Family Fun Pack New Baby Is Born 2017

Family unit Fun Pack by People's Policy Project

past Matt Bruenig

Introduction

Relative to its European peers, the United States spends virtually nothing on benefits for families with children.^ane This famine of family benefits leads to two cruel outcomes: it denies many people the power to accept the families that they want and inflicts financial ruin on many of those who get through with parenthood despite the lack of social support.

The prevalence of financial bug among families with children causes many would-be parents to have fewer children than they would prefer and causes some to forego parenthood birthday. A recent survey found that one-fourth of people betwixt the ages of twenty and 45 had fewer or expected to have fewer children than they wanted.² The most common reasons were economic: 64 percentage said child care is too expensive; 44 percent said they can't afford more children; and 43 percent said they waited too long because of financial instability.

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When people exercise have children, they oft struggle to afford child care, pre-k, and even everyday expenses. The effects of this social neglect are felt nearly severely by those on the lesser of our society. Xx-one percent of American children live in relative poverty—a college percentage than that of any European country.^three

Electric current policy discussions around benefits that help families with children are fractured in strange and unhelpful ways. Ideas to expand child care and pre-thousand services tend to go grouped in with teaching policy or stand alone under the heading of "early on babyhood pedagogy and care."⁴ Programs that provide public health insurance to children are categorized as healthcare policy.⁵ Paid go out proposals almost always seek to parcel get out for parents with leave for medical reasons and and then air current upward classified as women's policy.⁶

These issue-area assignments are not wrong in an objective sense, only they create a muddled and rudderless policy framework. A more effective approach would exist to bring all these policy ideas under the heading of family unit benefits and and so pitch family benefits equally having a uncomplicated unified purpose: making parenthood piece of cake and affordable for everyone.

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In Department One of this paper, I lay out a full general theory that explains why having and raising children is so hard in a laissez-faire backer system. In Section Two, I introduce the Family Fun Pack, a suite of family benefits that solves the problems identified in the beginning section. These benefits include free kid care, free pre-k, gratuitous healthcare for children, and a child assart, among other things.

Progressive candidates looking for a fresh platform would exist wise to consider adopting the Family Fun Pack agenda. It is a coherent set of programs that conveys a simple message. These programs, which are common throughout the globe, are extremely effective at reducing the burden of parenthood and peculiarly effective at reducing child poverty.

Department One

The Problems

Capitalist economies only provide income to those who piece of work and those who ain. Since children neither work nor own, they observe themselves locked out of the master mechanisms of resource distribution in a capitalist society. To the extent that children receive resource, they do and then indirectly through a family unit. But relying solely on that unit to funnel incomes to children runs into ii major problems that generate high levels of inequality, poverty, and financial stress.

Problem 1

The Mere Improver Trouble

The first problem, which I telephone call the mere improver problem, is that calculation children to a family unit increases the amount of resources and time needed past the unit of measurement, simply our current economic arrangement does nothing to accost this need. Similar workers receive the same wages and time off even though some have to pay for diapers and child intendance while others do not. Because income is paid out to the factors of production without any regard for its final family-level distribution, families with children wind up in dramatically worse fiscal circumstances than families without children, even when the families are otherwise identical.

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The best fashion to understand the severity of the mere improver trouble is through a concrete example with realistic figures. And so, imagine 2 married middle-class couples, the Smiths and the Johnsons. Both families earn $80,000 per year, just the Smiths have a son and a girl when they are in their mid-20s while the Johnsons never take kids.

According to the latest figures from the usda and the Electric current Expenditure Survey, the Smiths will spend $233,970 out of their ain pockets getting each of their children to age 18.^vii That's $467,940 for both kids. The Johnsons, being childless, will spend $0 over the same menses. If both of the Smith's kids attend a iv-year public college, that volition price the family unit another $116,720, bringing the grand full with college to $584,660 versus the Johnson'south $0.⁸

A table demonstrating the differences in expenses between a family with children (The Smiths) and a family unit with no children (The Johnsons).

Despite working the same heart form jobs, the Smiths are much worse off than the Johnsons. By merely adding two children to their family unit, they find themselves one-half a million dollars in the hole. This dynamic opens upward huge inequalities between families with dissimilar numbers of children and causes many lower income families to drown under the financial burden.

