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Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone


NextImg:Honor Charlie Kirk’s pro-family legacy with more than words

“Get married. Have children. Build a legacy. Pass down your values. Pursue the eternal. Seek true joy.” This quote from Charlie Kirk was a touchstone at his Arizona funeral last month, and it was emblematic of an important truth that he had come to embrace in his too-short life.

Yes, he believed in the conservative causes of freedom, the free market, “America First,” and free speech. But, in the wake of his marriage and the birth of his two children, Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the nation’s largest conservative youth organization, had come to realize that there were some things in life more important than the right’s present preoccupations — such as getting married and starting a family.

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But in the wake of his tragic assassination, Kirk’s widow, Erika, has amplified his pro-family messaging and example, and the cause has been taken up by many on the Right. The nation’s largest conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, unfurled a giant poster spotlighting the “Get married” quote at its Washington headquarters. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the vast throng that Kirk gave voice to young adults that “the highest calling we are called to is to be in a successful marriage and raise productive children.” And President Donald Trump saluted Kirk’s “old-fashioned” philosophy, to “go get married,” on Fox and Friends.

At a time when the fortunes of marriage and family have been ebbing for decades — the fertility rate is at a record-low 1.6 babies per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 and the average number that people say they want, which is more than two children — this cultural turn toward family across the Right is a welcome and needed pendulum shift. It’s also a great way to honor Kirk’s legacy — Kirk, after all, was known above all else as a faithful family man who earnestly wanted everybody else to enjoy the same goods of faith and family life he so thoroughly and publicly enjoyed.

But if Republicans want to revive the falling fortunes of the family, they must do more than talk the family talk — they must also embrace policies that make it easier for young men and women to do as he did, to get married and have children. Indeed, in eulogizing her husband, Erika Kirk went out of her way to say that he “told me if he ever did run for office, that his top priority would be to revive the American family.” Had he run for office, it would have been on a family policy platform — her words, not ours.

Kirk knew what time it was for the American family — time for renewal with policies that make it easier to get married, buy a home, and support a family. Unfortunately, the Republican leadership in Congress does not. Take the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that the GOP just pushed through. Whereas Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act dramatically expanded the child tax credit, the OBBBA walked back those gains. Had the 2017 CTC value been updated for inflation, the CTC today would be $2,600 per child — instead, Republican leadership pegged it at just $2,200.

The most visible family policy achievement of this Republican Congress was the OBBBA’s expansion of childcare subsidies — it almost doubled the child and dependent care tax credit from $1,200 to $2,100. Yet even those child care subsidies are an awkward fit for conservative family priorities — Sen. Katie Britt’s (R-AL) campaign to boost the CDCTC only increased its value for high-earning families with two working parents, and only increased the benefits for first and second children. This “blue state” approach, putting one or two children in day care with two full-time working parents, does nothing for conservative families who wish to do things like Erika Kirk, a self-described “guardian of the home,” did, with one parent staying home to raise their young children. Why conservatives thought taxing breadwinners to pay for subsidized double-earner families was a win is bewildering.

If Trump is serious when he emphasized Kirk’s commitment to supporting family and his desire to do something to further that aim, he should lean on Congress to act. Conservative family advocates have been calling for a second reconciliation bill focused on family, yet Congress has balked. The baby boomers who run Congress, whose generation chronically underfunded Social Security and now expect younger taxpayers to finance their deficits, are simply not that interested in family: Polls reliably show that younger people favor more generous support for family, while older people often do not. The reason for this divide is simple — young Americans, like Charlie Kirk, are seeing firsthand how dysfunctional modern dating is, how unattainable an economically normal life and homeownership have become, and how many of them face fertility problems due to long delays in starting a family.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Practically since the day Trump took office, there have been promises of a “family policy executive order.” Conservatives are still waiting for it. Other things have taken priority — but they shouldn’t have. As Kirk came to realize, family policy is more important than trade policy or immigration policy. There’s no point in reindustrializing America or preserving American borders and sovereignty if people cannot even get their own households in order — or form households at all. Family policy should be the administration’s first priority, not least because it’s one of the key issues on which conservative priorities poll well with younger people.

The first step for the Trump administration to make Kirk’s vision for renewed family life a reality is to go ahead and issue whatever family policy executive order it’s been gestating for the last nine months: that baby will soon be overdue.

But executive orders are not enough. The main problems facing families will not be solved by regulatory tweaks. To help families, the White House must lean on Congress, hard, to allocate enough money that it actually matters to families. A good first step would be to fix some egregious shortfalls of the OBBBA: break through congressional resistance and restore the real value of Trump’s 2017 child tax credit; extend the childcare credit to all working families, not just two-earner households; increase work incentives in the child tax credit and simplify it by phasing in benefits at the first dollar earned. All these things can be done easily in a second reconciliation bill — we can have better family policy by Christmas.

But these policies are still just tinkering around the edges. The White House should demand more from Congress. An idea recently floated by the Heritage Foundation makes sense: endow every child born in America with a $1,000 investment fund that matures upon marriage, guaranteeing that every new marriage in America begins with money to support a down payment for a home, pay off a loan, or even just have a nice honeymoon. This policy isn’t that expensive but would yield big benefits in the long run. Likewise, a larger child tax credit in the year of birth of $5,000 would make sense — family incomes crash when they add a new baby, and it takes time for households to adjust to their new arrangement. Besides stabilizing family incomes in a tricky time, giving families a baby bonus like this would encourage many of them to go ahead and have that baby they’ve been debating having: Research shows pronatal incentives do increase birth rates.

Beyond these ideas, the intergenerational compact needs to be rewritten. Social Security and Medicare are broken — they reward people for prioritizing work over family. Mothers who stay home and raise four children receive a pittance from Social Security, even though their work raising children is the only thing keeping Social Security solvent for the nation’s future. Meanwhile, childless people who earn big salaries contribute literally nothing to their own future Social Security needs — remember, Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system: Retirees are paid for by people currently working, not by their own past contributions — yet they get far more generous Social Security checks. The solution is simple: many countries already provide modest “care credits,” artificially bumping up the income basis for pension calculations for parents who are out of work with young children. The U.S. should do the same thing — for every year people report being the legal guardian of a child on their tax returns, Social Security should provide an additional credit to their calculated Social Security benefit. Having children is the only thing that keeps Social Security solvent — it’s high time Social Security recognized that fact.

These proposals would cost money, but not as much as you might think. The Social Security change, assuming it was only applied to people currently in their childbearing years, would actually have a $0 cost within the 10-year budget scoring window. But all of these policies combined would cost at least $20 billion but not more than $50 billion per year. That’s real money. Congress would have to make cuts elsewhere, or raise taxes, though not necessarily income taxes.

But families are worth it. And if Congress isn’t willing to foot this bill, the future will simply be that there are fewer and fewer families every year, and our nation dwindles into a shadow of its former self. We don’t think this is the family future Kirk wanted, or anybody wants, for the nation, so it’s time for Trump and the Republican Congress to step up with family policies that make it possible for all people who wish to embrace Kirk’s legacy not just in words but in deeds, to “get married, have children,” and thereby “build a legacy.”

Lyman Stone is the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. Brad Wilcox is a distinguished university professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and the author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.