Nancy Folbre: Credits for Children Unless Congress takes action before the end of the year, the child tax credit (currently $1,000 a child) will be cut in half when other Bush-era tax policies formally lapse. Like the earned-income tax credit, which offers considerably more assistance to parents than other earners, the child tax credit enjoys fairly strong bipartisan support, and some conservatives have proposed increases to it. Yet both tax credits show scars of partisan sparring over what kinds of behavior deserve public support and send mixed signals regarding the value of parental contributions. Debate over family tax reform should be part of a larger effort to reconsider family policy in the United States. Currently, the federal tax code subsidizes home ownership about as much as parenting. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the total cost of lost revenues from the mortgage interest tax deduction and the exclusion of capital gains on principal residences is estimated at about $110 billion for 2011. The combined cost of the child tax credit and the earned-income tax credit comes to about $77 billion. Add in an estimate of the cost of the dependent exemption and the total comes to about $107 billion. Many cross-national comparisons, including a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Doing Better for Families," show that the United States provides far less support for child-rearing than other advanced industrial countries. Many factors, including racial and ethnic diversity, anti-immigrant sentiment and high income inequality probably help explain this lack of social solidarity. Differences in political priorities also weaken support for an expanded child tax credit. Conservatives favor increasing it partly in order to encourage a higher birth rate. Others, like me, favor increasing it largely because it would increase the economic well-being and the future productivity of children, especially those from low-income families. Even more profound disagreements center on income eligibility and incentives for marriage and paid employment. Like the earned-income tax credit, the refundable portion of the child tax credit (which offers a transfer to some families with tax liability below the amount of the credit) is based on complex phase-outs that reduce benefits along with family income. These phase-outs make it difficult for even experts to estimate what a specific family can expect to receive. Still, even a rough estimate reveals a disincentive to marry among low-income earners, because family income typically goes up as spouses pool their earnings. The rapid phase-outs also contribute to a very high marginal tax rate for low-income families, because increased earnings result in benefit loss. One way to reduce such problems is to raise the income at which phasing out of credits begins and lower the phase-out rate. The economist Robert Cherry proposes a specific remedy in a New Mothers Tax Relief policy that would modify details of the earned-income tax credit. While this thoughtful proposal should receive serious legislative consideration, a simpler solution would be to convert the child tax credit and the earned-income tax credit to a unified transfer unaffected by family earnings or by marriage, sometimes called a child allowance. Most conservatives dislike this idea because it would benefit single mothers who are not employed. But as the recent brouhaha over Ann Romney's career illustrates, many people now consider raising young children to be work. Many Republicans favor the child tax credit precisely because it - unlike subsidized child care - offers benefits to families in which a parent provides care at home. The spousal benefit provided through Social Security already subsidizes married spouses who haven't worked for pay. A married retiree receives 1.5 times more in retirement benefits than a single retiree with the same earnings record. A conservative proposal developed by Robert Stein for quadrupling the size of the child tax credit to $4,000 a child (along with other proposed modifications of the larger tax code) would prohibit any refund greater than the combined amount of the family's federal income and Social Security tax payments. Single mothers with limited employment during the year would benefit very little from such a proposal, though they and their children are more vulnerable to poverty than any other group. Instead of a double standard, in which married mothers are encouraged to work at home but single mothers are pressured to work for pay, why not give all parents more flexibility to combine paid work with family care? Cash expenditures on children are high, but the costs of parental time devoted to them are even higher. Most mothers work for pay during part of their lives, but face institutional constraints that unnecessarily reduce their economic opportunities. A child allowance combined with paid family leaves of up to three months could ease transitions for parents who plan to remain employed. Public early-childhood education programs focused on toddlers could both improve children's capabilities and make it easier for their parents to schedule paid employment. Such policies have been adopted in many other affluent countries to good effect. Tax reform, including elimination of the mortgage interest tax deduction for vacation homes, boats and second mortgages, could help finance supportive family policies. But tax reform alone can't give parents the credit they deserve.