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child tax credit
A Compact for American Workers to Share This Labor Day
Most of the long-overdue planks on this Domestic Compact for America are supported by both liberal and conservative families who live, work, and raise their children here.
Sep 01, 2025
Running on the following Domestic Compact for America is a winning election strategy for candidates at the local, state, and national levels.
Most of these long-overdue programs are supported by both liberal and conservative families who live, work, and raise their children, facing unaddressed necessities of life and livelihoods.
Labor Day celebrations should be about more than department store sales and clambakes. America’s labor unions, at both the national and local levels, should circulate this agenda widely on Labor Day, because it is also a Compact for American Workers.
This agenda is being sent to Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO (see the letter sent to her on August 27, 2024), and to the presidents of other major unions, including those representing postal workers, flight attendants, electrical workers, autoworkers, steelworkers, service workers, nurses, textile workers, and agricultural workers.
You might ask yourself: How many of these protections and benefits is US President Donald Trump opposing? These are good yardsticks by which to compare his deceptive rhetoric with his misdeeds.
The basic question is, whose side are you on? The key elements of the Compact are:
- Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to at least $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers.
- Raising all the Social Security benefits, frozen for over 45 years, paying for it by increasing the Social Security tax on the wealthy, benefiting over 60 million elderly. This was supported by about 200 House Democrats in 2022 but was blocked by the Democratic Speaker from going to the floor. Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the bill’s champion, can provide further explanation.
- Restoring taxes on the very under-taxed super rich and corporations (85% approval).
- Establishing a children’s tax credit, cutting child poverty in half, with over 60 million children benefiting. Very popular with parents regardless of their political party affiliations.
- Instituting Medicare for All, safer, more efficient, and much less stressful than our current approach to healthcare.
- Cracking down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, wages, and worker pensions.
- Adopting social safety nets long available in Western Europe and Canada.
- Passing labor law reforms put forth decades ago. (See my column on Taft Hartley at Nader.org)
- Investing in crumbling public services and infrastructures.
- Paying for the above by restoring taxes on the very under-taxed super rich and large corporations and by ending huge corporate welfare giveaways and debloating the runaway, unaudited military budget.
Why has the Democratic Party declined to lead with such an agenda, which has been proposed for years by various citizen groups? (See winningamerica.net.)
One reason is special interest campaign money. Another is that the Democratic Party contracts out many of its campaigns to corporate-conflicted consulting firms that have long pushed weak messaging that leads voters to keep wondering what the party stands for. These consulting firms know the answer—have the party do what is necessary to outraise the GOP in campaign contributions from corporate PACs, the super wealthy, and Wall Street titans.
When the labor union chiefs just write campaign checks to the Democratic Party without demanding an authentic, publicly visible agenda for workers, the pressure is off the party’s leadership to cease being a corporate party or to recruit younger leaders to provide needed energy from the Democratic National Committee down to the grassroots. Without this energy, there is no serious effort to mobilize informed voters who demand these changes and overdue redirections. (See Roots Action, founded by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon.)
Here is to a more vibrant, respectful LABOR DAY.
For more information about what workers can do to advance their interests, see my book Civic Self-Respect—Chapter 2: “I, the Worker.”
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Report Warns of Anti-Family Pronatalist Movement's Growing Influence on Trump White House
"Underneath shiny motherhood medals and promises of baby bonuses is a movement intent on elevating white supremacist ideology and forcing women out of the workplace," said one advocate.
Aug 13, 2025
The Trump administration's push for Americans to have more children has been well documented, from Vice President JD Vance's insults aimed at "childless cat ladies" to officials' meetings with "pronatalist" advocates who want to boost U.S. birth rates, which have been declining since 2007.
But a report released by the National Women's Law Center (NWLC) on Wednesday details how the methods the White House have reportedly considered to convince Americans to procreate moremay be described by the far right as "pro-family," but are actually being pushed by a eugenicist, misogynist movement that has little interest in making it any easier to raise a family in the United States.
The proposals include bestowing a "National Medal of Motherhood" on women who have more than six children, giving a $5,000 "baby bonus" to new parents, and prioritizing federal projects in areas with high birth rates.
"Underneath shiny motherhood medals and promises of baby bonuses is a movement intent on elevating white supremacist ideology and forcing women out of the workplace," said Emily Martin, chief program officer of the National Women's Law Center.
The report describes how "Silicon Valley tech elites" and traditional conservatives who oppose abortion rights and even a woman's right to work outside the home have converged to push for "preserving the traditional family structure while encouraging women to have a lot of children."
With pronatalists often referring to "declining genetic quality" in the U.S. and promoting the idea that Americans must produce "good quality children," in the words of evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman, the pronatalist movement "is built on racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant ideologies."
If conservatives are concerned about population loss in the U.S., the report points out, they would "make it easier for immigrants to come to the United States to live and work. More immigrants mean more workers, which would address some of the economic concerns raised by declining birth rates."
But pronatalists "only want to see certain populations increase (i.e., white people), and there are many immigrants who don't fit into that narrow qualification."
The report, titled "Baby Bonuses and Motherhood Medals: Why We Shouldn't Trust the Pronatalist Movement," describes how President Donald Trump has enlisted a "pronatalist army" that's been instrumental both in pushing a virulently anti-immigrant, mass deportation agenda and in demanding that more straight couples should marry and have children, as the right-wing policy playbook Project 2025 demands.
Trump's former adviser and benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, has spoken frequently about the need to prevent a collapse of U.S. society and civilization by raising birth rates, and has pushed misinformation fearmongering about birth control.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed rewarding areas with high birth rates by prioritizing infrastructure projects, and like Vance has lobbed insults at single women while also deriding the use of contraception.
