Married couples with children don’t need fresh new government policies. Government needs to do the same old stuff conservatives have talked about for years.
“Family policy” doesn’t have to mean a bunch of new government programs. Politicians often talk about it that way, with proposals for federally funded child care, federally funded paid leave, federally funded baby bonuses, and more. But if what families need from the government is a growing economy with stable prices, communities safe from crime and disorder, and the space to form and join civic and religious institutions, then a lot of the same old stuff conservatives have been talking about for years will be the best family policy available. That’s especially true when the welfare state is already too big and the government’s ability to fund new programs is already too small.
John Shelton of Advancing American Freedom has written an article for Civitas Outlook making that case. He notes that clearly not all family policies are good: ancient Sparta’s idea of family policy was to take boys away from their parents and have the state raise them instead. The U.S. does not need to “pull every lever” for family policy, as Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts wrote in his most recent book. Many of those levers are very expensive and provide little reason to believe they will produce results worth the cost.
Shelton notes that Roberts highlights Hungary, which, as Roberts wrote, spends 6 percent of its GDP on “measures to encourage family formation and the raising of children.” This is surely easier for countries to do when they don’t have to spend much money on defense; as a NATO member, Hungary has consistently spent below the alliance guideline of 2 percent of GDP on defense, spending as little as 0.9 percent in 2014. And as Shelton notes, “Despite the massive family support spending discrepancy between the two countries, the U.S. outperforms Hungary in baby births.”
If the U.S. spent 6 percent of its GDP on family policy, that would be over $1.7 trillion per year in government spending. Does any conservative really believe the U.S. has $1.7 trillion per year sitting around to spend? Does any conservative really believe that what American families need is $1.7 trillion per year in debt-financed government largesse?
The median household income for married couples with children in the U.S. is about $120,000 per year. Married couples with children are the most common type of family household, according to the Census Bureau. Median household income overall in the U.S. is about $80,000. Married couples with children, on average, are already doing about 50 percent better than the median American household. They don’t need more handouts from the government.
The national debt is straightforwardly anti-family. As Shelton writes, it represents “passing the problems of one generation along to the next generation,” something universally recognized as an irresponsible thing for parents to do to their children. In the Burkean understanding of the social contract — the contract between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born — sending the bill for the benefits the living enjoy to those yet to be born is a gross dereliction of duty. Those yet to be born are convenient bill-payers for politicians because they can’t vote. It takes some moral restraint, currently in short supply, to stop racking up debt other people will have to pay.
Shelton has a different approach in mind, based on a story from his grandfather:
The problems that family policy seeks to address are urgent, emergencies even, but panic often multiplies problems rather than mitigates them, as my grandfather once learned. Training aspiring helicopter pilots at a small airport in South Carolina, he taught them to calmly navigate simulated engine failure and avoid a catastrophic collision with the ground. On one occasion, however, the trainee panicked, pulled the wrong lever, and transformed the situation from simulated to actual crisis. Fortunately, the crash failed to kill the pair of them, though still leaving my grandfather with a painful back break and an extended hospital stay.
Policymakers should proceed under the same principle that guided the doctors attending to my grandfather post-crash: first, do no harm. Sound policymaking, like good medical practice, requires sober-minded realism. If policy levers never worked for other countries trying to reverse the birth dearth, we shouldn’t think it might work for us. Moreover, we should be alert to the serious tradeoffs that arise from many of these seemingly apparent levers. Simply because one of them is nominally about “children” or “family” does not make them the automatic best way to advance the cause of families. Even the most cautious version of CTC expansion—updating and indexing the credit’s value to compensate for Bidenflation—could conceivably leave families worse off if paired with aggressive tariffs as pay-fors, as has been repeatedly suggested for tax reform in 2025.
Deregulation (for families the deregulation of housing is especially vital) and business-tax reform remain two of the best tools available to increase economic growth and the wage and employment growth that come with it. Government should remove every disincentive to marriage that currently exists, such as marriage penalties in the tax code and the welfare system. (Something as unexciting as an easier process for name changes would help a lot of women getting married.) Shelton suggests measures to reduce children’s exposure to pornography, “a known acid to marital stability.” (As I have written before, if it’s going to be called “adult entertainment,” there should be no problem restricting it to adults.) He also endorses a suggestion from Catherine Pakaluk of Catholic University that government at all levels make it easier for churches to run schools and provide family support, removing regulatory barriers that currently exist. Expanding school choice alongside those efforts would give hope to many currently dispirited parents who want their kids to get a good education that also aligns with their values.
“These policy proposals might not seem particularly exciting,” Shelton writes, “but when you’re trying to navigate a helicopter or the federal government safely, boring is good.” How did Ronald Reagan know that boring stuff like stable prices and lower interest rates were working? Because, as the “Morning in America” ad said, people were buying new homes and getting married. Families don’t need the federal government to cook up something fresh. They need the federal government to make space for them and their communities.