When analyzing politics, especially “programs” making significant promises voters, incentives are the name of the game. Intentions count for nothing, at least if you care about what a policy will actually do.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration floated a plan to expand an existing federal child-care grant program, providing qualifying stay-at-home mothers roughly $9,000 a year for child-care services. Two-income households already qualify for the program, but their money goes directly to child-care providers; under the proposed change, families with a stay-at-home parent would receive the money directly. The proposal, championed primarily by Vice President JD Vance and his allies, immediately divided conservatives. One side sees a welcome end to a policy that treats stay-at-home parents as less deserving than two-income households. The other sees a de facto welfare expansion, and another dependency trap, wrapped in pro-family language.
But what nefarious incentives lie beneath this "pro-family" program?
Well according to Steve Forbes, it acts as a potential launchpad for universal basic income. Democrats are bound to retake power at some point, but that does not mean Republicans should preemptively build the machinery for the policies Democrats want. Vance’s proposal establishes the principle that Washington should send direct cash grants to lower-income families. Once that principle exists, what stops a future Congress from expanding it? Beyond the pro-family label, there is little meaningful difference between a $9,000 grant to working families and a smaller-scale version of UBI.
The second problem is government control over family life, something conservatives have traditionally opposed. Government should not be an active manager of Americans’ family decisions, yet this program would use federal money to incentivize stay-at-home motherhood. Do we want Washington deciding which family arrangements deserve subsidies? Do we want to encourage people to leave the workforce, rely more heavily on government, and further strain an already tight labor market? A policy built around rewarding one particular household model may sound pro-family today, but the precedent survives long after the political coalition that created it, and can be redirected by the next administration toward any family arrangement it chooses.
Most surprisingly, the vice president’s plan could also create a backdoor threat to homeschooling. Once the federal government begins writing checks directly to parents, it also gains a reason to dictate the conditions attached to those checks. Teachers’ unions are among the country’s most powerful lobbying forces, and they would have every incentive to demand that families receiving federal child-care grants enroll their children in public school rather than educate them at home.
This is precisely the problem with what some conservative commentators have described as simply "reforming" an entitlement: conditions can be added, eligibility can be narrowed, and what begins as a pro-family benefit can become another lever of federal control over how families raise and educate their children.
What has happened to conservatism? Our political beliefs once rested on the pillars of limited government, free markets, and individual freedom. Are those principles embodied in the vice president’s plan to send up to $9,000 a year in federal child-care subsidies to eligible stay-at-home parents? Or in the president’s suggestion that every adult receive a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans win the midterms?
As MAGA begins to search for its heir, more and more eyes are turning toward Vice President JD Vance. As a matter of fact, his speech last night at the RNC Midterm convention might've sealed the deal. That is fine. But conservatives cannot delude themselves into thinking that he simply is President Trump’s MAGA in full, much less the original tenets an embodiment of Reagan or Buckley conservatism.
That is the question conservatives need to answer before we simply crown the next heir to MAGA: are we comfortable with that direction? Are we willing to trade limited government and free-market principles for a more active, more paternalistic federal power, so long as it arrives with a pro-family label and a Republican signature?
Maybe the answer is yes. But if it is, conservatives should at least be honest about the totality of the bargain we are making.
