In January 1971, Richard Nixon infamously quipped, “I am now a Keynesian in economics”. That spirit is now being channeled by JD Vance and an array conservative leaders who should be honest and admit, “We are now social engineers in family life.”
In what is an apparent attempt to satisfy family traditionalists, post liberals, and "common-gooders" on the right, while avoiding an open admission that affordability might not be a “hoax”, the Vice President has made a stay-at-home parent subsidy a priority. Reporting describes a bureaucrat-generated rule that would let one married parent draw childcare assistance to raise kids at home, provided the other spouse works at least 35 hours per week.
The actual amount of the subsidy remains unclear. The $9,000 figure in the headlines isn’t a proposed benefit, but an average of the total expenditures of the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). Further, the draft reportedly sets no specific amount at all, because federal block grants are issued to the states for their central planners to dole out.
While details remain hazy, the source of the ideas is abundantly clear. Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation oversaw the publication of “Saving America by Saving the Family”. In it he and his team proposed that “Congress and the Administration should make the average value of credits, programs, and tax benefits currently provided for paid childcare available for at-home parental child raising.” Others have identified underlying issues such as ongoing inflation that have done more to undermine American families than a lack of specialized subsidies.
After Vance’s statements, Severino took to Twitter/X to defend the proposal directly. He’s argued that parents who send their children to commercial day care receive subsidies. So, why should parents who bear the toil, expense, and opportunity cost of raising children at home receive nothing. He’s called this a policy asymmetry that is “illogical” and “unjust.”
He’s right on both fronts. The welfare state itself is both, however, he’s wrong about the solution.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Clinton welfare reforms, which moved missions of Americans from welfare to work. Less well known is what came afterward. After the legislation became the law of the law of the land, the bureaucrats rebuilt what Congress had dismantled by statute. Various efforts to re-expand the welfare state included providing categorical eligibility in food assistance, to the 2012 waivers of work requirements under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Despite the bureaucracy’s best efforts, cash assistance has fallen to 21 of every 100 households in poverty, down from 68 in 1996.
The Vance proposal seeks to deploy the same rule-making mechanisms, avoiding the need for Congressional approval. Through this approach, unelected, unaccountable technocrats can pass a rule and create legislation without resistance.
What would a new rule resembling Vance’s proposal accomplish, given the CCDF’s current budget? More harm than good.
The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) oversees the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). It has nowhere near the resources the rhetoric implies. In fiscal year 2023, the average monthly subsidy paid to a childcare provider was $8,280 per year. Those expenditures aren’t divided evenly either. An infant in a group home setting averages about $1,030 per month, while a school-age child’s parent averages $505.
Care delivered in the child’s own home, which is the existing category closest to what this rule would create, is the cheapest thing the program purchases: $484 per month, or $5,808 per year. Families are being enticed to support a number that nobody has promised, for care priced in the category that pays little over half of what was floated in this weekend’s trial balloon.
Conservatives are being sold a bill of goods and the costs are real. Among the proposal's flaws is the implication that the Federal government’s already massive tax revenues aren’t enough and that taxpayers should shell out more. Further, the fund itself is already rationed among currently eligible households, will their benefits be stripped? Not likely. Besides, the current program only reaches a fraction of the kids who qualify for the benefit. Vance’s plan will simply grow the pool of households on the dole by expanding benefits toward married households, all at the behest of central planners. Furthermore, there’s no clear explanation of where the money is coming from, whether from current taxpayers, additional borrowing, or more printing from the Federal Reserve system.
The outcomes of these rules are also contrary to what most conservatives claim are their social (engineering) goals. Eligibility is contingent on an earnings ceiling. What’s more, a second earner who pursues part-time work stands to lose the payment entirely, or they can simply enter the informal job market, working for cash under the table. The plan fails to consider the case of two modest earners deciding whether to marry may find that their combined income pushes them over the earnings cap, leaving them better off unmarried.
The proposed rule disincentivizes both marriage and work.
It’s an odd brand of conservativism that touts a program which produces more taxation and spending, increased cohabitation, less work, and fewer children. Alas, we live in strange times.
Playing fields among household types aren't leveled by adding more interventions on behalf of another constituency. Conservatives are simply creating another group of dependents, and a broader institutional substitution of the state for the family. The late Roger Scruton called this displacement the destruction of “oikophilia” or the love of family, warning of its outcomes. Top-down governance, he explained, breeds irresponsible and servile people, through the drowning of civil society under a deluge of state intervention, buoying a state-driven family system and culture.
Those cheering on the proposal seem unaware of how little loot it distributes, and are even less aware of the principles they have jettisoned. Supporters of this idea are not only conserving the welfare state, they're expanding it. What genuine conservatives would preserve are pre-political institutions, with the family front and center in community, civic, and religious life. Instead, they are calling for the undoing of the foundations of a free society, centralizing planning, and picking politicized winners and losers.
