Guess what: The most important story in the current news cycle is not the exiled demagogue’s rant that he would never have staged a coup with a loser like General Mark Milley. Cable news, in particular, is still feeding the beast, falling for his claptrap every time his flaps his yap.
And yeah, we do need to track his incipient fascism. But it would be nice, once in a while, if we paid more than token attention to other stuff that’s going on, most especially the good news. It may not be as “colorful” or “controversial” as coup talk – some might even call it “boring” – but it just so happens that one particular Biden policy, which went into effect yesterday, will financially help roughly 88 percent of all households with children.
Apparently this development is too “boring” for cable and social media: Thanks to the recently-enacted American Rescue Plan, most parents with kids living at home will receive monthly payments ($300 for each child under age 6; $250 for each child between 6 and 17) during the 2021 tax year. This federal “child allowance,” which will help parents pay bills, will cover an estimated 60 million kids. The IRS began sending out direct deposits yesterday. The rich don’t get this money; it’s earmarked for the poor up to the middle class. And we lest forget, not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted to help those parents and kids.
This new child allowance – not dissimilar from what other western countries already do – seems worthy of a wee bit of attention right now, since it involves $15 billion in first payments to people with real needs, a program signed by a president who’s determined to demonstrate that the government can actually work to make life better. Indeed, he and the congressional Democrats want to make this child allowance permanent, to embed it forever like Social Security and Medicare. As key lawmakers declared in April, “Expansion of the Child Tax Credit is the most significant policy to come out of Washington in generations, and Congress has an historic opportunity to provide a lifeline to the middle class and to cut child poverty in half on a permanent basis.”
That would be consequential, and Republicans don’t seem to know how to fight it. Some of them are reflexively claiming that the child allowance money will make people lazy, but Henry Olsen, a commentator with conservative creds, points out that “the vast majority of people who will collect these checks already work, and they aren’t going to stop working or trying to better themselves because they get a few hundred dollars a month from Uncle Sam.” And because of programs like Social Security and Medicare, “the mixed-economy ship has sailed; people have found that they live happier, wealthier, and more secure lives with a combination of government support and private activity.”
Boring, right?
It’s no surprise that so many members of the Washington press corps (particularly the youngest ones, who arrived during the MAGA era) don’t like covering the Biden team. Policy takes precedent these days, and many journalists think policy is dull. The Trump regime oozed idiocy and leaked like a sieve. That was way more fun to cover. Trump cranked up their metabolisms, and they’re still trying to calm themselves down; as Olivia Nuzzi, a young White House reporter, recently lamented, “I feel like a feral child that has to learn not to bite people because I was raised by wolves.”
No wonder they’re thrilled with the looming plethora of Trump books – such welcome catnip! – led by the excerpted revelation that Joint Chiefs chairman Milley feared a post-election coup (“They’re not going to fucking succeed, Milley reportedly vowed)…which prompted Trump to put paw to paper yesterday and scrawl a statement declaring that “if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley”…a remark that’s sick and twisted on so many levels that I can’t even…
No! I refuse to get sucked in.
Enjoy that boring money, moms and dads. It’s not deemed to be big news, but at minimum it’s a welcome break from MAGA Theater.