A recent Politico story on pro-life criticisms of the Trump administration included this response: “Aides also point to Trump’s pardons of activists convicted of breaking into or blocking abortion clinics, the expansion of the child tax credit, and the creation of so-called ‘Trump accounts’ for children as examples of the administration’s ‘pro-family’ focus.”
Expanding the child credit is a great idea in my view, although it is not a substitute for blocking taxpayer subsidies for abortion (for example). But what even people who follow this issue often miss is how small the increase in the child credit has been when you put it in the context of the tax code as a whole.
Trump, in his first term, signed a tax reform that increased the child credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child — but simultaneously eliminated the dependent exemption, the other broad-based benefit for families in the tax code. In 2025, he signed another bill that increased the credit to $2,200.
In 2017, the exemption was worth $607 per child for households in the most populous tax bracket. So each child reduced tax liability by $1,607 for middle-class filers. Adjust that for inflation, and it would be worth $2,070 today: just $130 per child less than the current $2,200 value of the credit. There has been a lot of discussion about how much more willing Republicans are these days to pursue pro-family economic policies. But tax benefits for kids are at roughly the level President Obama left them.