The impetus for the program is straightforward: like the rest of the world, the United States is suffering a fertility crisis with birth rates now below replacement levels. As in most of the West, women are having fewer children, later in life – and a growing number are having none at all.
Across the world, one of the most commonly provided explanations for this phenomenon is economic: namely, that would-be parents simply cannot afford to have children and that the career pressures on women often mean that having a child means a promotion delayed or an earning opportunity foregone.
Vance’s proposal seeks to address that by making it more feasible for families to live on one income. In theory, this can be economically viable because a woman (or a man) acting as a full-time parent reduces the need for childcare costs, making having more children more affordable.
The additional financial support that Vance seeks to provide would in theory make this more so: families would save on childcare while also receiving direct financial support. The plan is to make it viable for more married couples to live this way.
On paper, it makes a lot of sense, and conservatives in many parts of the world will instinctively admire it. The problems with it are largely economic, but also political.
Do the Numbers Add Up?
To describe the plan as “largely unfunded” would, of course, be a description that the program’s authors would deny. Officially, the money is set to be redirected from the US’s existing $12bn per year Child Care and Development Fund, the great majority of which is currently spent supporting poor and single mothers with childcare and other supports that assist them in getting into the workforce.
The new MAGA proposal would reverse the logic of the scheme: it would take a fund presently designed overwhelmingly to help low-income working parents and open it to married households in which one spouse deliberately remains outside the workforce.
There is, of course, a problem: the existing fund contains only $12bn. If large numbers of married families become eligible, either Congress eventually has to provide substantially more money or existing recipients will receive less of it. In fact, one universal problem with entitlement spending is that the more successful it is, the more spending is required.
Expensive on Both Ends
Then there is the other problem: taking women out of the workforce means cutting the budget at the other side of the ledger, since those women stop paying taxes. Perhaps they might be replaced by others not currently working – that would certainly be the theory – but the proposal does mean taking currently productive people from the workforce, which is at least at risk of creating some costs.
However, there is a more fundamental issue: while all conservatives would agree, presumably, that parents who desire to stay at home with their children should be assisted in doing so, there should be grave skepticism about whether the creation of another entitlement program is either wise or feasible.
Can Republicans Ever Outbid Democrats?
Wise, in the first instance, because the universal law of politics is and always has been: do not attempt to outbid the left on entitlements. Republicans advancing this particular entitlement are conceding two principles at once: first, that the US government spends too little supporting its own people, and second, that elections should effectively become auctions of the public treasury at a time when the country is already building a terrifying debt burden that is growing ever larger.
Feasible because, like an unfortunate number of Trump and MAGA policies, this one could be argued to have the appearance of spite within it.
It is one thing to proclaim support for married mothers but quite another to do so by taking funds away from children unfortunate enough to have been born to single or unmarried mothers. The politics of it are inevitably racial as well as class-based: a program presently dominated by single working mothers would be required to share a fixed pot with married, single-income households deliberately choosing to keep one parent at home.
The Long, Slow Death of Reaganism
Above all, though, the very existence of the idea is a reminder of the long, slow death of Reaganism on the American right. Where once the Republican Party existed to shrink government, the Trump era’s hallmark has been a reorientation of right-wing ideology toward seizing and wielding the power of the state toward explicitly ideological ends: no longer is there meaningful disagreement between left and right about the fact that the state should tax and spend; now the disagreement is almost entirely about what the spending should be on.
Trump himself has been at the heart of that shift. He famously proclaimed, for example, that the soon-to-be-bankrupt Social Security system would not be reformed on his watch. Once an advocate of abolishing Barack Obama’s painfully expensive Obamacare health reforms, Trump now presides over a Republican Party in which repeal has effectively disappeared as a serious political objective. Once an advocate of balanced budgets, Trump’s spending proposals – on the military, for example – now vastly exceed the growth in tax revenues. And once concerned about the debt, he now barely mentions it at all.
Whether this particular proposal survives lawyers, regulators and the inevitable court challenges is almost beside the point. But the thinking behind it should give pause to those who believe, for some reason, that America’s debt trajectory can be reversed. Once, one of the two parties held the view that it should be.
Now, it appears, the debt will continue growing indefinitely – or until the markets finally force the hands of those governing the world’s increasingly erstwhile superpower.
