J. D. Vance and the Child Tax Credit

J. D. Vance said during a 2021 interview with Charlie Kirk:

We need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad. So, you talk about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good. If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.

The liberal super PAC American Bridge took that clip and declared it “unreal.”

ABC News ran the headline, “Vance argued for higher tax rate on childless Americans in 2021 interview.” Newsweek warned, “JD Vance Wanted Higher Taxes for Childless People, Video Shows.” Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy fumed, “This is . . . idiotic. You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids? We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron. If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of kids.”

What all of this demonstrates is that a lot of people jumping into the debate about tax policy have no idea what is in the current tax code — not some obscure fine-print provision but a tax credit claimed by roughly 40 million American families each year.

It’s called the Child Tax Credit, and it didn’t just sneak up on us. The CTC was introduced by John Kasich, then a Republican representative from Ohio, and passed into law as part of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which was signed by Democratic president Bill Clinton. The bill passed the House with 226 Republican votes and 27 Democratic votes. It passed the Senate with 80 votes.

For each dependent claimed, a tax filer gets up to a $2,000 credit — with up to $1,400 of that total being refundable, meaning that it gets paid out even if the person filing doesn’t owe any taxes.

J. D. Vance has the remarkable ability to take a long-standing part of the tax code that enjoys broad bipartisan support and make it sound scary and unfair.

A big part of a politician’s job is trying to make policy ideas sound good to voters. There are any number of different ways to describe a policy idea. For example, a politician could communicate to voters about inflation and interest rates with articles from economics journals, mathematical equations, and lectures about the money supply and the market for loanable funds. Or, like the Reagan campaign did in 1984, he could talk about inflation and interest rates by showing people getting married and young families buying houses. I think we all know which of those approaches would be more successful.

Vance here essentially does the opposite of what politicians are supposed to do. He is describing a policy idea in the least palatable way possible.

Reportedly, Trump was leaning toward selecting North Dakota governor Doug Burgum as his running mate, but Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump vehemently disagreed and convinced their father that Vance was the best possible pick.