“By sending unconditional monthly checks of up to $300 per child to the nation’s poorest families — including those with little to no income who had typically been excluded from such programs — the “child allowance” lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty who would’ve otherwise been left behind.
Arguments against such programs that give unconditional cash usually assert that it’ll drive low-income people to quit their jobs, ultimately harming the economy. But research found little to no drop in employment rates as a result of the expanded CTC. Yet despite a flurry of support from prominent economists and recipients alike, politicians failed to reach an agreement to make the temporary expansion permanent, and Congress let it expire at the end of 2021.”
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“a new working paper from Elizabeth Ananat and Irwin Garfinkel, two economists at Columbia University. Expanding on work they first published in 2022, their research surveys long-run cash and quasi-cash transfer programs (like food stamps) in the US in an effort to predict the overall effects of a child allowance over the very long run. Instead of the grim and jobless future forecast by expanded CTC critics, they find that a future shaped by a permanent child allowance is well worth the investment.
Ananat and Garfinkel found that the total long-run benefits to society of making a child allowance permanent outweigh the costs by nearly 10 to 1.”
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“Their promise of a 10 to 1 return is, frankly, massive. For every $100 or so billion the child allowance would cost the government each year, society would reap additional long-term benefits of about $929 billion. Those dollars represent benefits like improved child and parent health and longevity, higher future earnings for children, and reduced crime and health care costs. There would be an effect from the small dip in employment that their calculations predict, and a resulting decrease in tax revenue — but it would amount to just $2.4 billion. That’s a drop in a bucket overflowing with almost a trillion dollars in benefits.
But the nuances of such long-term returns can be difficult to convey. “A little bit shows up in the first few years in the form of reduced [child abuse and neglect], reduced hospitalizations, and those sorts of things,” said Ananat. “But most of it doesn’t show up until the kids grow up. So that requires a very patient type of investor.””
“It may be tempting to simply write this off as “Trump being Trump” and move on. But the Republican presidential nominee’s consistent inattention to the details of policymaking does matter—even if it has no bearing on the election—and the child care issue is a perfect example of why.
This sort of issue is a liability for Trump because he can’t just bluster or pander his way through it. Trump excels when he can turn complex policies into simple, partisan us-vs.-them arguments that allow him to avoid any attention on the specifics. On issues like taxes and immigration, this technique works because one party broadly wants the policy to shift in one direction, so Trump can simply promise to do the opposite—never mind the details.
But no one wants higher child care costs. Both sides want to reduce them. The argument, then, must turn on which side can offer the better plan for accomplishing that goal. As Thursday’s answer makes obvious, Trump has no such plan.”
“The driver of the ICCP’s $16 million budget deficit wasn’t just the rising cost of child care, but also the agency’s overpromising of generous welfare benefits at the expense of taxpayers.”
“The “extra votes for parents” proposal came in a 2021 speech sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization that encourages college students to engage with right-wing ideas. About halfway through the speech, Vance says that he wants to “take aim at the left, specifically the childless left.”
He knows these comments will be controversial: He says “I’m going to get in trouble for this,” and then asks the hosts if he’s being recorded. But he continues on by listing off leading Democratic politicians who didn’t have children at the time — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and then asks, “Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children?”
Of course, this is misleading: Harris is a stepmother and Buttigieg has become a father since Vance’s remarks. But the specific examples are less important than Vance’s general point, which is a moral one.
In his view, being a parent is the primary source of happiness and meaning in a person’s life, and people who don’t have kids can’t be trusted to make decisions in the interest of society writ large. Societies are good, per Vance, when they have babies; if they don’t have enough, they rot.
So what to do about it? Vance suggests borrowing ideas from Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister who has made increasing Hungary’s birthrate a centerpiece of his policy agenda. But Vance also worries that a Hungarian model might not be possible because families suffer from a “structural democratic disadvantage”: children can’t vote. Hence, he concludes, we should let parents cast votes on their behalf.
“Let’s give votes to all the children in this country and let’s give control over votes to the parents in this country,” he says.
It’s an old idea called “Demeny voting,” named after 20th-century Hungarian demographer Paul Demeny (a vocal champion of the idea). Typically, the argument for Demeny voting is rooted in fairness. Children are people who, like anyone else, deserve political representation. Since they lack the maturity to make informed choices about their interests, parents should vote on their behalf — much in the same way they make decisions about children’s medical care or education. To get a sense of how this argument works, I’d recommend a recent paper by two law professors at Harvard and Northwestern making the case at length.
But for Vance, the policy isn’t just about ensuring fairness for families: it’s about punishing childless adults. Vance sees Demeny voting as a tool for creating two-tiered citizenship, one where parents have more and better political representation than other adults.
“When you go to the polls in this country, you should have more power — more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids,” he says. “If you don’t have much of an investment in the future of this country, then maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
This is not the language of a liberal looking to expand the sphere of people whose interests are represented in the system to children. Vance’s defense of Demeny voting reveals a belief that people who aren’t like him, who don’t share his values about childrearing, are social unequals: non-participants in the political project of ensuring America survives across generations, and hence deserved targets of political discrimination.
In short, Vance wants to turn the law into a vehicle for legislating hard-right morality.”
“Modern neopatriarchy begins from the opposite fear; the concern is not communist collectivism, but liberal individualism.
The neopatriarchs believe we live in an age where people prioritize self-actualization and fulfillment above all else. Young adults, they argue, live in extended adolescence, lost in some combination of video games, drugs, and casual sex; as they age, raw hedonism is replaced by single-minded foci on money and career. According to neopatriarchs, this liberal social model fails men and women alike, funneling them toward a spiritually empty existence that all but guarantees disappointment and depression, and it fails society by discouraging the production of children who are quite literally required if the country is to have a future. (Immigration, needless to say, is not seen as an acceptable solution.)
The solution, for neopatriarchs, is to return to the past. Men need to rediscover the old John Wayne vision of masculinity, making traditional male gender markers (including acting as fatherly provider) into defining aspects of their identity. The state should play a role in encouraging this reversion, primarily by changing policy to cultivate “masculine” virtues and incentivizing marriage and child-rearing.
In his recent book Manhood, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley urges men to embrace strength and stoicism as routes for self-improvement, calling on them to take on the roles of “warrior” and “builder” in their everyday lives. The psychologist Jordan Peterson has long dispensed similar advice, helping turn him into a conservative guru. In his forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts argues that contraceptive technologies “break the most basic functioning elements of civilization” by liberating individuals to have consequence-free sex out of wedlock. Vance, who wrote the forward to Roberts’s book, has mused about eliminating no-fault divorce for similar neopatriarchal reasons.
Neopatriarchy can be distinguished from straight-up patriarchy primarily through its treatment of women. Unlike some Christian fundamentalists or alt-right scribblers, neopatriarchs do not assert that women are obligated to be homemakers as a result of divine commandment or natural law. All they insist on explicitly is that women have lots of children, and that choosing to focus primarily on raising said children is no worse than having a career.
It’s obvious why liberals and leftists would have problems taking this seriously. If Americans are supposed to be having more kids, and American men are supposed to be more traditionally masculine, then who’s supposed to be doing the work of raising all of these kids? The answer, of course, is wives (as it’s certainly not immigrants). Neopatrarichy may not explicitly call for a reversal of the feminist revolution, but that’s basically what it’s going for.”
“Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power.”
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“Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.”