User:Daask/sandbox/Livable Incomes for Families Today

For draft subjects, see Template:Draft article.

Livable Incomes for Families Today is

Context
LIFT is very similar to the Earned Income Tax Credit, which has achieved bipartisan support. It comes in the wake of expansions of state-level EITC systems, including California and Maryland expanding eligibility criteria, Deleware making the credit refundable, and New Jersey increasing the amount.

By 2018, there was widespread recognition that President Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 benefited the wealthy substantially more than the average American, and it had become unpopular among Americans. LIFT was designed to have the reverse impact of these tax cuts.

Spurred by the success of Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, which featured novel policies including free college education and single-payer healthcare, all the major 2020 Democratic presidential candidates offered substantial new social policy proposals. Politico reported that "the mood on the left is freewheeling, collaborative and ambitious" prompting substantial economic proposals such as LIFT which would previously have been "unthinkable".

In 2017 and 2018, a number of Democrats proposed substantially expanding the EITC. In addition to LIFT, Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) proposed the EITC Modernization Act, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) proposed the Grow American Incomes Now (GAIN) Act, and the Economic Security Project proposed the Working Families Tax Credit.

Reception
The program excludes the poor with no income, which may hurt its popularity with critics on the left. LIFT taps interest in universal basic income, although it is not actually universal.

Influence
In October 2018, President Trump proposed a 10% reduction in taxes for middle-class households. Ann O'Leary, a policy adviser to the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, claims these proposals were a response to LIFT, saying "She got him to pay attention, and he didn’t say 'You're a crazy spending lefty.' He said, 'You're right, and I’m gonna do it better.

LIFT contributed toward California governor Gavin Newsom's Working Families Tax Credit, a 2019 proposal to expand California's state-level Earned Income Tax Credit.