FOR a long time, Hillary Clinton has said that she wants to reduce taxes for low- and middle-income Americans. But, unusually for her, she has been a little vague about exactly how she would do it. This week she announced a specific policy: to expand the child tax-credit (CTC), which reduces income-taxes for parents.

Currently, for every dollar a parent earns above $3,000, they receive 15 cents in CTC, up to a maximum benefit of $1,000. (The credit is gradually withdrawn from higher earners.) Mrs Clinton promises to increase the phase-in to 45 cents per dollar, to reduce the threshold at which it kicks-in from $3,000 to the first dollar of earnings, and to double the CTC’s generosity to $2,000 for children under the age of five.

The combined effect of this is that parents of young children would need to earn only about $4,500 to receive the full $2,000 from the government. By contrast, earning $4,500 would net you just $225 in CTC today; to receive the maximum $1,000 you would need to make almost $10,000. And as a result of Mrs Clinton’s proposed change, some parents with desperately low incomes—less than $3,000—would see a 45% boost to their pay (in addition to whatever other welfare they receive).

This would be a significant cash infusion to parents in deep poverty, a group that has attracted much attention thanks to work by researchers Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer. They found that in any given month in 2011 there were 1.5m households, with 3m children, surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day (though other academics take issue with this claim, as we wrote about here). Over the course of a year, many such families drift in and out of deprivation, as they find and lose work. The child tax-credit, by contrast, is paid annually. For that reason, Mr Shaefer, while applauding the Mrs Clinton’s policy, says it would be better to find a way to pay the money out in monthly chunks.

Despite this clear benefit for the very poor, most of the estimated $209 billion outlay over 10 years would probably flow to middle-income families. In 2014 only 2.1m tax returns showed income of under $10,000. But the child tax-credit is phased out at incomes above $110,000 for married couples, and only at a rate of 5%, meaning it chips all the way up to $130,000. There are over 70m taxpayers with incomes between $10,000 and $100,000.

This scattergun approach is not necessarily a bad thing: Mrs Clinton wants to redistribute towards middle-income as well as poor households, and often complains of the stagnation in median-earnings since the turn of the century. Some, like Mr Shaefer, would rather the benefit was universal, so that it was harder for politicians to take it away in future. And the child tax-credit is properly seen not just as income redistribution, but also as a subsidy to parenthood. That might help achieve all kinds of social goals, from more births (see article) to more gender-equality (see blog).

The child tax-credit is classic Clinton policy, in several ways. First, it introduces more complexity to the tax code, by changing the benefit amount only for young children. This was probably done partly to keep down costs. Second, it helps only those with incomes, that is, those who work for at least some of the year. This could be justified as a way to increase the incentive to work, but so much of America’s welfare system is structured in similar ways that in practice that incentive is already very sharp. Third, it is an incremental tweak to existing policy, rather than a sweeping new vision. Still, it adds to the towering mass of wonky ideas Mrs Clinton has produced—compared to a flimsy sketchbook from Mr Trump.