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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25566 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Trumps proposing to pay families with SAHP $9,000.

Dana Loesch, former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, called the program an example of the "new socialist right." Conservative personality Tomi Lahren likened it to the money that was sent out during the COVID-19 pandemic that "destroyed our workforce and supply chain" and raised the possibility that it could create a "giant fraud boondoggle."

Am I the only one who thinks the proposal is excellent, and that it is an inherent good to support families (even if its limited to more traditional ones)? Its probably better for us to support some families than not? The payment is certainly not ideal, perhaps an argument could be made for support working parents as well. But I think this is at least on the right track. We hear people complain about the cost of raising children all the time, (though I suspect this isnt a genuine complaint for most - many who are saying this probably wouldn't have children even if the cost were $0) but I think this may encourage the few who do actually think like this to go through and continue with more.

My only other complaint here is if Trump and JD Vance are primarily concerned with boosting the overall birth rate alongside helping working families, targeting male income and raising it should be paramount.

I think it's important to note this isn't a new appropriation authorized by Congress (at least, not yet) rather the money is supposed to be coming from the existing Child Care and Development Fund which subsidizes childcare for low income parents who work or are in education or training. So, it's a reallocation of a government subsidy from working parents to non-working parents.

So this isn't really natalist at all then, it's just punishing working parents and telling them they should be stay-at-home welfare leeches instead.

Amazing.

yeschad.png

The idea that double-income families are bad and self-defeating is not new or limited to social conservatism. Elizabeth Warren (yes, that one) wrote a book about it back in 2003.

If anything, we're not punishing double-income families enough.

Incentivizing people not to work is in fact a bad thing. If it led to a significant spike in fertility then maybe it might be justifiable. This is not the case, however.

I'm not sure what you think Warren's book does to buttress your argument. The thrust of her book is that when people have more money from an additional worker in the family, they spend that money on things instead of saving it.

I'm pretty sure the point of that book is that life becomes worse when two-working-parent families become commonplace. They are competing with all the other two-working-parent families so stuff isn't any more affordable, while now there is no longer a parent at home to do the non-economic stuff. That's why it's called a trap.

I thought the trap was legible vs. illegible value. Your non-economic labor had value but you didn’t realize how much.

This is going off Scott’s review. I haven’t read the book.

Neither have I tbf, I was going by my understanding of the popular understanding of the term :)

The "trap" is rising expectations where families respond to having more money by blowing it on stuff like bigger houses, vacations, and fancy crap. It's a normal human reaction, but not one many people are aware that they'll likely fall into themselves, and then they become unhappy when they have to have 2 people working to maintain the same spot on the lifestyle treadmill.

Women entering the workforce drove down the wages of their husbands and sons.

This isn’t true. The influx of women into the labor market since the 1970s wasn’t really a negative economic force but more of a survival mechanism in response to changes in underlying factors in the economy. What happened in response was banks and the housing market weaponized the transition from single-income to dual-income households to fuel a massive expansion of private debt. The standard narrative we all often hear was that this owed more to a change in social norms (and that’s true to some degree), but it was largely driven by the opposite effect.

The mid-1970s was when you first saw real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) begin to stagnate or fall, and that was due to anti-labor policies and weaker unions. So to keep their families afloat and maintain their standard of living wives entered the labor force in response. If you’re a dyed in the wool traditionalist who wants women back in the household, before you embark on a public propaganda campaign to brainwash women back into the home, shoot the banking sector first.

Wages today are significantly higher than before the days when women entered the workforce.

LOL. LMAO, even.

Sure, nominal wages are higher than ever. Held constant in something like the oldest, most widely used, and most stable form of money on earth (gold) they're lower than ever. Priced in silver, before the CRA you were paid in money that was real silver, you will see the same thing.

By the way, the price of a good beef cow has pretty much always been one ounce of gold, and guess what, it still is. Houses when priced in gold are reasonably priced and have not inflated like mad. Wages are significantly higher because they're being paid in scrip that's significantly less valuable.

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Stay at home moms do something valuable, they're worth encouraging, and this policy is terribly designed. But it's also just not enough to push very many people out of the workforce. Full time employment at minimum wage pays a lot more than this program does, and 90% of workers make more than double the minimum wage.

I think you are ignoring the costs of working, the marginal tax rate of working, and the quality of life differences for SAHM.

My wife was a teacher. When she ran the math with our first kid (and the quality of childcare she wanted) working only came out ahead by about 10k. She made the decision the 10k wasn’t worth it.

It’s certainly on-brand.

Punishing single parents is good, actually, and subsidizing them is bad. If they didn't have the government reaching into my pocket to take my money and give it to them, maybe they'd find a man to marry them and raise their children.

But as long as the government has its hand in my pocket, the money should go to subsidize good things like intact families, not bad things like single mothers.

For the class that actually becomes single mothers, there are simply not eligible men to marry. And that's with a supremely reasonable definition of eligible(like non substance addicted, full time employed, not currently engaged in the criminal justice system- simply not happening below the income cutoff for this program).

I suspect that this will be used by, like, grad students, or families with the husband on disability, and stuff like that.

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