Clinton to Support GOP Tax Credit for Adoptive Families

President Clinton, moving again to outflank the Republicans on a social issue of particular concern to middle-class families, today will endorse a GOP-sponsored bill providing a sizable tax subsidy for families that adopt children, White House sources said Sunday.

Acting just two days after announcing sanctions and benefits aimed at keeping teenage welfare recipients at home and in school, Clinton will embrace a measure that gives a $5,000 tax credit for adoptive families while removing long-standing roadblocks to interracial adoptions.

The House Republican leadership hopes to put the bill to a vote on the floor Wednesday or Thursday.

The president is also embracing the pro-adoption measure as a way to balance his veto last month of a bill outlawing certain types of late-term abortions.

That veto drew a vehement backlash not only from abortion opponents but also from religious organizations and even some supporters of abortion rights.

Many opponents of abortion regard adoption as an alternative to abortion, and they hope that legislation to facilitate adoption, such as the measure to go before the House this week, will encourage pregnant women to carry their babies to term.

Clinton’s new adoption policy appears to be yet another element of a political strategy to co-opt Republican “family values” issues by embracing such measures as school uniforms and the television “V-chip,” designed to enable parents to block programs with sexual or violent content.

In still another example of this strategy, Clinton on Tuesday will travel to New Jersey to give a talk discouraging teenagers from taking up smoking and exhorting tobacco companies not to target young people with their advertising.

The adoption bill that Clinton plans to endorse today is essentially the same one he twice vetoed last year, once because it was packaged with welfare reform legislation that he opposed and once because Republicans included it--along with Medicare cuts and other items to which the president objected--in the massive bill to balance the federal budget by 2002.

The bill, which cleared the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday, would provide the $5,000 tax credit, which could be spread over as many as five years, to help families defray the costs of adopting a child.

The credit would be available to families who adopt children anywhere in the world. Families could use it as a dollar-for-dollar reduction in taxes they owe the government, but they would not receive the difference in a government check if they did not have $5,000 in tax liabilities over a five-year span.

The full tax credit would be available to families with incomes of up to $75,000 a year. Its value would decline for families with income between $75,000 and $115,000; families earning more than that would get no tax credit at all.

The tax credit was a part of the “contract with America” that formed the basis of the Republican congressional candidates’ campaign platforms in 1994, when the GOP wrested control of both the House and the Senate from the Democrats.

The bill also facilitates interracial adoptions. States may now delay adoptions of children of one race by parents of another in hopes of eventually matching children with parents of the same race. The bill denies states that authority.

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More than 400,000 children are in foster care, about half of whom are minorities. Minority children wait longer to be adopted than do white children, according to studies.

Janice Goldwater, executive director of Adoptions Together, a private, nonprofit licensed adoption service that places children nationwide, said children should ideally be placed with parents of the same race.

She acknowledged that it is “definitely harder for a child to be placed with a family of a different race--but it is shortsighted to rob children of the opportunity of ever having a family, or waiting for one, because one of the same race is not available.”

The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of Clinton’s letter to House Republican leaders endorsing the bill, quoted it as saying: “Promoting adoption is one of the most important things we can do to strengthen American families and give more children what every child in America deserves--loving parents and a healthy home.”

The Ways and Means Committee estimated that the bill would cost the government $1.7 billion over seven years, and it proposed making up the lost revenue by enforcing new anti-fraud provisions on foreign trusts and from repeal of a tax exclusion for businesses that pay for energy conservation measures.

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GOP candidate is at work on refining his campaign pitch. A4