The Folly of Means-Testing a Child Allowance

Means-testing is a revenue-raising tax done very stupidly and inefficiently.

Click here to read.

Bruenig discusses Jason Furman’s latest call to increase means-testing on the CTC. The discussion is centered around a new paper published by the Norwegian statistical agency pointing out that means-testing a child allowance is strictly inferior to a tax-financed universal benefit on every axis of comparison. Then Bruenig illustrates the point in the Norwegian paper using US data.