In the above case, the Smiths earn $80,000 per twelvemonth and therefore can probably absorb the extra costs of raising children without going broke. But for lower course families, the story is much more bleak. Retail workers, nutrient service workers, and others with low incomes oft detect themselves completely crushed past these expenses. Without a robust set of family benefits bachelor to get-go child-rearing costs, these families frequently air current up in poverty.

Indeed, because of the mere addition problem, the presence of children is one of the leading causes of poverty in American life. In social statistics, poverty is a function of family unit income and family size. When children are added to a family, the family unit's size increases, but the family'south income does not. This necessarily pulls a family closer to the poverty line and plunges many families below that line.

In 2017, 158 meg Americans lived in families with children.^nine Over 28 million of those people lived beneath the poverty line, and that's even later on counting transfer programs like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.^ten

If these children did not exist, then patently there would exist no child poverty. More than interestingly, if they did not be, and then half of the poor adults who currently alive in families with children would no longer be poor. ¹¹ That's right: one-half of poor adults who alive with children are only poor because of the expenses of raising children. It is thus the presence of children in these households that is driving the adults into poverty. Based on this analysis, children direct or indirectly cause 36 percentage of all the poverty in America.

Since children increase the amount of resource families need to maintain their standard of living, a order that fails to lucifer that need with public benefits volition generally wind upward with high levels of interfamily inequality and loftier levels of child and child-adjacent poverty.

Problem 2

Lifecycle Income Trouble

The second problem, which I call the lifecycle income problem, is that peak childbearing years occur in early adulthood when individuals are working entry level jobs and therefore receiving entry level pay. As workers gain feel, they more often than not receive promotions and raises that increase their incomes, just much of this money comes as well belatedly to assistance with the punctuated costs of raising children. This mismatch between peak earning years and peak childbearing years drives up inequality and poverty in society.

People generally accept children in their late 20s and early 30s. The average age of starting time birth is 26.6 years sometime.¹² The birth rate, i.eastward. the percent of women who have children in a given year, peaks at 11 percent around age xxx.¹³ The percentage of adults living with children under the age of 5 peaks at 35 percentage effectually historic period 33.¹⁴ The percentage of adults living with children under the age of 18 reaches a high of 66 percentage at age 39.¹⁵

Even so adults receive their highest levels of income in their 40s and 50s. Median personal earnings peak at age 44; median family income peaks at age 49; and median equivalized family income, i.eastward. family income adapted for family size, peaks at age 59.^xvi The upshot of this lifecycle income blueprint is that family unit incomes are lowest right effectually the time people offset having children, increase gradually while people are raising kids, and then reach their peak after kids take moved out.

Put simply, the distribution of income in a capitalist economy is at odds with the rhythm of human being life and particularly the rhythm of family life. Child-bearing comes too early to aggregate savings. Income arrives likewise late to finance contemporaneous child-related expenditures.

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Even the patterning of income during parenthood itself is nonsensical: parents of older children have higher incomes than parents of younger children despite the fact that older children practise not require child intendance and despite the fact that the younger years are the most crucial for kid development.

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Ane of the particularly disturbing ways to illustrate the lifecycle income problem is to look at the poverty rates and income levels of children at different ages. Newborns are 32 percentage more likely to live in poverty than 15-yr-olds.¹⁷ Likewise, beginning graders take a 33 percent higher poverty rate than xi_th graders.¹⁸ There is no good reason for these age-based disparities.

Fifteen-year-olds and 11_th graders are not more than virtuous or harder working than newborns and first graders. They are simply older, which ways their parents are older, which means their family unit income is higher.

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Of course, it is non simply poor and centre grade children who feel the pinch of the lifecycle income trouble. Income levels increase as children age at every percentile of the income distribution. The family income of the 10th percentile xv-yr-erstwhile is $5,200 college than the family unit income of the 10_thursday percentile newborn (p10 in the graphs below). That represents an income increase of 55 percent from birth to age 15.

Similarly, the family unit income of the 90_th percentile fifteen-year-old is $23,600 college than the family unit income of the 90_th percentile newborn (p90 in graph), which represents an increase of 15 percent relative to birth. The aforementioned upwardly trend is besides seen at the 25_thursday (p25), l_thursday (p50), and 75_th (p75) percentiles.

