Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday touted agenda items for her first 100 days as president including a $6,000 tax credit for parents of young children.
Democrats have long championed a bigger child tax credit, but the sum Harris proposed is larger than any Democrat previously suggested ― and it’s exactly $1,000 more than Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance suggested earlier this week.
Advertisement
Harris pitched the $6,000 benefit as part of a broader economic policy that includes aid to first-time homebuyers and a crackdown on “price gouging” by food companies.
The Harris campaign said she’s calling for “up to $6,000 in total tax relief for middle-income and low-income families for the first year of their child’s life when a family’s expenses are highest ― with cribs, diapers, car seats and more ― and many parents are still forced to forgo income as they take time off from their job.”
On Sunday, during an interview with CBS News, Vance proposed a $5,000 child tax credit, but seemingly acknowledged it wasn’t a very realistic idea.
“I’d love to see a child tax credit that’s $5,000 per child,” Vance said. “But you, of course, have to work with Congress to see how possible and viable that is.”
Advertisement
Vance mocked the Harris proposal on Friday.
“Kamala Harris will soon propose that we finish the border wall and Make America Great Again,” he wrote on social media. “No one should be fooled by the fake campaign copying President Trump’s vision.”
In recent years, however, it’s Democrats, not Republicans, who have championed an expanded child tax credit.
The policy works by giving households earning up to $400,000 annually a tax cut worth $2,000 per child, and lower-income households can get a portion of the credit as a cash refund.
In 2021, Democrats and President Joe Biden temporarily boosted the credit to as much as $3,600 per child, with the full amount available as a cash refund that the IRS distributed on a monthly basis. The policy resembled the kind of child benefit that is standard in other advanced countries and it greatly reduced poverty among the households that received it.
A bipartisan proposal that passed the House earlier this year paired a more modest child tax credit expansion with a host of business tax breaks. Most Senate Republicans opposed the bill when the Senate considered it earlier this month, however, and Vance skipped the vote.
Advertisement
Neither Harris nor Vance has provided any details about their child tax credit ideas beyond the big numbers, and neither seems likely to receive serious consideration in Congress ― at least not this year.
