by Betsy McCaughey
The Democratic Party used to call itself the party of working people and hail the “dignity of work.” No more. Now Democrats want to guarantee people who choose not to work an income funded by the suckers who show up for employment, care for their families and pay taxes.
Fortunately, these self-supporting Americans just dodged a bullet. The failure of Build Back Better to pass in Congress, thanks to holdout Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), means that the monthly checks or automatic bank deposits to parents with kids — sometimes dubbed Biden Bucks — come to an end this month. (Though progressives haven’t given up on trying to revive them some other way.)
For working people, the monthly payments were merely an advance on their tax refunds. But parents who choose not to work have been getting no-strings money to support their nonworking lifestyles.
Using the pretext of pandemic relief, Democrats who enacted the American Rescue Plan in March changed a feature of the tax code — the child tax credit available to adults who work and pay taxes — into a grant paid unconditionally and monthly to almost all adults with kids, whether they work or not.
Democrats have been pushing to extend the free monthly payments through 2022 as part of the Build Back Better Act, with a plan to make them permanent.
Manchin saw right through what his party intended: a socialist-style universal basic income. Manchin objected to the unconditional monthly cash grants: “There’s no work requirement whatsoever. Don’t you think if we’re going to help the children,” he asked, the parents “should make some effort?”
So what about the Democratic Party that represents working people? President Joe Biden still talks the talk. “My dad used to say, ‘Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in the community.’”
But Biden’s party is no longer walking that walk. As Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) told the House Ways and Means Committee during a debate over Build Back Better, “the so-called dignity of work — that’s like hearing a fingernail on a chalkboard.” New York magazine’s Eric Levitz calls Manchin’s work-ethic convictions “contemptible.”
Sorry, but most Americans don’t want to support the moochers.
Advocates of the monthly payments hail them as “already a huge success” for lifting millions of children out of poverty. Nonsense. That’s what a working parent does. The national poverty rate fell temporarily, but the payments didn’t solve the problem of parents without the mindset to support their children.
