The Fiscalization of Social Policy

Abstract

This book challenges the conventional wisdom on American exceptionalism, offering the first and only comparative analysis of the politics of child and in-work tax credits. This comparative approach, analyzing the US, Canada, and the UK, upends everything we thought we knew about the politics of tax credits, accounting for both the timing of their development and the distribution of their benefits among families across liberal welfare regimes. Rather than attributing these changes to antiwelfare attitudes, mobilization of conservative forces, shifts toward workfare, or racial antagonism, the book argues that the growing use of tax credits for social policy was a strategic adaptation to austerity in all three countries but that the historical absence of family allowances in the US left the country with a policy legacy that institutionalized a distinct “logic of tax relief,” ensuring that the poorest American families would be ineligible for tax credits. Focusing on the twin puzzles of the growth and distribution of new tax credits across the three countries, the book explains both their convergence on the use of these tax credits and the US’ divergence from the UK and Canada on the distribution of these tax credits’ benefits.