I read Heritage's Special Report on Fertility so you don't have to
It is deranged. LGBTQ+ obsession, outrageous claims of fraud, sex-dolls, pornography, and more.
So the Heritage foundation has been in the news for a recent “walkout” over the courting of neonazis in the conservative movement.
Today they released a special report: “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” It is quite bizarre, between blaming the federal debt for low fertility, weird obsessions with LGBTQ, sex-dolls, and pornography, and straight up outrageous claims of fraud, this white paper has it all.
The first thing is that it is incredibly vague right off the bat. Here are its three “broad imperatives:”
And these are all well and good buzzwords, but what does any of this even mean? It seems that (1) means eliminating welfare and for some reason imposing work requirements (which don’t work). This is bizarre because its well documented that work requirements, if anything, punish parents further.
(2) seems to mean eliminating the federal debt and completely neutering the entire federal government
I think what the government really needs here is more process and procedure that stops it from doing anything, and they broadly seem to agree, asking for executive orders demanding all government actions take family impact assessments?
(3) appears to mean tax credits and some further weird trump account nonsense, which by all means is the least objectionable part of the report.
After going through its “broad imperatives” the whitepaper goes into a screed against environmentalists, Roe V. Wade, pornagraphy, LGTBTQ+, and… sex dolls. I kid you not:
That’s just the first 20 pages. The next 40 pages go into some detail on why single parent households are bad and dual parent households are good, whatever standard fare in family economics and is already well understood. Ok. Now we get into the exact policy proposals for congress:
Removing the EITC marriage penalty
Work requirements in welfare
Vague nonsense about restructuring welfare
Reducing fraud in welfare
Eliminating “excessive stacking of welfare benefits"
To go through these one-by-one, (1) would be good if congress didn’t already gut the EITC through administrative burdens. (2) plainly is bad for families, which is something that even conservative aligned think-tanks think! (3) is too vague to even critique, you can read the 5 sentences yourself:
Then there’s the real pièce de résistance, (4), which contains this absolute nonsense:
First of all, I really like how sloppy they are to the point they can’t even round numbers consistently. 14.6M or 14.7M, which is it? But beyond that, this is just preposterous. If you go into their sourcing their 14.6M number comes from the following table from another think tank report.
I would like to point out here the highlighted sourcing. The table is taking all “head of household” (i.e. non-joint tax returns) in a single bucket. Whereas if you read the census source, the title tells you everything: “Table FG5. One-Parent Unmarried Family Groups with Own Children Under 18, by Labor Force Status of the Reference Person: 2017.” This means that all EITC-filing households households caring for an older than 18 dependent, which EITC allows so long as they are either under 19, under 24 and a student, or disabled.
It is far more likely that of the ~6M low-income pell grant recipients, all low-income singles with adopted and/or foster kids, all low income single god-parents, all low-income singles with kids aged from 18-19, and the entirety of low-income single caretakers for disabled adult children, that there are more than enough EITC-eligible singles to make up this so-called 3M “gap.” And finally there’s (5) which, once again, is too vague to really even critique.
Overall this report is just a total mess. It concludes on three not-entirely deranged tax credit changes that are not even worth getting into because the fundamentals of the report are so bad. Maybe I’ll get into it in another post. Here is my tweet about this if you want to see if Heritage responds.