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When confronted with these figures and the lifecycle income trouble more by and large, some react past saying that nosotros should effort to get people to delay childbearing. If commercialism distributes more income to people when they are older, then, co-ordinate to this argument, we should but have people look until they are older to take children. Simply this reasoning is wrong for two reasons.

First, it is philosophically repugnant. Economies should be synthetic to support homo beings in their lives, not the other way around. In this specific example, people should be able to have children when they desire to do then based on their own calculations of when they are ready, not be forced to contort their family-formation preferences around an economic order that is hostile to family life.

Second, delaying childbirth for financial reasons prevents many families from having the number of children that they would similar. Amidst the quarter of adults who say they had fewer children than they wanted, 44 percent cite waiting also long because of fiscal instability equally a reason for their deficit.¹⁹ Basic biological realities ensure that solving the lifecycle income problem with delay means denying many people the families that they want to have.

The window for fertility is set by biology while the distribution of national income is established past people through the cosmos of economical institutions. The Us has put together an economic system that ignores the nature of the human lifecycle and has thereby inflicted severe financial pain on children and the parents attempting to raise them. We can't do much well-nigh our biology, merely we tin can create an economy that supports family life, if we want to.

Section Two

The Family Fun Pack Solution

The easiest solution to the problems posed by family life nether capitalism is to levy broad-based taxes then use the revenues from those taxes to fund a set up of benefits that provide resources to families with children. The reason this strategy works is because it causes net transfers of income across three axes: family unit size, age, and income level.

The gear up of benefits I am calling the Family Fun Pack causes income to exist net transferred abroad from smaller families and towards larger families; abroad from older families and towards younger families; and away from richer families and towards poorer families.

The net transfers from smaller to larger families direct address the mere addition trouble while the net transfers from older families to younger families directly accost the lifecycle income problem. The internet transfers from richer to poorer families is a cherry on tiptop that too ensures that older and smaller families with lower incomes are partially shielded from taxes required by the Family Fun Pack scheme.

The Family unit Fun Pack consists of the post-obit seven programs.

Around three months before the birth of a child, mothers will be eligible to receive a infant box that contains essential babe items like dress, diapers, and wipes. The box the items comes in volition be made of sturdy paper-thin and lined with a mattress in order to serve every bit a bassinet. Baby boxes are currently provided to mothers in Republic of finland and Scotland.^twenty Four US states—Ohio, Alabama, New Jersey, and Texas—also take baby box programs for some mothers.²¹

The Social Security Administration volition administer the program by contracting with vendors who prepare baby boxes and send them to benefit recipients. Individuals will plant their eligibility for a baby box through a certification of pregnancy submitted by their doctor.

Effectually the time of the nativity of a child, parents will be eligible to take a full of 36 weeks of task-protected leave from piece of work and receive an income benefit from the Social Security Assistants while they are on leave.

If there is only one custodial parent, then that parent volition be entitled to the entire 36 weeks of get out. If there are two custodial parents, then each parent will be entitled to xviii weeks of exit by default, simply will also be permitted to transfer as much equally xiv of their 18 weeks to the other parent. The option to transfer go out allows couples to split their parental leave entitlement in the way that they prefer.

The income benefit volition be based on the highest earning year from the terminal 3 years of the recipient's Social Security earnings record. The do good volition supervene upon 100 percent of earnings upwardly to the minimum wage (currently $15,080 per year) and 66 percent of earnings that exceed the minimum wage. The maximum benefit will be capped at the national boilerplate wage as measured by the national boilerplate wage index (currently $l,321.89 per year).²² All new parents volition be eligible for benefits equal to at least the minimum wage even if they have no earnings on record.

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This parental go out proposal is an improvement on the leading alternative, chosen the Family unit Deed, for five reasons.²³

1. This proposal truly is a parental exit proposal in that information technology only provides benefits to new parents. The Family Act combines parental exit with other go out benefits, which leads to conceptual and political muddling.
2. This proposal ensures all new parents receive at least the minimum wage while on leave. The Family Deed would provide no benefits to parents without earnings records and would provide below-minimum-wage benefits to many low-earners.
3. This proposal uses a more generous earnings replacement formula: 100 percent replacement up to the minimum wage and 66 percent replacement afterwards. The Family Human activity uses a flat 66 percent replacement formula.
4. This proposal provides 36 weeks of parental leave per child. The Family Act just provides 12 weeks if 1 parent is present or 24 weeks if both parents are present.
5. This proposal allows parents to transfer as much as xiv weeks of their leave entitlement to the other parent. The Family unit Human action does not permit any such transferring.

