Republicans should be very, very thankful they have AOC and her “squad” of anti-Semites and socialists to point to come Election Day. Otherwise, why the hell would we keep on voting for them?
The new “conservative” proposal from Senate Republicans is not a spending cut, but the creation of yet another unfunded entitlement in the form of the Child Rearing and Development Leave Empowerment, or Cradle, Act. The paid parental leave plan, unrolled by the usually stalwart conservative senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah, is the latest in a string of Republican attempts to cater to the notion conjured by Ivanka Trump that the GOP is bleeding women because it’s not giving the ladies enough free cash, instead of maybe what her dad says on his Twitter account.
As the Examiner‘s Kimberly Leonard describes:
Compared to Democratic senator and presidential hopeless Kirsten Gillibrand’s annoyingly persistent push for her economically illiterate Family and Medical Insurance Leave, or FAMILY, Act, the Cradle Act doesn’t demand a new tax in the immediate future. But it’s still an unfunded liability, promising to pay for itself with the lie that Social Security is anything but a Ponzi scheme.
Social Security recipients aren’t simply receiving “their” money. They’re getting paid with mine. Every generation of Social Security recipients effectively steals from the generations after it, which is why the program will be insolvent within the next two decades.
Tying paid leave to the sinking ship of Social Security will, without a doubt, require the same payroll tax increase as Gillibrand’s in the long run. Just because it won’t be immediate doesn’t make it any less egregious.
Lee and Ernst tout the program as conservative because it’s both voluntary and doesn’t create a new tax. Theoretically, they say, it’s just allowing people to pull from their own retirement funds today instead of in the future. But is it really their own funds if the program is slated to cost $8 to $9 billion per year? Lee and Ernst say their program is budget neutral in the long run, but wasn’t Social Security supposed to be budget neutral in the long run as well? In the long run, are we not all dead?
If anything, it’s even more fiscally irresponsible, a vanity project at best, and a sham of conservatism at worst. For two of the nation’s top Republicans, and ones widely respected at that, to tout yet another unfunded entitlement as “conservative” just stands as a testament to the sorry, reactionary state of our current movement.
Conservatives should be aggressive in trying to reverse their losses with women. They can begin by deregulating contraception. They ought to expand Title X funding even as they divorce it from abortion providers, giving women more proactive choices before conception. They ought to expand tax credits that benefit working parents and stay-at-home parents alike. They ought to embrace the push for transparency and accountability brought about by the Me Too movement even as we continue to defend the sanctity of due process. And they ought to maybe cool it with the rhetoric, particularly from a certain man in the Oval.
But to whip out another entitlement, functionally equivalent to that of far-left-wing Democrats in the long run, isn’t just poor strategy. It’s not even conservative.
