NYU prof's congressional campaign promises free money to families
One of his proposed policies would pay parents up to $500 monthly for each child.
A New York University lecturer has announced his campaign for Congress.
A New York University professor is running for Congress in the 12th District of New York with a platform plank of paying families $500 per child, per month.
An adjunct assistant business professor, Democrat Suraj Patel’s campaign introduces a policy called the Universal Child Dividend.
This policy would entail the federal government giving families $500 monthly per child, ages 0-5, and $350 monthly per child, ages 6-17. Patel’s campaign clarified on its website that this program would replace the Child Tax Credit.
However, the Child Tax Credit relieves families of up to $2,000 in taxes per child every year, making a large, financial difference between the two programs, with the Universal Child Dividend being objectively more expensive for the American taxpayers.
In email correspondence with Campus Reform, Vikas Patel, the policy director for Patel’s campaign, confirmed that it is not possible to say how much the Universal Child Dividend will cost yet.
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“It’s really impossible to answer how much the child dividend would cost without dynamic scoring- something that the Congressional Budget Office would provide us with if Suraj won the election and introduced the bill,” Patel said.
He went on to explain that “the static cost of the child dividend would be $352,380,000 per year.” Patel also indicated that, in order to pay for this program, parts of the Trump tax-cuts would have to be rolled back.
Patel continued, confirming that “the credit is universal so every family in the United States would get it.”
Patel’s other proposed policies include extensive gun control, as his campaign supports banning “assault weapons” and accessories and enacting red flag laws. He supports the legalization of marijuana, the legislation of mandatory vaccines and asserts that “climate change is an existential threat and a moral obligation we face.”
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Patel is running against incumbent Democrat Rep. Carolyn Maloney. He ran against Maloney in 2018, as well.
According to an interview with Buzzfeed News, Patel thought that the downfall of his last campaign was not reaching out effectively to older voters, saying: “Let me be frank. I think, If I learned a lesson from the last campaign, it’s a bit of humility. We admittedly, sort of, didn’t do a good enough job of explaining to the older voters what change meant.”
Suraj Patel previously worked on both of the Obama presidential campaigns and as an associate on the White House Advance team during the Obama administration. He also worked as a volunteer attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union when President Trump began Executive Order 13769, the Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States (colloquially called the Muslim Ban), in 2017.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @carolinefshaver
