There’s a big and welcome effort on the Right to promote pro-family policy. While worries about family cohesion and dropping birthrates are not new, a lot of the effort to make policy around this is new.
Conservatives, that is, don’t have that much recent experience in trying to solve problems. The result is a somewhat chaotic and occasionally muddled debate. That’s great, but it’s important to sort through some better and worse ideas.
At the Federalist, conservative Scott Ruesterholz argues for a massive tax credit, effectively a government check, to parents. It’s not a bad idea, but as Lyman Stone points out on Twitter, there are some oddities to this argument.
First, there are the funny politics here. Casting Trump’s GOP as the pro-natalist, pro-family wing of the GOP versus Sen. Mitt Romney’s corporatist wing is a bit off, considering that Romney is one of the biggest champions of pro-natalist policy in the Senate.
There’s no evidence that former President Donald Trump, a serial philanderer with two divorces and a stated disdain for involved fatherhood, has made the GOP more of a family party. Ruesterholz cites Trump’s seven-point victory in married Americans, but that’s far lower than Romney’s 14-point victory among the married in 2012.
The odd part of this proposal to “explicitly incentivize more births to married couples” is that it doesn’t incentivize more births if you already have three children. In fact, the third child is less incentivized than the second. “We should rally behind a new $5,000 refundable tax credit for a married couple’s first child, $10,000 for the second, and another $5,000 for the third,” Ruesterholz writes.
Why would we not incentivize fourth, fifth, and sixth children, and beyond? A family subsidy that clearly states that 2.5 children might push our birthrate upwards, but why is a fourth child less valuable to society than a third, who is less valuable than a second?
Ruesterholz’s best point is that cash money to parents should be only a piece of “policy proposals to encourage marriage and family formation, from eliminating welfare policies that discourage marriage to re-engaging against secular progressive forces in America’s cultural fights.”
That’s right. The earned income tax credit and welfare programs often discourage marriage. The Left’s effort to drive the church out of the public square is an effort to destroy the infrastructure that allows nonelites to build families.
“America is suffering an epidemic of emptiness. We see it in rampant drug addiction, a disinterest in marriage, and falling birth rates. It has many roots, from secularism to stagnant wages, and COVID-19 has exacerbated it.”
Exactly. The single biggest factor in the collapse of living standards and of family formation is alienation.