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In the Family unit Fun Pack framing, parental leave would be understood every bit a benefit for children, with the do good consisting of the care provided by their parents during leave. This likewise differs from conventional paid get out framing, which construes the plan primarily every bit a do good for working adults.

Parents with children between the ages of six months and 3 years will be provided a gratis spot in a public kid intendance centre. Parents who prefer to provide child care at home can forego their public child care spot and instead receive a home child care benefit paid by the Social Security Administration.

The federal government will fund the complimentary child care program through grants, just local school districts will administer information technology. The federal grants volition cover all of the costs of providing the kid care service, including capital expenditures and worker pay. The federal government volition likewise ready standards for the provision of child care, including kid-to-adult ratios and wage levels. If a school district does not cooperate with the program, the federal government will establish its own federally-administered kid care centers in the area covered by the uncooperative district.

Those who opt for the home child intendance do good rather than a public child care spot will be paid a weekly benefit that is roughly equal to the per-child wages of childcare workers. So, for example, the median childcare worker has an annual salary of $22,290.²⁴ The recommended child-to-adult ratio for these workers is effectually iv to one depending on the age of the kid.²⁵ Dividing $22,290 past four gives $v,730 per year, which is $110 per calendar week. Thus, under prevailing child-to-adult ratios and prevailing childcare worker wages, the weekly home kid intendance do good would be $110 per child. If the ratios or prevailing wages change, e.one thousand. because the new public child intendance organization sets college wages, so the home child intendance allowance would change with it.

Children between the ages of iii and five volition be eligible to attend free public pre-yard, merely equally many already do in Oklahoma, New York City, and Washington DC.²⁶ This programme will mirror the structure of the gratuitous public child care plan. The federal government volition fully fund the gratuitous pre-k plan through grants, but local school districts will administrate it, just equally they already administer costless chiliad–12 teaching. If a school district refuses to cooperate with the new programme, then the federal government will open its own pre-yard facilities in that district. Unlike with child care, there will be no benefits available to those seeking to do pre-m at home, i.e. through homeschooling.

All children in public child care, public pre–thousand, and public k–12 schools will be eligible to receive a free lunch during the solar day. The federal authorities volition finance the plan just equally they have financed complimentary and reduced-price lunches for depression-income students since the 1940s.²⁷ The national school dejeuner program was recently expanded via the community eligibility provision to allow schools and school districts with a sufficient number of low-income students to provide free schoolhouse lunches to everyone attending their schools regardless of income.²⁸ Universal school lunches would aggrandize upon the logic of the community eligibility provision by delivering free school lunches to all children, rich and poor akin.

All individuals below the age of 26 will exist eligible to enroll into the Medicare arrangement and receive a comprehensive set of health benefits with no cost-sharing. This would be similar to contempo proposals to create a Medicare-for-All organization, except it would be limited to the nether-26 age group. This is not meant to be an alternative to Medicare-for-All, just a version of it focused specifically on families with children. A Medicare-for-Kids program similar this could as well be a significant pace towards a universal Medicare system.²⁹

Information technology is too worth noting that Medicare-for-Kids would be significantly easier to implement than Medicare-for-All. Children are relatively cheap to insure. In 2012, children received 60 percent less health intendance spending than non-children on a per-capita basis.³⁰ Put differently: children make up 25 per centum of the population but account for less than 12 percent of the personal health care spending. In addition to their low cost, many children are also already publicly insured. In 2016, xl per centum of children received public insurance, generally from Medicaid and chip.³¹ Adding the residue of people nether the age of 26, who once more are not that expensive to insure, onto the public rolls is but not that big of a leap.

Parents volition be eligible to receive a child allowance of $300 per calendar month for every minor child that they are currently taking care of. The Social Security Administration will administer the child assart program.

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This benefit would replace the disruptive hodgepodge of greenbacks benefits for children currently provided through the tax code. The benefits that volition be fully replaced are:

1. Child Tax Credit
2. Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit
3. Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts
4. 529 savings accounts used for elementary or secondary school
5. Head of Household filing status

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In addition to these benefits, the Earned Income Tax Credit (eitc) will exist significantly simplified and scaled back.

