Scott Walker is giving Wisconsin families $100 per kid. Democrats should learn from that.

The author has a point (read rest of article0--probably a good one at that. But for now, what Walker is doing with this piddly amount, is just a bribe.

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Scott Walker is giving Wisconsin families $100 per kid. Democrats should learn from that.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/10/17335466/scott-walker-wisconsin-child-tax-credit-hundred-100-dollars-refund-child-allowance


It’s not meant to fight poverty. But a better version could.

By Dylan Matthews@dylanmattdylan@vox.com May 10, 2018, 2:02am EDT


Scott Walker, the two-term Republican governor of Wisconsin currently running for a third, has a bold election strategy this year: just give people money.

Starting May 15, as Wonkblog’s Jeff Stein explains, Wisconsin parents can go online and receive checks of $100 per child. The payments come a month after Wisconsin income taxes were due and are framed as a refund for “sales and use tax paid on purchases made for raising a dependent child in 2017”:
The child tax rebate website
childtaxrebate.wi.gov

Tax experts are baffled by the news — Scott Drenkard at the conservative Tax Foundation told Stein, “it’s hard to see how it improves economic outcomes” — and political opponents are furious. State Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, one of the Democrats challenging Walker for reelection, said voters are being “bribed with a $100 payment.”

So let me offer an incredibly tepid, caveated defense of Walker’s weird $100 quasi-bribe. It’s poorly designed and it’s not large enough, but it’s also an unconditional cash transfer available to poor families with children, one that in a small way makes life easier for parents and children in the state.

To be clear, I’m not under any illusion that this policy is an anti-poverty best practice, or that Walker is pursuing it for anything approaching the right reasons. When the policy was being debated, he offered to make it “nonrefundable,” meaning that families too poor to pay income tax wouldn’t get any relief. That would’ve effectively eliminated any anti-poverty effect of the policy. Walker has also attempted to implement drug testing and work requirements for food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid. He’s not exactly a friend to the poor.

What’s more, there are some barriers to poor families getting the money, like the requirement that recipients of the funds have bank accounts for direct deposits. After looking over the procedure for filing for the refund, Tim Smeeding, an economist and poverty expert at the University of Wisconsin Madison, commented, “I am sure poor people won’t follow all of this and won’t get the money.”
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