- Hawley rolled out a plan for a new "Parent Tax Credit" on Monday.
- It would distribute $1,000 payments to married couples and slash that in half for single parents.
- Experts said the plan contained design flaws that could hurt low-income workers during recessions.
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Sen.
The proposal would establish a new, fully refundable tax credit of $6,000 for single parents and $12,000 for couples, meaning families with minuscule or no tax obligations would qualify for a payment.
"Millions of working people want to start a family and would like to care for their children at home, but current policies do not respect these preferences," Hawley said in a news release. "American families should be supported, no matter how they choose to care for their kids."
To get the money, households must report earnings of $7,540 for the prior year, an amount equal to 20 hours of work each week at the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The earnings floor is the same regardless of whether a person is married, and families do not receive more cash if they have more than one child. Families would sign up for the plan through the IRS.
A spokesperson for Hawley told Insider the program would be in addition to the existing child tax credit. The proposal did not include a cost estimate.
The current CTC provides up to $2,000 per child, though it leaves out families with small tax bills.
Other
Patrick Brown, a
"They're trying to find a way to say, 'We want to require work but not screw too many low-income single parents, " Brown said, though adding "the structure of the CTC still makes more sense to me."
Seth Hanlon, a tax expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, told Insider he believed the plan had major design flaws, starting with its earnings threshold.
"That would seem strange if you get nothing if you're $1 short of that," Hanlon said. If the Hawley plan was in effect during the pandemic, he said, millions of parents who lost jobs and thus saw their annual incomes fall below $7,540 would have lost their government aid.
"The number of families benefiting in 2020-2021 would be much lower than other years, which highlights the backwardness," Hanlon said. He also pointed out that parents under the plan need Social Security numbers to qualify, a move that would exclude undocumented families from receiving aid.
Other Republicans, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah, slammed the Romney plan as "welfare" after it was unveiled, torching its universal assistance to families as a step that discouraged work.
Brown said he thought the Hawley plan wouldn't go far among Republicans. "But it does indicate there's openness to actually not just talking the talk about being a pro-worker party but actually being willing to invest in that," he said.
Biden is set to introduce the second part of his infrastructure plan this week with an extension of the monthly child-tax-credit payments to 2025, The Washington Post reported. The IRS recently said it was on course to start monthly payments of the
Editor's note: After publication, Hawley's office clarified to Insider that this policy would be in addition to the CTC. The headline has been updated to reflect this.