On Wednesday, Politico reported some bad news for President Biden and his Democratic Party for the 2022 midterms: a huge majority of respondents in the latest Morning Consult/Politico poll would not credit Biden or his party for their monthly $300-per-child checks from the federal government.
Politico’s Playbook reported:
Democrats who were hoping that the monthly $300-per-child checks the federal government started sending to families over the summer would be a winner in the midterms won’t like the findings of our latest poll with Morning Consult. Fewer than half of respondents, 47%, gave congressional Democrats credit for providing the extra cash, and even fewer, 38%, credited President Joe Biden. While half of registered voters support the expanded payments (vs. 38% in opposition), only 35% want to make them permanent — an idea Democrats in Congress are weighing at the moment. The payments are set to expire next year.
It’s no secret that the Democratic Party wanted the checks to elicit support for the party among voters. Bloomberg reported in July, “Democratic leaders want voters in key states to know which party is responsible for the checks Americans with young children are set to start receiving on Thursday. A new digital ad campaign targeted to key Senate and House midterm races touts the expanded monthly tax credit of up to $300 a child hitting Americans’ bank accounts as a middle-class tax cut delivered by President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats.”
Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said, “We are making sure Americans know this contrast is clear. While Republicans continue to play games and block efforts to improve the lives of working people, Democrats are delivering for you.”
But Florida GOP senator Marco Rubio fired back:
Over the next six months, some American households with no working adults will receive over $6,000 in cash payments from the federal government. The way President Biden tells it, the handout is part of his administration’s ‘pro-family’ plan. In reality, he has transformed the pro-worker, pro-family Child Tax Credit into an anti-work welfare check.
In recent months, Americans have seen the destructive consequences that follow when the government pays people not to work. These new payments will recreate the same problems and cause totally new ones. Not only does Biden’s plan abandon incentives for marriage and requirements for work, but it will also destroy the child-support enforcement system as we know it by sending cash payments to single parents without ensuring child-support orders are established.
“The Biden Child Allowance is anti-work, and it certainly isn’t pro-family. No one should be fooled,” he concluded.
Rubio had warned in June:
For the next six months, the Child Tax Credit, claimed by working families every year at tax time to keep more of their hard-earned money, will be transformed into an anti-work welfare check. Parents will receive monthly payments of $300 per child under 6 and $250 per child age 7 to 17. By next tax season, some households with no working adults will receive more than $10,000 in these payments. No work required. Just free money on top of America’s existing safety net. It’s all part of a pattern of President Biden spending recklessly on a liberal policy wish list, at risk to the economy.
Despite Democrats’ claims, this is not a pro-family plan. It would re-create the failed welfare system that President Clinton and then-Sen. Biden opposed in the 1990s, when there was a bipartisan consensus that the goal of welfare should be to encourage work and marriage rather than dependency.