by Frank Holmes, reporter
Imagine reading an article that warns that, if Republicans don’t vote for the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” act, poor people will suffer.
Now, imagine reading it on a conservative website founded by the most popular commentator on Fox News.
On Monday, an article warned that getting rid of the Child Tax Credit — a $300-a-month handout from the government to people with children — means “cutting into aid on which families had begun to depend.”
The article focuses on West Virginia, claiming that “even if the enhanced credit returns with a work requirement, it could disproportionately harm West Virginia’s poorest” people.
A story praising the most expensive part of Joe Biden’s political agenda wouldn’t be out of place at left-wing websites like Jacobin, The Nation, or Mother Jones. Let’s face it, it would fit right in at any outlet in the entire Fake News media (ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.).
So, what’s it doing in at The Daily Caller, which was founded by Tucker Carlson? Carlson announced he was leaving The Daily Caller in June 2020. Since then, the website has continued its conservative focus, but it’s sometimes strayed into liberal economic views.
But running a story saying that you’ll starve coal miners’ kids to death by opposing the heart of the “Build Back Better” Act seems like a totally different take for the fantastic website.
The story uses tactics common with Fake News media. For example, the article says that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., is wrong to worry that the money will be abused. To prove this, it quotes a West Virginian named Tom Susman, a former member of the state House of Delegates—but it doesn’t tell readers that Tom Susman is a Democrat who says, “You’ve got to give people a reason to say they’re proud to be a Democrat.” He also runs a professional lobbying firm called TSG Consulting.
It also makes strange, Democrat-aligned talking points that Carlson has personally opposed in the past. For instance, it’s upset that too few West Virginians have their children raised by strangers. “Additionally, less than a third of West Virginia children ages 3-4 were enrolled in early childhood education, nearly 20 points below the national average,” it says. But the story just reported that “2020 census numbers showed that nearly 55% of grandparents had at least a significant role in raising their grandchildren, the second-highest rate of any state nationwide.” Most folks would rather have their kids raised by kin than kindercare. Tucker Carlson has repeatedly asked why the government isn’t doing more to “help people raise their own children.” What’s going on here?
Whatever the story, the Child Tax Credit seems to be a questionable policy. Lots of West Virginians didn’t spend a dime of the monthly handouts, which ended at the end of the year when Biden’s “Build Back Better” act bit the dust. “Residents of Manchin’s home state of West Virginia appear quite prudent, as 39.8% said they mostly saved their benefit, the highest share of people in any state,” according to U.S. News & World Report.
Americans say they don’t need and don’t want a handout from the government, especially if it rewards layabouts who refuse to work. “I’ve heard from so many different families from across America that have checked in with me and said you know what I don’t need this tax credit in cash deposited every single month. I really so wish that the fiscal spending was thought out better,” former Dallas Federal Adviser Danielle Dimartino Booth told Fox News host Neil Cavuto last month. “They’re saying we really need to step back and see the effect of all this fiscal spending and craft legislation more reasonably, so that we’re not going money to people who don’t really need it, who are just injecting all the money into the economy, buying things they don’t necessarily need, and igniting this inflation.”
And Joe Biden’s Democrats just rolled back a provision that would have let illegal aliens get billions of dollars in taxpayer handouts through the Child Tax Credit. “Tucked away on page 1,647 of the Build Back Better Act, the Democrats’ social spending package, is a provision that would repeal the Social Security number requirement to obtain child tax credits. This change would expand child tax credits to parents of illegal immigrants who don’t have Social Security numbers,” Fox News reported in the middle of last November. That part of the CTC would come to $2.3 billion to illegal aliens alone, plus another $8.2 billion to the U.S.-born anchor babies of illegal aliens, according to the Center for Immigration Study.
The Daily Caller is one of the most fearless websites opposing illegal immigration and the welfare programs that Democrats wave like magnets to attract illegals across the border. Is DC signing off on this provision of Biden’s agenda, too?
We hope that backing this part of Biden’s economic agenda is a single lapse of judgment by DC.
But The Horn News keeps everybody honest—and expanding government handouts to people who don’t work is honestly a policy worth rethinking.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”