Currently, the eitc looks like this.

Single filer (2018)

Married filer (2018)

Subsequently the reform envisioned by the Family Fun Pack, the new eitc volition look like this:

Canada recently carried out a like consolidation of programs into a single child allowance. There, the Liberal authorities used a child allowance to replace the Universal Child Care Benefit, Canada Child Tax Benefit, National Child Benefit, income-splitting for families with children, the Children's Fitness Tax Credit, and the Children's Arts Tax Credit.³²

Combining all these various programs into a kid allowance volition brand the benefits system simpler and more progressive. The universal cash grant blueprint also makes it like shooting fish in a barrel to directly deposit the cash sum into recipients' bank accounts every month rather than as a lump sum tax refund at the end of the twelvemonth.

Conclusion

The Family Fun Pack would bring the The states system of family benefits upward to where its top European peers already are and, in some ways, even surpass those peers. This would dramatically reduce poverty and inequality in society, specially kid poverty. By relying on universal benefits bachelor to all parents, the Family unit Fun Pack would besides become deeply rooted into the American welfare land and very difficult to coil dorsum.

Every bit a policy matter, the Family unit Fun Pack is an elegant solution that addresses the specific problems confronting parents today. Parental exit, free child intendance, and free pre-k fully resolve the trouble of how to care for children before they are able to attend kindergarten. The baby box, costless health care, and free school lunch provide in-kind benefits that address a few universal childhood needs. And and so the child assart provides a modest cash grant to offset a big portion of the costs that remain.

Left alone, capitalist income distributions will always make family unit life miserable for many. The Family Fun Pack makes it easy and affordable for all.

Endnotes

1. Family benefits public spending.
2. Americans Are Having Fewer Babies. They Told Us Why.
3. Poverty charge per unit.
4. Early Childhood. Early on Childhood Education and Care - Domicile.
5. Congress is Going for a I-Two Punch in Taking Away Children's Health Insurance.
6. Paid Family and Medical Leave: By the Numbers.
7. Expenditures on Children past Families, 2015.
8. Average Net Price over Time for Total-Time Students, by Sector.
9. Annual Social and Economical Supplement (ASEC) of the Current Population Survey (CPS). 2017 Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) research file.
10. Income is defined equally the disposable income concept used in the SPM. The poverty line is set equal to one-half of the median equivalized income, which was $30,633 for a family of four. Family unit incomes are equivalized using the square root of family size.
11. For this figure, I simply remove the children from each family unit, and and so find the new equivalized incomes for the adults in each family. Those new equivalized incomes are compared to the same poverty line as earlier, which is $thirty,633 for a family of 4.
12. Births and Natality.
13. Author's calculations of the 2012-2016 American Customs Survey.
14. Author'south calculations of the 2012-2016 American Community Survey.
15. Author'southward calculations of the 2012-2016 American Community Survey.
16. Author's calculations of the 2012-2016 American Community Survey. Family incomes are equivalized past dividing by the square root of family size.

17. Author's calculations of the American Community Survey. Poverty is defined by the official poverty mensurate.
18. Author's calculations of the American Community Survey. Poverty is defined past the official poverty measure.
19. Americans Are Having Fewer Babies. They Told United states Why.
20. Maternity package 2018. Baby Box.
21. What new Texas moms should know nigh those free baby boxes. New Jersey gives out gratuitous infant boxes in move to lower infant mortality rates. Ohio becomes 2nd state to offer free baby boxes to adjourn babe deaths. The Infant Box program is here to stay in Alabama, still in loftier need.
22. National Average Wage Alphabetize
23. The Family And Medical Insurance Go out (Family) Human action: Frequently Asked Questions.
24. 39-9011 Childcare Workers.
25. Ratios and Group Sizes.
26. Oklahomans take embraced gratis, universal early pedagogy—and it's working. Pre-Thousand. Pre-Kindergarten (PK3 and PK4).
27. National School Dejeuner Program (NSLP).
28. Community Eligibility Provision.
29. The Path to Medicare-for-All Starts with Medicare-for-Kids.
30. NHE Fact Sheet.
31. Wellness Insurance Coverage of Children 0-18.
32. 5 things to know most the new Canada Child Do good.

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Source: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/family-fun-pack/

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