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In defending his “childless cat lady” comments, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance wrongly claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris “is calling for an end to the child tax credit.” He also incorrectly claimed that Harris said “it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety.”
Harris, who is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has a record of working to expand the child tax credit, which reduces taxes for families with dependent children. Her tiebreaking vote in the Senate was essential to moving forward legislation in 2021 that temporarily increased the child tax credit and also made it fully refundable, meaning that poor people who don’t owe taxes can still get the money. She has since supported making those changes permanent.
During a college tour last year, Harris said that young climate leaders had spoken to her about “climate change anxiety,” which included their concerns about having kids in the future. But she did not endorse the notion of not having children because of environmental concerns. Rather, she mentioned several ways in which the Biden administration was addressing climate change.
Vance’s claims came in a July 28 interview on Fox News, in which he addressed his “childless cat lady” remarks from 2021 that have now gone viral. In those comments, Vance, then running for a Senate seat in Ohio, referred to prominent Democrats, including Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made” and argued that the country would be better off being led by people with children.
Harris has no biological children, but is a stepmother of two; Buttigieg adopted twins soon after Vance’s remarks in 2021.
In Vance’s July 28 interview, host Trey Gowdy asked him whether childless people can still be invested in America’s future. Vance, who is a father of three, responded, “of course,” and accused Democrats of blowing his remarks “out of proportion.”
“And if you look at what the American people are most concerned about, Trey, it’s not an out of context quip that I made three years ago. It’s the fact that Kamala Harris, the border czar, opened the American southern border,” he said, using a moniker for Harris that, as we’ve explained, is inaccurate. “It’s the fact that the Democratic Party has become explicitly anti-family in some of their policies. In fact, you just heard Kamala Harris in a surfaced clip recently talk about how it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety. So, really, what I’m trying to get at here, Trey, is that it’s important for us to be pro-family as a country.”
“I think a lot of parents and a lot of non-parents look at our public policy over the last four years and ask, how did we get to this place?” he continued. “How did we get to a place where Kamala Harris is calling for an end to the child tax credit?”
Vance made the same child tax credit claim in an interview with Megyn Kelly on July 26: “Why do we have the Harris campaign coming out this very morning and saying that we should not have the child tax credit, which lowers tax rates for parents of young children? It’s because they have become anti-family and anti-kid.”
False Tax Credit Claim
We found no evidence of Harris stating she is opposed to the child tax credit and would like to end it. As we said, she has a long history of supporting the child tax credit and has worked to expand it.
When we asked about Vance’s claim, the Trump campaign pointed us to a July 26 tweet from a Harris campaign staffer.
The tweet, from the Harris campaign’s rapid response director, Ammar Moussa, shares an ABC News story about remarks Vance made on a podcast in 2021, in which he discussed lowering tax rates for people with kids.
“JD Vance’s attacks on childless Americans is even vile,” it reads. “He called for HIGHER taxes on those without children.”
A Vance spokesperson told ABC News, “The policy Senator Vance proposed is basically no different than the Child Tax Credit, which Democrats unanimously support.”
The child tax credit does lower the effective tax rate for people with kids. But it’s always framed as a benefit to those with children, not as a penalty to those without. In his podcast remarks, Vance did not mention the child tax credit. Instead, he spoke of future policy changes that would “reward” some and “punish” others.
“We need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad. So, you talk about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good,” Vance said during a discussion with conservative podcast host Charlie Kirk about how to make “unthinkable” Republican ideas popular and ultimately put them into practice with policy. “If you are making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.”
The child tax credit began in 1997 as a $400 credit per child under 17 years old and has a history of bipartisan support. Over the years, the amount has increased and eligibility has changed.
Currently, due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which will expire in 2025, the full credit is $2,000 per child under 17, with $1,400 of the credit being refundable. Households eligible for the full credit are single filers making $200,000 a year or less and joint filers making $400,000 a year or less.
For 2021, the American Rescue Plan, which Harris helped pass, temporarily increased the child tax credit to $3,600 per child under age 6 and $3,000 for older kids under age 18. The credit was fully refundable, which helped poorer people who do not make enough money to be eligible for the full credit. Half of the credit could be received in advance in monthly installments.
The Census Bureau estimated that the 2021 child tax credit lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty, with the expansion accounting for 2.1 million of those children.
Harris has been a vocal supporter of the expanded child tax credit and has advocated for it to become permanent. As a senator, she also co-sponsored bills that increased the credit and made it fully refundable.
Just days prior to Vance’s claim, Harris touted the success of the 2021 child tax credit. “We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, which is why I helped pass the child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half — and cut Black child poverty even more,” she said in a July 24 speech before a Black sorority.
A bipartisan bill expanding the child tax credit failed to advance in the Senate on Aug. 1. The bill had overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans when it passed the House in January. Vance, who voted against the American Rescue Plan, which was a $1.9 trillion bill that included many provisions besides the child tax credit expansion, was not present for the vote.
Vance has not said if he supports the bill, and his campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond when we asked. Earlier this year, Vance said the bill was “by and large good policy,” but he also considered some Republican objections “reasonable.” Speaking to NBC News about the missed vote, Vance said that “unless we get a better president, there’s almost nothing that Congress can pass that is really going to improve the lives of the American people.” He also called the child tax credit “a great thing,” and said he supported expanding it. Former President Donald Trump has called for, and the GOP platform supports, making the 2017 tax cuts, which doubled the child tax credit, permanent.
Distortion of Harris’ Climate Change Comment
As part of casting Democratic policies as “anti-family,” Vance incorrectly claimed that Harris, in a recently surfaced clip, talked “about how it was a bad idea to have kids because of climate change anxiety.”
A 15-second video clip of Harris mentioning “climate change anxiety” has indeed recently been spreading online.
Donald Trump Jr. shared the clip on X on July 27, falsely claiming Harris was suggesting “young people should not have children due to climate change.” Vance retweeted Trump’s post the same day, adding: “It’s almost like these people don’t want young people starting families or something. Really weird stuff.”
But in the clip, Harris is simply explaining what she had heard from young people — not agreeing that people shouldn’t have kids.
Harris was speaking at Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania on her “Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour” last year, and she brought up climate concerns after praising a “record turnout in 2020 of young voters” who voted for her and President Joe Biden.
Harris, Sept. 19, 2023: Because young people — and, in particular, young voters — said, “We are going to direct and decide what is the direction of our country” … Because young people said, “We’re not leaving it to other people to decide how we’re dealing with the climate crisis” — you know, I’ve heard young leaders talk with me about a term they’ve coined called “climate anxiety.”
Right? Which is fear of — of the future and the unknown of whether it makes sense for you to even think about having children, whether it makes sense for you to think about aspiring to buy a home because what will this climate be?
But because people voted, we have been able to put in place over a trillion dollars in investment in our country around things like climate resilience and adaptation, around focusing on issues like environmental justice.
Later, she mentioned climate change again, emphasizing that there are things that can be done to mitigate the problem.
“The climate crisis is a threat to us as a species and this planet that God gave us to live on,” she said. “And we need to take this issue seriously and understand that the clock is not just ticking, it is banging. And on this issue, there are things we as human beings can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to help communities deal with extreme climate experiences so that they are not facing peril.”
As we have written before, scientists do not think the human species as a whole is at risk of dying out because of climate change, but the warming of the planet from heat-trapping pollution is a real problem that poses risks to many people and ecosystems. Taking aggressive action sooner rather than later will make it easier to address climate change in the future.
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