Here’s what Joe Biden said of a so-called “expanded Child Tax Credit” that will take the form of monthly payments from the federal government starting in July: “This tax cut sends a clear and powerful message to American workers, working families with children: Help is here.”

That’s not the “clear message” I hear.  Actually, the clear message is:  “You belong to us.”  Parents will no longer supporting their families, fully, and this will be yet another way in which the government creates a special interest who’ll advocate for massive budgets for the sake of its crumbs:

The payments will stop at the end of the year unless Congress re-authorizes them. President Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families plan would extend it through 2025. Republicans have panned the proposal as too expensive, and it faces stiff odds in the 50-50 Senate.

Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the one-year expansion of the credit will cost $110 billion.

The message from Democrats is that they’ll give you cash.  It’s a bribe, pure and simple, and given exploding debt, it’s a bribe for which the children it’s supposedly “lifting out of poverty” will have to pay with interest down the road.

Featured image by Fred Barnard, original illustration for Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.