Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks about tax policies to help families, February 8, 2022, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus.
A fresh-faced, big-beaming woman has just taken over from an older man, weeks before a general election, spurring a turn against the right in the polls. It’s 2017 in New Zealand, and “Jacinda-mania” has energized a broad coalition, with an unusual policy emphasis: on child poverty. In 2024 in the United States, Kamala-mania seemed to lack such a policy focus until Harris’s speech on the “opportunity economy” on Friday. In it, the vice president dropped a major policy offer: to give parents $6,000 in their child’s first year. This proposal is more ambitious than the baby bonus that became Jacinda Ardern’s signature anti-poverty policy. But New Zealand’s experience suggests it could increase children’s opportunities, and be politically viable, in the U.S.
Since 2018, New Zealand’s “Best Start” program has transferred NZ$3,100 (US$1,890) annually to mothers of infants under one, with additional income-based payments for all but the highest-income third of families for the next two years. (Best Start works out to about US$40 a week. While wonks have wrestled over whether child tax credits should be paid annually, monthly, or weekly, New Zealand’s Inland Revenue just asks parents, online while registering their child’s birth, what frequency they would prefer.)
Unconditional cash transfers have narrowed skill gaps, and equalized economic opportunity in the U.S., when they have been substantial and sustained.
Ardern’s “Families Package,” which also included an extension to paid parental leave and increased housing subsidies for low-income families, raised the income of mothers of under-threes by 5 percent on average, and 9 percent for mothers who are Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. Economic gaps between families narrowed, and the percentage of children in poverty fell from nearly 23 percent in 2018 to just over 16 percent in 2021.
The cash transferred, and so the fiscal cost, through Best Start was modest, and came in a context where—unlike in the U.S.—new parents already also had 18 weeks of paid parental leave, universal public health care, a high minimum wage, and strong rights to paid, and unpaid, leave. Still, my research suggests that the Families Package made a real difference for families, seen in reductions in child abuse. The policy led to a 19 percent reduction in referrals for suspected maltreatment of children under three, with an even larger impact on Māori children, and those with older siblings for whom child protective services had a record of concern. Among single-mother families, the policies also substantially reduced the number of children under three being neglected, likely directly by enabling them to safely feed and supervise their babies.
Of course, a $6,000 baby bonus alone will not create an opportunity economy in the U.S. My findings for New Zealand align with those for unconditional cash payments for young children in Alaska, and California, where child maltreatment was significantly reduced. But the experience of Spain shows that, without other supports, baby bonuses will not improve more mainstream issues like education. Harris could multiply the potential of her $6,000 if she can also take on systemic failures of the child care market, as Ardern failed to.
Eric Risberg/AP Photo
Then-New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaking at the Botanical Garden in San Francisco, May 27, 2022
Unconditional cash transfers have narrowed skill gaps, and equalized economic opportunity in the U.S., when they have been substantial and sustained. In that vein, progressives are holding out for a universal child allowance for all ages, making permanent the Child Tax Credit expansions that got presidential sign-off under Trump and Biden during the height of COVID-19. But by focusing on the early years, Harris has a policy that is both politically meaningful and achievable.
Harris no doubt understands the potential to avoid the huge personal and public costs of childhood trauma, her family having taken in her molested childhood friend, and having lasered in on violence against women and children as a prosecutor. She can make the connection to the extreme levels of child poverty and systemic racial inequality in the U.S., where young children are twice as likely as those in New Zealand to be entangled with child protective services for suspected maltreatment.
Harris’s baby bonus proposal shows she recognizes that it is in the first years that the financial squeeze on parents is tightest and felt even by the middle class. It also shows an awareness that it’s for the newest parents that the peculiar American preoccupation with disincentivizing parents’ paid work is most breakable. Best Start had no effect on mothers’ income from employment, and unconditional cash elsewhere has typically only reduced new mothers’ long hours and weekend shifts. It should be hard, at least for proclaimed family-orientated conservatives like J.D. Vance, to begrudge a new mother and her baby that time, even if she is Black or unmarried.
Best Start was supported by the progressive Greens and populist anti-immigration New Zealand First—parties that Ardern’s Labour Party initially relied on to govern. It is also one policy from her era that has survived New Zealand’s current conservative government’s sweeping cuts and new sanctions on welfare recipients. That bodes well for the broad, bipartisan support Harris will need for her big campaign policy idea to become more than just that.
