A centerpiece of Vice President Harris’s newly released economic plan is a revamped Child Tax Credit, which would send families $6,000 for each newborn and up to $3,600 for older children, up from the existing $2,000 per child credit. Her proposal follows Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s recent call to increase the credit to $5,000 for all children.

While the increased dollar amounts have attracted most of the attention, a key motivation for these proposals is to ensure working families with low incomes receive the maximum credit. Working families who pay little or no income tax currently receive only a partial credit, a practice that Senator Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, calls “economic discrimination.” In the same vein, Mr. Vance laments the current credit’s “massive cutoff” for low-income families, while Ms. Harris hones in on sending the “most hard-pressed working families” more assistance.