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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7927 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.

Story time.

I have 4 small kids and a SAH wife. Even with this modest family, the government has made basic errors with our taxes every year the youngest has been alive (3 years in a row now). For example:

  1. I live in California, and the California tax form 540 only has space for 3 children. For larger families, the official instructions are to write a letter explaining the situation to get the extra tax credits. Apparently this is so infrequent that there isn't even a form for it! Two out of the 3 years, California has lost this letter and not applied the tax credit for the 4th child until I do dozens of back-and-forths with the tax board.

  2. This year, the IRS had a mistake reading one of the SSNs of the children, and so they didn't count any of the children as deductible. (Apparently the OCR system they use didn't like the font of my pdf writer, but it's the same font as before... and they should already know all the SSNs...) We've been doing back-and-forths with the IRS since April and they still haven't resolved this for us.

So I don't trust the government at all to properly handle any sort of tax breaks/etc for large families.

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