The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let married couples with a stay-at-home spouse collect federal welfare benefits. The money would come from a Health and Human Services fund created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents cover daycare so they could hold a job or go back to school. About 870,000 families draw on it now, roughly 80 percent of them headed by a single working parent, usually a mom, and the benefit runs around $9,000 per child per year. The program is vastly underfunded and, at present, only about one in seven eligible people can even get into the program. Vice President Vance champions the change to the program, and the administration intends to make it without a vote in Congress.
The people who brought us tariffs and said they’d cost us nothing now insist that putting stay-at-home moms on welfare will cost us nothing, too, so long as they get to keep picking the winners and losers. Moms who go to work get to subsidize those who do not. The GOP gets to open a new front in the culture war, pitting moms against moms.
Superficially, the policy sounds good. Children raised in stable two-parent homes outperform every other group in school and in earnings, and a policy that makes those homes easier to build deserves a hearing. More specifically, if you break down the data, the two-parent, single-earning household outperforms all other households. The working parent tends to outearn his peers. The non-working parent has a full time job raising the kids and better mental health than her peers. And the kids in this household are the future leaders of America. Additionally, these households are the only ones reproducing above the population replacement rate. The more we incentivize these families, the better off our society will be.
We should absolutely want more stay-at-home parents and, more specifically, more stay-at-home moms. We should have a national policy to encourage that. I don’t dispute that at all. The Vice President’s heart is in the right place, but his plan is a terrible idea. In the face of rising socialism, the Vice President is offering socialism-lite. And just as Diet Coke is never as popular as regular Coke, Diet Coke Socialism can’t beat the real thing either.
Let’s start with welfare reform from the 1990’s. Republicans had long argued that people were dependent on welfare. If they tried to improve their lot in life, they met the “benefits cliff” and lost their benefits. The concept of the “welfare queen” became familiar with single women having lots of kids and no desire for any self improvement. The Clinton Administration and Republicans restructured welfare. Single moms could get benefits and the cost of child care would be covered, so they could get a job or education, improve their standing in life, and transition off welfare over time.
The new program would take money designated to help get working moms off welfare and redistribute it to moms who stay home with their husbands working, so long as the husbands do not make too much money and the moms do no work other than make babies and raise them. In both cases, the money comes from everybody else, including moms who do work outside the house or even in the house while the kids are in school. We would take money designed to get single moms off welfare and repurpose it to make whole families dependent on welfare, unable to upgrade their lives without a math calculation to see how much they can advance without losing benefits.
Look at how it would operate in an actual household. Now, you should know that some proponents will scream about the numbers, but the reality is the numbers work in most states, and every state would have a formula and, ironically, mostly an unfunded program that actually can’t do anything except provoke a fight amongst the right in the run-up to the midterms.
The plan carries an income cap that would work out to be around $75,000.00 in a lot of states, and a married couple with two children would collect $9,000.00 per child or $18,000.00 a year. Dad makes $70,000.00, and his boss offers him a promotion with a 10% raise. That raise is worth $7,000.00, which raises the household’s income to $77,000.00 and wipes out the entire $18,000.00. He turns the promotion down, and he turns down the next one too, because the math does not change until the children hit 18. But by the time the youngest turns 18, the dad is in his 50s, he has passed on every rung of the ladder he was offered, and the $18,000.00 goes away regardless. Mom cannot take a part-time job even when the kids are in school, because anything paying less than $18,000.00 functions as a pay cut. A nurse who steps away for 5 years can take a few certifications and go back. A nurse who steps away for 25 years is starting over at 50.
This is the benefit cliff, and it is one of the many reasons welfare was reformed. Conservatives spent 30 years arguing that welfare builds dependency and blunts ambition. The argument was correct then, and it is now, even though the recipient is married and votes Republican. Some of my Christian friends have praised this idea, but they should rethink their praise, as what they’re really doing is making families dependent on government welfare, turning stay-at-home parents into welfare queens.