The report was released days after CNN detailed the close ties the Trump administration has with self-described Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, who heads the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, preaches that women should not vote, and suggested in an interview with correspondent Pamela Brown that women's primary function is birthing children, saying they are "the kind of people that people come out of."
Wilson has ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose children attend schools founded by the pastor and who shared the video online with the tagline of Wilson's church, "All of Christ for All of Life."
But the NWLC noted, no amount of haranguing women over their relationship status, plans for childbearing, or insistence that they are primarily meant to stay at home with "four or five children," as Wilson said, can reverse the impact the Trump administration's policies have had on families.
"While the Trump administration claims to be pursuing a pro-baby agenda, their actions tell a different story," the report notes. "Rather than advancing policies that would actually support families—like lowering costs, expanding access to housing and food, or investing in child care—they've prioritized dismantling basic need supports, rolling back longstanding civil rights protections, and ripping away people's bodily autonomy."
The report was published weeks after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law—making pregnancy more expensive and more dangerous for millions of low-income women by slashing Medicaid funding and "endangering the 42 million women and children" who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for their daily meals.
While demanding that women have more children, said the NWLC, Trump has pushed an "anti-women, anti-family agenda."
Martin said that unlike the pronatalist movement, "a real pro-family agenda would include protecting reproductive healthcare, investing in childcare as a public good, promoting workplace policies that enable parents to succeed, and ensuring that all children have the resources that they need to thrive not just at birth, but throughout their lives."
"The administration's deep hostility toward these pro-family policies," said Martin, "tells you all that you need to know about pronatalists' true motives.”
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Stop a Federal Budget That Betrays Millions of Children, Including Immigrant Children
The budget leans into cruelty toward immigrant children, both in the punishments it seeks to inflict—and in what it proposes to spend our tax dollars on.
Jun 24, 2025
As Congress debates the federal budget, one thing is clear: This legislation isn’t just about dollars and cents—it’s a blueprint for cruelty. The current budget proposal takes direct aim at immigrant families, and threatens to inflict lasting harm on children already subject to inhumane treatment at the hands of the U.S. government.
Advocates for children and families have raised the alarm about how the proposed cuts would gut access to healthcare and essential programs for millions of children. But what has received less public attention, and demands urgent scrutiny, is how this budget leans into cruelty toward immigrant children, both in the punishments it seeks to inflict—and in what it proposes to spend our tax dollars on.
First, the bill includes a cascade of tax and health provisions and fee requirements that will limit vital benefits and harm immigrant children and their families.
Congress is being asked to approve a spending plan that wants to use taxpayer dollars to lock up children, while stripping away the very supports that help them survive.
The budget proposal would eliminate Child Tax Credit eligibility for millions of children if neither of their parents has a Social Security number. The bill also penalizes states that fund health insurance programs for immigrants excluded from federal Medicaid. States that step up to protect immigrant children would be hit with a 10% cut to their Medicaid expansion match, punishing compassion with financial retribution.
And it doesn’t stop there. The budget levies fees on immigrants applying for humanitarian protection, impacting children applying for asylum and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, and putting children who cannot pay at risk of detention or deportation. It also imposes thousands of dollars in fees on people seeking to sponsor unaccompanied children, creating a huge financial barrier to providing children with a family home and care while they await immigration proceedings. These fees will cause children to languish in harmful institutional settings for even longer periods of time.
At the same time, the budget allocates billions of taxpayer dollars to supercharge immigration enforcement, not to solve a crisis, but to expand it. This extreme agenda targets law-abiding immigrants who have for years lived and contributed to the quality of life in communities across this nation. It proposes huge new spending on immigrant detention facilities, with families subject to indefinite detention in direct violation of long-standing legal protections for children.
Children’s Rights knows what these detention facilities look like. As co-counsel representing children under the Flores Settlement Agreement, which has protected the rights of immigrant children detained by the U.S. government for decades, we are one of three organizations allowed to speak directly with children held in federal facilities. We’ve heard their stories firsthand, and we know that even a few days in detention can have devastating and long-lasting emotional and psychological consequences for kids.
Last week, the Flores co-counsel team filed a motion to enforce the Flores Settlement, citing heartbreaking evidence that U.S. Customs and Border Protection is detaining children for weeks in harsh, unsafe, and prison-like conditions before turning them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where they are often detained for weeks more. This should not happen to any child.
It is shameful that, In the face of overwhelming evidence, the administration has filed a motion to terminate the Flores Settlement, alleging that it is no longer necessary. The eyewitness accounts we have heard utterly dispute this. Children and parents tell us they are being imprisoned for prolonged periods, subjected to cruelty, neglect, and conditions that are not only unlawful but deeply inhumane. They make one thing clear: The government cannot be trusted to care for immigrant children without judicial oversight.
The budget and our court battle may be on separate tracks, but they tell the same story. The government is waging a coordinated assault on immigrant children. It is not just failing to protect them—it is actively endangering them.
This is not just a legal fight. It’s a moral one. The federal budget is America’s budget, and it should reflect our values as a nation. Right now, Congress is being asked to approve a spending plan that wants to use taxpayer dollars to lock up children, while stripping away the very supports that help them survive.
We must say no. And we must do it loudly. Poll after poll shows that most Americans disapprove of the aggressive immigration tactics we are seeing. Now is the time to speak up by calling on our elected officials to demand a budget that upholds the dignity and rights of every child, regardless of where they were born.
There is still time to choose a better path—one that protects children instead of punishing them.
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