THE REAL REASON VANCE'S CHILDLESS TAX COMMENTS ARE BAD

National Review

 

The Real Reason Vance’s Child-Tax Comments Are Bad

By Dominic Pino

July 26, 2024 5:39 PM

 

ABC News reported today on comments J. D. Vance made on the Charlie Kirk Show podcast in 2021 in which he said people who don’t have children should pay a higher tax rate than people who do have children. Left-wing activist groups such as American Bridge have clipped the comments and shot them around social media:

 

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Unreal. JD Vance claimed childless adults should pay a higher tax rate than those with children because we should "punish the things that we think are bad."

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11:13 AM · Jul 26, 2024

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Watch the clip. It shows Vance isn’t a very good politician, but not in the way the Left wants you to think.

 

The Harris campaign is trying to make it sound as if Vance was calling for some kind of dystopian makeover of tax policy. But he wasn’t. U.S. tax policy, in 2021 and right now, effectively has a higher tax rate on childless people than on people with children. That’s because of the child tax credit, which is quite popular, and politicians from both parties have voted for it in the past.

 

Levying higher taxes on people without children is mathematically identical to levying lower taxes on people with children. Vance talks about different tax rates rather than a tax credit, but that could also be worked out to be mathematically identical.

 

The U.S. tax code, right now, punishes people who don’t have children relative to people who do, all else equal. You can agree or disagree with whether the child tax credit is good policy, but it is currently the law of the land, and those are the effects it has.

 

It’s not the content of Vance’s comments that hurt him. It’s the way in which he says them.

 

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.

 

First, he does so by talking about the idea with Charlie Kirk, one of the more disreputable people on the right. Kirk regularly goes over-the-top with his rhetoric in ways that damage the conservative cause. When on a show with someone like that, it’s natural to play along.

 

Second, he does so by trying to sound edgy and aggressive in his rhetoric. He said he supports punishing people who do not have kids by taxing them more. People don’t generally like to hear politicians talk about punishing people with taxes. He says, “We need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad.” Note that “we” here refers to “the government,” the entity that sets tax policy. That “we” implies a “they,” in this case, childless people. Siccing the government on a subset of the population is also something people generally don’t like to hear from politicians.

 

And third, he does so by being poorly informed while trying to make his point. He is arguing for a change in current tax policy, but current tax policy already does what he says he wants. Maybe he would like the child tax credit to be increased, but that is not what he said here. He was saying that tax policy, in principle, should do something that it already does. He would not have gotten himself into this mess to begin with if he took into account the effects of current tax policy.

 

There’s a totally palatable way to make the argument that Vance is making in this video. It’s the same argument many people have made for many years about the child tax credit: Raising kids is expensive, government shouldn’t discourage people from having kids, in fact it make things easier for families with kids, so there should be a tax benefit for people with kids.

 

But Vance didn’t make that argument. He is now being judged for the argument he made, which makes a normal idea that is currently in law sound like a weird idea that would require overhauling the tax code.

 

The Real Reason Vance's Child-Tax Comments Are Bad | National Review