for several years a group of conservative media types has lectured republicans that the key to their political salvation is to expand the child tax credit. well, they<u+2019>ve now found their candidate<u+2014> hillary clinton, and therein lies a political lesson. this week mrs. clinton proposed to double the current $1,000 per child tax credit to $2,000 up to age 4. she<u+2019>d also expand eligibility to people who aren<u+2019>t working or earning very little. oh, and in a press release, the clinton campaign threatened that the new proposal is <u+201c>only a down payment<u+201d> on other family-friendly tax ideas<u+2014>or not so family friendly. mrs. clinton is promising <u+201c>tax relief<u+201d> for <u+201c>those without children, and with older children.<u+201d> if it takes a village to raise a child, she now wants to subsidize the entire village. the child tax credit, which was created in 1997, is a tutorial in how social spending through the tax code becomes its own political engine. it was originally a $500 deduction. the george w. bush tax bill of 2001 converted it to a partially refundable credit of $1,000, on the notion that low-income americans don<u+2019>t owe enough income taxes for a deduction to be valuable. the tax freebie does nothing to increase economic growth and it costs a bundle in lost revenue. mrs. clinton began her campaign with a promise to increase the credit<u+2014>details to come, as they did tuesday<u+2014>and also boost the separate credit for child-care expenses and mandate <u+201c>free<u+201d> maternity leave. donald trump answered with his own expanded child subsidy in september<u+2014>a deduction that would allow parents to write off the average state cost of child care for up to four kids while applying the earned-income tax credit to deliver more benefits to low-income non-taxpaying families. the political lesson is that once republicans cede the liberal premise that the tax code is the appropriate venue for social engineering, liberals will always come through with a higher transfer payment and a chicken-in-every-tax-pot pitch. marco rubio proposed lifting the child tax credit to $2,500, not that it did him much political good. but if mr. rubio were the gop nominee, a lot would be different in this race. for example, mrs. clinton would probably have proposed tripling the credit to $3,000.
clinton<u+2019>s me-too tax credit - wsj
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