Emma Green, writing in the New Yorker, takes a look at “an attempt to reorient Republican politics around what’s good for parents and their children, even if that requires the Party to embrace some policies it once considered anathema.” This turn is, to my mind, very welcome, as is Green’s fair description of it.

My only caveat is that we should not exaggerate what the advocates of a pro-family conservative economics have accomplished. A lot of useful work has been done by conservatives who span many intra-conservative divides. What we haven’t gotten yet are many actual changes to government policy.

The main policy change we have gotten is an expansion of the tax credit for children. But that expansion has been more modest than is generally appreciated. Back in 2005, the child credit took a maximum of $1,000 per child off federal tax bills. The dependent exemption took $3,200 per child out of a household’s taxable income, and was thus worth $480 to families in the 15 percent tax bracket. So families could receive $1,480 per child in tax relief that year.

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act, signed by President Trump in 2017, got rid of the dependent exemption but increased the maximum credit to $2,000 per child. But inflation has eroded its value, especially during the Biden years. It is now worth less, in real terms, than the pro-family provisions of the tax code we had 20 years ago. And that value keeps eroding—which means that parents’ (already disproportionately large) share of the tax burden keeps rising.

Lots of work to do.