The conservative party in power has actually presented something that would help the American family.
The Department of Health and Human Services is drafting a rule change that would pay married parents roughly $9,000 a year per child to stay home and raise them. The money comes out of the Child Care and Development Fund, a $12 billion Clinton-era program built to pay for daycare so parents could go to work. To qualify you have to be married, and one spouse has to be putting in at least 35 hours a week. It doesn’t need a bill or a vote — just White House sign-off and a comment period.
This, if followed as presented, would be one of the most pro-family policies to come out of Washington since the mid-20th century.
“Parents who bear the toil, expense and opportunity cost… currently get zero.” — Roger Severino
When our birthrate was declining, I found it mighty peculiar that the only remedy presented for this problem was infinite immigration from all parts of the non-westernized world. It certainly wasn’t to create policy that encouraged and enabled the native population of the nation to start families. (Yes, Americans are a nation. It was considered people living in America of European descent.) Hungary has offered tax incentives for having children — mothers of four or more have paid no income tax for life since 2020, and Orbán has since dropped that threshold to two. Russia pays lump sums for births with regional bonuses stacked on top. China ended the one-child policy in 2015 and finally started cutting checks last year — 3,600 yuan, about $500, every year until the kid turns three. That’s real money in a country where the average rural person lives on about $3,500 a year.
Why worry about the people of your nation reproducing when there’s billions of people ready to flood into your country that you can hand jobs and small business loans to! The SBA refused to even list country of origin for these loans they’re giving out. To this administration’s credit, the SBA finally shut that window in March. Green card holders are barred from 7(a) loans entirely now. It only took until 2026.
The key element of this childcare rule change that must be maintained for it to actually be a “pro-family” policy, is that it must only apply to married individuals. Married-couple households were 74% of this country in 1960. They’ve been under 50% since 2010. Children born to unwed mothers went from 5% to roughly 40% across the same stretch, and the share of kids living with only their mother nearly tripled. It’s as if the Great Society had the opposite effect of its title. The numbers don’t lie.
Automation and AI are coming and will utlimately wreak havoc upon the labor market once the new paradigm is built. The people who want to sell you the idea that “they’ll just create new jobs, someone has to work on the robots!” Yes, someone does have to work on the robots, and at some point it will be another robot. In the meantime, one mechanic servicing a fleet of 500 robots who have replaced 3 human workers each does not offer industrial revolution labor growth.
A lot of people are going to be out of the work force anyway, moving into familial support roles is the most desirable outcome.
This would pair perfectly with a home-school voucher in the $7k per child range. Public schools spent $17,619 per pupil in FY2024, the highest figure ever recorded. The federal slice of that is about $2,500. Tearing down the indoctrinating and ineffective school system would help accelerate the nation’s flight from the grasps of cultural marxism.
Private, cooperative and religious schools would thrive. Sure, the inner cities would be a mess, many of the kids wouldn’t be able to pass basic reading or mathematics proficiency. Oh wait, we’re already there. Five percent of Detroit fourth graders were proficient in reading in 2024. Cleveland was at eight. Nine percent of Baltimore eighth graders were proficient in math.
My instincts, or political whiplash conditioning, tell me this may be another policy that will have been presented first as a good idea, get railroaded by the media and the Democrats, then get walked back, turned into something completely ineffective, and yet still victory will be declared.
But that is certainly not my hope.
This change is one that is worth fighting for.
“Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again.” — Michael Corleone
Photo: Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Want (1943), public domain.