Where the Trump and Harris campaigns agree on care proposals
Where the Trump and Harris campaigns agree on care proposals
When you cut your way through all of the highly divisive political rhetoric surrounding this year’s election, you find there is actually common ground in some policy areas, especially when it comes to economic policy.
And there is some — emphasis on some — limited bipartisan focus on policies that aim to support families raising children. One factor behind this interest in so-called “care proposals” may be a shift in economic research interested in measuring not just what happens to caregivers and parents when they get support for their families, but the long-run effects on how these children fare as they grow up.
For more on this, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with Marketplace’s senior economics contributor Chris Farrell. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sabri Ben-Achour: So just how much agreement do you see across party lines when it comes to economic support for families with kids?
Chris Farrell: There are deep divisions in the best ways to help struggling families and their children. But there does seem to be more child-centric initiatives in-play on both the federal and state level. Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance says he’d like to more than double the current federal child tax credit to $5,000. Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants families with a newborn to get a $6,000 child tax credit and to boost the credit for other kids in the family. Now, the details differ in important ways, of course, but the shared emphasis, it’s intriguing.
Ben-Achour: Sometimes when there is a consensus on something in research, it does not necessarily translate to a consensus in politics on that issue. So I’m wondering, why do you think there is this slight alignment on the issue of children and families?
Farrell: Economist and blogger Noah Smith, he notes that economic paradigms are more important as ways of thinking about policy, rather than a list of actual policies. And I thought about that framing while reviewing a National Bureau of Economic Research program report on a conference on children and families. And the report notes that historically, research largely focused on the risk that unconditional support for low-income families it might sustain rather than alleviate poverty.
Ben-Achour: That idea is something I remember hearing in decades past. You know, the idea that that helping people disincentivizes them from working. Does that actually hold any water when you look at it?
Farrell: You know many researchers these days, they find little effect on labor supply or marriage rates from safety net programs. Instead, academic research now puts a greater emphasis on investigating the long-term impact of safety net programs on children and their human capital development. And the research agenda in recent years has shown, and I quote from the summary, significant positive effects of safety net programs on short-run children outcomes, as well as longer term measures.
Ben-Achour: So if there has been a shift in the focus of economic research focusing on the cost of caregiving, the potential gains for children from public policy, do you think that politicians are registering that and trying to fix it?
Farrell: My sense is that everyone acknowledges that parents and families are really stretched. The kind of research we’re talking about, it’s an inspiration for ideas and policies with the best chance of healthy human capital development for children from families that live on low and unstable incomes.
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