In the wake of controversy that erupted earlier this week over the Harris campaign’s uncertain support for the child tax credit (CTC), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Monday that he will force a vote before Congress’s August recess on a piece of legislation he touted as an “expansion” of the CTC. But experts say the bill is in reality a vast expansion of the welfare state that, among other things, subsidizes single parenthood and penalizes marriage.

The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act, which was passed in the House in January by a bipartisan vote of 357–70, was originally described by Schumer as “good for kids, good for affordable housing, good for small businesses, and good for American families.” On Monday, the majority leader pressured his GOP colleagues to pass the bill, remarking, “When we vote, the American people will see for themselves who in fact favors expanding the Child Tax Credit and taking so many kids out of poverty, and who opposes it.”

But Senate Republicans are expressing wariness with the legislation. In February, Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) called for the need for an open amendment process in order to “try to tweak and fix some of the issues.” Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) also voiced doubts about Schumer’s intentions behind forcing a vote just before the August recess instead of taking action after the bill passed the House six months ago. “Makes me wonder how sincere of an effort could this be if … we’re going to run out of time to give a bill adequate consideration,” Cornyn remarked earlier this week. “I don’t expect it to go anywhere.”

Experts on family tax policy agree that the bill is rife with issues, particularly its near-total focus on expanding the welfare state. Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation who was one of the chief architects of the original CTC legislation in 1997, joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Tuesday to break down the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act.

“They say it’s tax relief, but 90%, 91% of the expenditure is for families that do not pay or owe any income tax,” he pointed out. “It’s simply a welfare payment. … It’s not intended to be tax relief. It’s a cash grant. Primarily about 75 to 80% of it goes to single parent families. It’s a subsidy system for single parent families. And the intention of this is to kind of reverse welfare reform from the 1990s, which said, ‘Look, we are not going to deny people aid. We’re not going to put people on the street, but we expect people who are able-bodied and get assistance, whether it’s cash, food, housing, or medical care from the government, they ought to be required to do something to support themselves and their families.’ This [bill] is a way of getting around that and talking about it in a completely misleading way, that, ‘Oh, this is about tax relief.’”

Rector went on to lament that House Republicans who voted to pass the measure “bought into this deception,” further emphasizing that the bill substantially penalizes marriage.

“This is a welfare system that not only subsidizes single parenthood and non-marital birth, but it imposes … dramatic financial penalties on low-income parents who choose to marry,” he noted. “A family where maybe the father makes $25,000 a year, the mom makes say $20,000 — as long as they don’t marry and he’s off the books, she gets tens of thousands of dollars from the government. As soon as they marry, they can lose up to $20,000 a year in welfare payments. So we’ve deliberately made marriage economically irrational for about 40% of the population.”

But that wasn’t the original purpose of welfare reform, Rector argued — it was precisely the opposite.

“We needed more children within the context of marriage — that was the idea of welfare reform,” he contended. “And welfare reform was very successful. At the time that welfare reform was passed, one in 10 children in the United States was born to an unmarried teenage girl 17 or younger. And it was going up. Even The Washington Post was upset about this, but they said there’s no solution. As soon as we put welfare reform in effect, that said, ‘You’re not going to get a lifetime of welfare from the welfare system,’ that immediately dropped, and that rate has dropped down close to zero. … [A]bortions among these young women also fell by the same rate. … There are 10 million fewer abortions that have occurred since welfare reform. [The Tax Relief for American Families bill] will reverse that.”

Rector also observed that the legislation dovetails with an underlying goal of an influential segment of the Left that seeks Marxist goals. “[S]ome of the Left just likes to redistribute income, because it’s cuddly and it’s kind and it’s nice, and it’s fuzzy thinking. But the hard Left really buys into what Marx and Engels said, that in order to produce Utopia, you not only have to get rid of private property and all that stuff, but you have to get rid of the married family. Engels is very, very clear about that.”

Rector concluded by insisting that an expanded welfare state is especially disastrous for men. “Men don’t win from this. … [W]hat you’re doing to men is you’re robbing them of their role as a father and a breadwinner. You’re pushing them out of the household and replacing them with a welfare check. And that has devastating effects on everybody, but in particular the men.”