| This dissertation examines the politics behind the increasing use of tax expenditures as tools for social policy in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. Tax expenditures, particularly in-work and child tax credits, have grown into major components of social policy across a number of countries since the 1970s. While some scholars have noted this increasing "fiscalization" of social policy, our current theories of welfare states struggle to explain this expansion across all three countries in an era of "permanent austerity" as well as variation in the distribution of these tax credits between the U.S. on one hand and Canada and the U.K. on the other hand.;First, how can we explain the expansion of tax expenditures targeted toward low-income families at the same time that social assistance beneficiaries were increasingly becoming the political targets of new workfare requirements? I argue that the proliferation of tax expenditures should be seen as an adaptation to austerity. Two unique dimensions of tax expenditures, one symbolic and the other technical, enabled policymakers to pursue a strategy usually associated with retrenchment --- obfuscation --- in order to expand the welfare state in the form of tax credits. Tax credits flourished, in part, because they were not perceived as new spending. I trace the process of fiscalization in the U.S., U.K., and Canada to show how child and in-work tax credits' symbolic and technical perception as non-spending made them valuable policy tools for policymakers seeking to expand the welfare state while still appearing fiscally prudent.;Second, why do Canada and the U.K. target the benefits of these tax credits disproportionately toward families with the lowest incomes, including those with no income, while the U.S. excludes such families? I argue that these differences stem from the cultural legacies of family allowances. Canada and the U.K. both established family allowances---government cash benefits directly payable to families with children regardless of means---in the 1940s. Though they evolved, some version of family allowances persisted in each of these countries into the 1990s, when the shift toward fiscalization accelerated. The policy legacy of family allowances in these countries had two effects as fiscalization took place. Family allowances provided a schema that was easily transported into the tax system, and naturalized children as appropriate recipients of direct cash benefits. In the U.S., the lack of such a legacy meant that the distinction between reduced tax payments and a rebate sent to families was seen as very relevant, and there was no assumption that it was "natural" to provide cash benefits to all families with children. As a result, the debate over how to structure child tax credits played out much differently in the U.S. than in Canada and the U.K, and the tax credits that resulted had strikingly different distributional effects. Whereas Canadian and British policymakers were able to frame child and in-work tax credits as poverty relief for children, American policymakers were unable to successful draw on the frames. Instead, these tax credits were framed as tax relief for taxpayers. The results, in the U.S., were tax credits structures that excluded the poorest children because they were not considered to be part of taxpaying families.;These finding help explain the higher rates of child poverty in the United States relative to Canada and the United Kingdom. Contrary to academic and popular accounts that stress unique American anti-welfare attitudes as the most serious obstacle to reform, this dissertation suggests that nonexistent cultural legacy of family allowances is what is really constraining policymaker efforts to reduce child poverty in the U.S. |
