Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution says she is disappointed with the Lee-Rubio proposal for a tax reform that includes an expansion of the child credit. I’m disappointed with her op-ed, which doesn’t show much familiarity with the arguments surrounding the proposal. I’ll take on her criticisms in the order she makes them.

First: She notes that Senator Lee’s initial proposal was estimated to cause revenue to be much lower. I agree that’s a problem, unless there are a lot of spending cuts accompanying the proposal. But it is certainly possible to modify the proposal to bring in more revenue while keeping the child-credit expansion that she spends most of her op-ed discussing.

Second: She complains that the expanded child credit in Lee’s proposal would not help many low-income households and would be “regressive” because it would help high earners with kids. It’s true, though hardly a criticism, that the proposal is not primarily intended to be an anti-poverty initiative. But it wouldn’t raise taxes on low earners. We’d have to have the full Lee-Rubio proposal and some sophisticated modeling to figure out its distributional impact, but it seems likely that it will involve a reduction in taxes for the lower middle class through the child credit, a reduction in tax breaks for the upper middle class, and a reduction in tax rates for high earners. Calling that “regressive” seems simplistic.

Third: Part of the argument for an expanded child credit seems “convoluted” to Sawhill. So what? A lot of features of any tax reform are there for reasons that require some thinking. Most tax reformers, indeed most economists, favor getting rid of the mortgage-income deduction. The full-dress argument for that is pretty convoluted too. (It involves explaining why interest payments should generally be deductible but not mortgage interest.)

Fourth: Sawhill claims that the argument that parents are overtaxed “does not stand up to closer reasoning,” but her reasoning is not especially close. Lee and Rubio think that parents are double taxed because the federal government does not recognize the extent to which the financial sacrifices they make to raise kids contributes to the health of entitlement programs. She counters that non-parents have to pay taxes to fund education. That’s true, but of course the cost of education is just a small part of those financial sacrifices. And adult non-parents already got an education funded by someone else, so the free-rider issue Lee and Rubio have in mind has no parallel in the case of schooling. (See here for a more extended discussion of that issue.)

Fifth: She says that the payroll taxes parents pay don’t, in fact, cover the cost of entitlement programs. What relevance she thinks this fact has to the debate is completely mystifying. To the extent the gap is made up for by income taxes, it just means that the child credit should apply against parents’ income and payroll taxes—which is exactly what Lee and Rubio want. To the extent there’s an additional gap, it means that future benefits will be restrained, which would reduce the need for the child credit, or that taxes will go up, which would increase that need. In neither case would the basic logic of the case for an expanded credit be affected.

Sixth: Sawhill suggests that we can solve the entitlement-financing problem by bringing in more immigrants. This is doubly irrelevant. First, it has nothing to do with the case for the expanded child credit, which stands whether immigration is reduced, increased, or left alone. Second, it doesn’t solve the problem she identified in her previous paragraph! Under current law new low-skilled immigrants are highly unlikely to cover their entitlement costs.

Seventh: She says that other countries have not increased their fertility rates with pro-natalist policies and therefore an expanded child credit won’t in the U.S. Her argument is a little glib and, yes, again irrelevant. It ignores the counter-example of France, and glosses over the difference between societies in which desired family size is higher than actual family size (such as the U.S.) and those where it’s not. Anyway, the proposal is not designed to increase birthrates but to reduce the overtaxation of parents.

Sawhill finishes by saying that Lee “may be well-meaning,” but his proposal is terrible. I’d say the same about her effort to think about it.