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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.
I'll say one thing, this is a beautiful example of how modern "conservativism" has completely erased itself in pursuit of nonsense cultural war grievances and virtue signaling. They're taking already appropriated money set aside for working parents meant to encourage them to be productive members of society and putting it into doing the exact opposite and promoting welfare dependency. Government money has to come from someone, so we're taking from people who actually contribute in order to create more leeches? That's crazy. But of course, socialist welfare thought is the default now, we can all just coast off the rich if we ban trade, nationalize their companies, give infinite subsidies (especially to the old), and keep ramping up on debt.
But ok maybe birthrates would be worth it, but this is a policy that is very unlikely to actually promote any new childbirths, given the failure of similar ideas wherever they've been tried.
So if Alice and Susie are paid to take care of their own children they are welfare leeches, but not if Susie is paid to take care of Alice's child and Alice is paid to take care of Susie's child?
If Alice is paid less than the cost of daycare for working, would do a better job than the daycare, and would prefer spending time with her own children to spending time at work, then working that job is not economically efficient. Subsidizing paid childcare is thus an obvious example of creating economic inefficiency, and the stay-at-home parents who get screwed by their exclusion have understandably been complaining. (Subsidizing childcare in general isn't necessarily inefficient because the average person creates net-positive externalities which parents aren't paid for because it's illegal and impractical to sell your children into slavery or take out loans against their future earnings. Thus the job of creating people suffers from underinvestment.)
Now, it is possible that subsidizing daycare but not stay-at-home parents served a beneficial purpose despite the obvious economic inefficiency. The average first-world person has net-positive externalities but lots of people do not. I assume that is what some of the backlash against "welfare-queen"-enabling policies was, not just enabling people to be net-negative to societal productivity but paying them to create more people who will likely also be net-negative in a fashion that is obviously unsustainable because somebody has to actually pay taxes. Proposals to increase the fertility rate often take the form of reducing taxes rather than direct payments for this reason. However the new proposal would require that the spouse be working 35+ hours a week, which might be sufficient to make it net-positive despite it cutting out at higher income levels.
Daycares actually take care of multiple children at once. I know, quite surprising isn't it?
Even for the youngest infants in my state of NC it's a 5x efficiency gain. Past 2 years old it's 10x. Maybe you don't think it's worth it, but framing it as cancelling out is incorrect. The entire premise of your comment falls into pieces with that basic fact.
We have a much better way of measuring whether it cancels out than the number of children per carer: the number of dollars. If some of the dollars instead go to "the construction workers who built the daycare building" and "the daycare administrators who handle the legal issues and overhead of taking care of other people's children" that doesn't represent an increase in efficiency. If anything having a lower carer to child ratio will on average correspond to lower quality (not to mention differences like how on average carers care less than parents do), so if daycare costs more than Alice's job pays she is paying more for lower quality. Rather than deciding on Alice's behalf that daycare must be more efficient because it has more children, we can let her compare her wages to the cost of daycare (not to mention other factors like how much she likes her job) and decide for herself. Except that, by subsidizing paid childcare, we distort this comparison and end up paying her to take the economically less efficient option. Equally subsidizing childcare whether she does it herself or pays a daycare to do it removes this distortion, letting her once again decide for herself based on her individual situation which is the best option.
Like a lot of pricing issues in the US, a lot of the costs are from unnecessary regulations, like the rather famous example of food preparation extending so far it might even cover peeling a banana.
An argument of economic inefficiency because of regulation isn't a rebuttal at all, the answer is clear and obvious to stop driving up costs. Construction especially is well proven to not have to be nearly as expensive as it. It's the same logic behind saying Mamdani's grocery store might be better than the private alternatives cause they won't deal with taxes and other costs but also duh yeah if the private alternatives are being handicapped then it's not a fair fight to begin with.
If the problem is government, you can't argue the only solution is more government. And in a fair fight it's very obvious that daycares win economically because one person taking care of ten children frees up nine workers.
Regardless of what improvements can be made to daycare regulations, "childcare subsidies but only if you pay for someone else to do it" is distortionary and produces economic inefficiency. Even if you hypothetically fixed regulations so hard that paying for daycare was always cheaper than even the worst-paying jobs, it would still be paying people trading off between "more money so we can save up for a cruise" and "getting to spend time with my kids instead of in an Amazon warehouse" to take the non-utility-maximizing option.
Making the childcare subsidies less distortionary is not "more government" in any meaningful sense, especially since it's coming out of the same fund so it is literally the same number of tax dollars being distributed. And of course until such hypothetical improvements are made we get the current situation where daycare for a couple children often costs more than the entire take-home pay for one of the parents, but the government will pay people to use it.
I think you are underestimating the overhead inherent in things like property costs, having a formal organization where people can sign up their kids, and compensating for the lower trustworthiness of multiple for-pay non-parent carers. Regarding the last I'm reminded of the statistic that non-relatives in the home are massively over-represented in abuse, while obviously some parents are abusive or neglectful it's less common. Not to mention the simple fact that more carers means a higher chance that at least one is bad. So if you're having strangers take care of your children there's an incentive to pursue overhead-increasing safety measures and expensive signaling like "all carers have a college degree in Early Childhood Education" or "daycare seems very well-maintained and high-class" to reduce risk, regardless of regulatory requirements. In any case, whether it can be made dramatically cheaper or not, subsidizing it over unpaid childcare is fundamentally paying people on the margin to choose it even if it would otherwise be the worse choice.
There is also a presumption that taking care of kids is the only output. A SAHM can help build a community especially if there is a critical mass
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