheAtlantic. What might GOP lawmakers learn from their forebears’ battles with the Birchers in the ‘60s? “The more the party allows itself to be branded as tolerating (or even welcoming) extremism, the more its support is likely to erode among previously Republican-leaning constituencies, especially white-collar suburbanites.”

• This BBC investigation into Uighur concentration camps from Matthew Hill, David Campanale, and Joel Gunter is very difficult to read. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it. “First-hand accounts from inside the internment camps are rare, but several former detainees and a guard have told the BBC they experienced or saw evidence of an organised system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture,” the trio write. “Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the US, said women were removed from the cells ‘every night’ and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.”

Something Courageous

We wrote to you yesterday about the sentencing of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Take a few minutes this morning to listen to a recording of the speech he made in court.

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• In today’s French Press (🔒), David takes a look at conservative pushback to Big Tech in two recent instances he argues have been blown out of proportion. “Millions on the right viewed the Parler cancellation as all the evidence we need that Big Tech is out of control. You mean Trump supporters can’t even start their own social media network without progressive Big Tech’s permission? The market is broken. Cancel culture is out of control. But what if there’s a different story?” he writes.

• Thursday’s edition of Vital Interests(🔒) breaks down the series of decisions President Biden will have to make on Afghanistan policy, with Thomas Joscelyn coming to the conclusion that there’s no perfect path forward. “Will President Biden leave 2,500 American service members, plus associated civilian personnel, in Afghanistan beyond May 1? If Biden decides to do so, then it is likely that more Americans will suffer casualties in an already unpopular war,” he writes. “If President Biden decides to complete America’s withdrawal, then the Afghan government’s weak grasp on power will become only more tenuous. The Taliban is laying the groundwork for the return of its Islamic Emirate. So is al-Qaeda.”

Let Us Know

Who are you rooting for in the Super Bowl this weekend? And what’ll you be snacking on?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).