In April 2021, President Joe Biden unveiled his American Families Plan (AFP), which promised to enact a slate of family welfare supports to help tackle some of the severe cost-of-living crunches families face when they have children. The AFP later became part of the broader Build Back Better (BBB) legislation, which seemed poised to pass Congress until Senator Joe Manchin indicated in December that he would not vote for it.

The media coverage of the AFP and BBB focused on the political personalities involved, with relatively little time devoted to the content of the policies being proposed. Many casual observers were likely left with the impression that the legislation was a left-wing wish list ultimately stymied by the reactionary elements of the Democratic Party. This, alas, was not the case.

In substance, the family benefits in BBB were chock-full of the frustrating, cruel, and self-defeating features characteristic of most Democratic welfare policy: direct and indirect exclusions of the poor, benefit cliffs, privatization, and invitations for state-level nonparticipation and sabotage.