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Notes -
Trumps proposing to pay families with SAHP $9,000.
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.
What’s to stop, uh, let’s call them ‘people who don’t vote Republican’ just getting married for the free $10k? Even if you say ‘you must have been legally married for five years’ there’s no central registry unlike European countries, meaning it’s ripe for fraud plus plenty of anti-Republican underclass groups like Somalis actually have high rates of marriage.
Ideally the policy would be to promote marriage and family formation and not just give Republican voters gibs. I don't actually see the problem here do you view reduced Black single parenthood as a bad thing? Having on SAHP requires more than just a marriage it requires coordination between parents and I imagine the amount of people who would abuse it would be less than you think.
So what if it benefits Somalis? Even in a totally cynical realpolitik way there are not that many of them and Minnesota was going Blue anyway. But more realistically making sure a Somali never gets a dime is such a bad policy priority. I thought we wanted to encourage marriage and families?
This is the Boomer school of conservative thought, most famously represented by George W. Bush.
Somalians - they're just like us! Good family people, really. Once planted on the magic soil of America they will soon be starting businesses, waving flags, and maybe, gosh darned it, even voting Republican.
And it's just entirely discredited. There is little assimilation. Somalians are a massive drain on the economy, on schools, on the justice system, on the benefits system, on social trust, the list goes on. And its not just in the US. This has been observed in countries like Denmark too, where Somalians remain net negative to the state economy throughout their entire lives, even men, even during the peak earnings years of 40-50 when almost everyone else is hugely positive.
Any policy that encourages the creation of more Somalians in the US is a terrible policy. And why they are a small minority now, its unequally distributed. The places where they concentrate are rapidly enshittifying. The phase change between "they're a tiny minority, to small to care about" to "you need Somalian votes to win an election" happens rapidly. Look at Minneapolis.
So, yeah, I am personally in favor of gibs to Republicans. If we can't take away the blue gibs, then all sides must have gibs!
The Zoomer/Trump conservatism seems to just be blatant self-dealing. The "Boomer" version was a lot better, but the reality is that Boomers are in fact the most guilty of anyone in voting themselves budget-busting entitlement expansions.
Exhibit A being COVID-19, of course, to the tune of several trillion.
"Taking away the [outgroup] gibs" and "voting for more [ingroup] gibs" are the same thing, by the way, because the way they're paid for is through inflation.
Whoever's not getting the gibs is therefore who's paying for it.
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