NEW YORK, NY May 3 (DPI) – Two one-time Treasury Secretaries – Robert Rubin and Jacob Lew – co-wrote a guest column in the NYT calling for a “refundable tax credit” for low-income parents – essentially a restoration of a pandemic emergency-relief benefit that expired earlier this year.

Despite the language, the “tax credit” is not a refund but a cash transfer to those who need it, and the two finance officials expended remarkable space to the inflationary implications of such a policy, and hardly any space to the merits of providing cash versus delivering services to low-income parents.

Several readers – certainly not all – pointed out that handing cash to low-income parents may not help the children. “The uncomfortable truth is there are just too many parents that won’t do anything good or beneficial to their kids with extra cash,” wrote one commenter whose post was widely recommended.

In many ways, though, the reader response section to the op-ed suggested that a vast swath of New York Times readers are more conservative than the publication itself these days.

Among the most popular comments:

A fully refundable child tax credit is cash welfare by any other name. Hello, the 1970s called and wants its policies back. We need to help our children, but funneling cash to poor parents has not proven itself successful in changing long term outcomes. Provide services, not cash.

With inflation at a 40 year high it is difficult to believe that an expanded child tax credit won’t result in even higher inflation. The economy has already been over stimulated which has had a disastrous impact for everybody. This expanded credit will act as a disincentive to work and may be spent on items having nothing to do with child care. The tax laws as presently constituted are more than generous for parents. People should not be rewarded checks for having more children than they are able to provide for.

I support this idea, personally. But it is another example of someone or a group of someone’s (Congress, presumably) stretching credibility by perverting the language; deliberately trying to obfuscate the meaning of something by using the wrong word to describe it is one of my pet peeves. One cannot get a refund for something one did not fund; you can’t get taxes back when you didn’t pay them. What you would get is the gift of taxes paid by other people. That defies the meaning of the word ‘refund’. Honestly, honesty is the best policy.

There should be no such thing as a “refundable tax credit.” That’s Orwellian. If the proposal is to send welfare checks to certain groups of people please just be upfront about it and let it be debated on the merits.

The uncomfortable truth is there are just too many parents that won’t do anything good or beneficial to their kids with extra cash. A better solution is improving and expanding resources at school where the benefit will go to children.