Imminent Death of Expanded CTC Shows Progressive Should Get Serious About Job Guarantees

Fighting for full employment, Not "Universal Benefits", is Key to Winning a Progressive Future

2021 really marks the year that any hopes that “universality” of benefits could sell help for poorer families came crashing down.

Joe Manchin basically announced the end of the expanded Child Tax Credit yesterday by saying Dems had to agree to renew it for ten years or not at all.  

Given the 10-year cost of the CTC is projected to be $1.13 trillion, that would mean dumping almost every other priority from the Build Back Better bill to fit within the $1.75 trillion spending limit Manchin himself has demanded.

The budgetary vice Manchin has put on the CTC complements his hostility to the CTC being available to non-working parents, similar to the hostility Republicans like Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio have expressed in their own proposals for expanded CTC credits (see Romney’s here and Rubio’s here).

The similar attacks on and termination of Pandemic Unemployment Insurance just adds to the evidence of how nearly impossible it is to overcome opposition to financial help for unemployed workers.

And it’s not just political leaders like Manchin or the Republicans. As I detailed in this post in September, polls have shown only a small minority of voters really wanted to keep the expanded Child Tax Credit. And the CTC has consistently polled as the least popular part of the Build Back Better package.

This defied the expectations of most progressive leaders and pundits (including myself) who thought it would be so popular that Democrats could ride that support to the midterms in 2022.

Instead, the CTC has exposed the radical downside of building a progressive strategy around “universal benefits”: they can end up being incredibly expensive to budget for and still be too politically unpopular to justify that expense.

The depressing part is the CTC fits exactly the model of a universal benefit that was supposed to be wildly popular. Families with 61 million children are receiving CTC payments but it looks like folks would rather that working and middle families with tens of millions of children lose that help out of fear that even a few million with non-working parents would get any support. Just a rancid obsession, fed by right-wing media, that somehow, somewhere, some person will have an incentive not to join the workforce.

You Can’t Fight the Ideology of Work

The combination of racism and idealization of work that goes into that hostility is just a blunt reality that progressives need to take into account in their political and policy calculations. That obsession with work is build into the supposed ethos of the “American Dream” and scaffolded among many by Biblical authority, the most famous being "He who does not work shall not eat" (SecondThessalonians 3:10)

But that mania for work has historically extended to large parts of the left as well. Echoing Marx’s exhortation that everyone should contribute to society, “from each according to their means,” no less than Vladamir Lenin in his State and Revolution quoted that biblical line and the 1936 Soviet Constitution enshrined it in its Article 12:

“In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’

And even liberal nostalgia for the New Deal is built on a fondness for the Works Progress Administration employing millions of the unemployed, despite the reality that most of those jobs were little more than subminimum wage workfare.

The point is that the commitment to “workerism”, to support for people who work - and disdain for those who don’t manage to find a job is an almost unyielding DNA of our politics. So the lesson of the last year is to choose a policy framework that accommodates that reality while delivering the public policies we want.

A Job Guarantee is the Framework on Which to Build Progressive Policy

As I detailed in this Nation piece, we already have a pretty extensive set of benefits available to those involved even in part-time work. And expanding support for those working is always more popular than doing so for those not working: just note the far higher support for the Earned Income Tax Credit expansion in the poll above, even though far fewer of those polled benefit from it personally.

Imagine if Biden’s agenda had been built around a clear commitment to guaranteed employment for every American, with each policy serving that goal.

• Physical infrastructure investments to help employ large numbers.

• Pre-K and Child Care to employ caregivers, while making sure others could work

• A massive green jobs agenda covering climate change commitments

• Higher education spending to train skilled workers for new industries and opportunities.

• And financial support for workers, particularly working parents, to expand their buying power and drive additional employment.

And with full employment in place, programs like family leave or elder care or support for students, are all part of supporting workers during expected downtimes from employment. Obviously, this kind of messaging exists for many of these programs but it is not tied together with the unifying principle of a job guarantee- and rather than giving everyone a job, the core default policy is just to give the unemployed cash.

Of course, jobs are more expensive than direct financial payments, one reason job guarantees look prohibitively expensive. But one lesson from the pandemic is that when there is political will, massive spending is just not that challenging in a country that is as wealthy as we are. As many have bitterly noted, multi-trillion-dollar defense budgets get approved with little worry about how to pay for them. What we should want is a job guarantee program so sacrosanct that no one even questions renewal year-to-year.

And job guarantees like most jobs programs of every kind, have that kind of broad political support. Just to repost this poll where 79 PERCENT of the population supports programs to provide jobs for the unemployed.

Whether that approach would have won over Manchin and Sinema this year is unknowable but as a long-term approach, it seems like the most stable foundation for messaging progressive policy going forward. Programs dedicating trillions of dollars each year seem far more feasible if the clear goal is employing every potential person.

That at least is one lesson I think progressives should take away from the abrupt political end of Pandemic UI and from what looks like a similarly abrupt end of the expanded Child Tax Credit.