Consider, too, the bureaucrats who would be in charge. Many of the same voices cheering the Vance plan spent last year going through grocery receipts to decide whether a poor woman should be allowed to buy a two-liter Coke with an EBT card. I shared some of their concerns about abuse, but nobody should pretend that the desire to control others disappears once the beneficiary is a married mother at home — and let’s be clear here that this is about stay-at-home moms, not dads. It’s what the post-liberal right wants.
A subsidy conditioned on staying home invites a rule defining what staying home requires, and the people who advocated for the “no cokes” rule will be glad to write that one. President Buttigieg or Harris will draft some really interesting rules. The socialist left loves the collective, and the post-liberal right believes it knows what is best for you, with both believing that a Washington-based bureaucrat should decide how a family runs its own household and what your common good will be.
There is a better answer, without robbing the Petersons to pay the Paulsons. Do not take their money to begin with. Give a massive and unlimited deduction per child every year, with no cap, for as long as that child is in the home or in college, and let parents who homeschool or pay tuition for private school deduct the local school taxes they are already paying for a system they have chosen not to use. The family keeps its own earnings, no bureaucrat decides who qualifies, and no father declines a promotion to protect a paycheck.
Additionally, address the debt. People are not getting married and having kids because they’ve given up on the future. Fewer and fewer people think their tomorrow will be better than their parents’. The national debt has sapped America’s ability to grow the private sector economy, which in turn has eroded people’s ability to advance comfortably. This plan would only grow the debt further, slow the economy further, and create a doom loop that discourages more people from bringing kids into a world where the future is guaranteed to be worse than the past. Again, to my friends in the Christian community who think putting families on government welfare is good, you’re not only choosing a program that historically fosters dependency and discourages ambition, but you’re also choosing a program that will make the future worse for those families, not better. At the same time, you are festering cultural antagonism between mothers who work, even just part time, with those who do not — a needlessly divisive fight in a culture already at war with itself and reducing itself every day into smaller and more isolated and angry tribes.
Unfortunately, the people pushing this plan used to know all of that. They spent the Bush years hammering Republicans over No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, and they were right. They run the government now, and they do not want to end the programs, but control your life. They still call everyone else the establishment. They have become the establishment, and they got there by trading conviction for power. Just like the establishment they replaced, they’re perfectly willing to drive up the national debt to reward their friends and punish their enemies. They have given up on persuading people to change the system and now have decided they want to cash in for their own tribe. They subtly gamble that if they can get the nation into bankruptcy, they can rebuild it in their image.
An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously.
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. (
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Diet Coke socialism is always outbid, in the end, by the people who want the real thing. As Rush Limbaugh used to say, Democrat-lite never beats Democrat. As Phyllis Schlafly argued, this GOP Establishment is offering not a choice, but an echo of the Left. The Vice President is gambling that actual socialists will balk at subsidizing stay-at-home mothers over working mothers. They will not balk. Democrats will take the deal and raise it — full federal funding of pregnancy and delivery, then paid maternity leave, then paid paternity leave, then universal health care. Each of those gets easier to sell the moment Republicans concede that Washington should put families on welfare because they vote Republican.
President Trump and the Vice President are right that a nation that stops forming families has stopped planning for a future, and they deserve credit for starting the conversation on the issue. But the solution is not to expand government dependency by making stay-at-home moms welfare queens. Instead, let the parents keep their own money and let them decide what is in their best interest. Give them hope in the future by reducing the national debt and firing up the private sector economy. Sadly, that is something those who believe in tariffs are not capable of doing. So they’ll grow the welfare state instead.
Lastly, it is amateurish to pick a fight that divides the right over a new policy choice so close to the midterms, with the Vice President pitting stay-at-home moms against the moms who work and will pay the welfare queens with their own hard-earned money.
P.S. — if the Executive can make such a major change to a legislatively enacted program to redirect benefits without Congressional approval, why not just further restrict benefits altogether and reduce the welfare state, which in turn would reduce spending, which in turn would reduce the rate of growth in the debt?
