Political leaders on both the left and the right seem to think that economic growth is more important than families.
Political leaders on both the left and the right seem to think that economic growth is more important than families.
F or all their rhetorical complaints about neoliberalism and the heartlessness of unfettered capitalism, progressives in today’s Democratic Party are often remarkably friendly toward corporate interests. From an obsession with repealing the cap on SALT —disproportionately paid by the top quintile of earners — to a multiplicity of plans for student-loan debt forgiveness, the Democratic agenda is increasingly reflective of the political priorities and cultural attitudes of upwardly mobile, college-educated professionals. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the contemporary push for government-run child care, which the White House has touted as a central feature of the Build Back Better Act. “Nearly 2 million women in our country have been locked out of the workforce because they have to care for a child or an elderly relative at home,” President Biden tweeted on Tuesday. “My Build Back Better Act will make caregiving accessible and affordable and help them get back to work.”
The progressive case for universal child care assumes that raising children unjustly keeps women from what they all want to do: work outside the home. Biden’s choice of words is telling: mothers “have to care for a child,” and government should “help them get back to work.” In this way, universal child care is actually the opposite of a pro-family policy; it is an effort to replace parents with government workers, based on the idea that child-rearing is secondary to economic productivity and GDP growth. Progressives are open about this view: During a 2020 Democratic primary debate, Elizabeth Warren mourned the fact that “too many mamas and daddies today are getting knocked off the track and never get back on” after the arrival of children. Pete Buttigieg was quick to agree: “It makes no sense, and it must change, and we shouldn’t be afraid to put federal dollars into making that a reality,” he told the audience. “Subsidizing child care and making sure that we are building up a workforce of people who are paid at a decent level to offer early childhood education, as well as child care writ large.”
But the way some conservatives think about child and family policy suggests that they accept the basic premise of this argument — that public policy should be oriented toward incentivizing mothers to spend more time in the workforce. In an eight-and-a-half-hour speech on the floor of the House last week, Representative Kevin McCarthy railed against the Build Back Better bill’s removal of the work requirement from the child tax credit (CTC), a per-child tax break that BBB would extend through 2022: “This bill will make the labor crisis worse by fundamentally transforming the child tax credit — placing small-business owners into direct competition with the federal government’s unlimited printing press,” McCarthy argued. “That alone is reason to defeat the bill.”
Again, McCarthy is far from the only conservative who has invoked labor-force participation as a reason to oppose pro-family policies. A November 2 statement from the Republican Joint Economic Committee titled “Child Tax Credits Should Promote Work, Not Undermine It” argued that “work is one of the most important paths out of poverty for parents and their children. By not requiring a job to receive benefits, the Democrats’ proposal could lead many lower-income Americans to work less or entirely sever their connection to work.”
While there is a range of opinion among economists about the negative employment effects of a policy like the CTC, a version of this argument is worth taking seriously. It stands to reason that the CTC would at least incentivize some number of parents to exit the workforce — particularly if Congress nixed the work requirement.
But is that always a bad thing?
In the debates over family policy, both left-wing proponents of government-run child care and right-wing opponents of the CTC seem to aim at maximized labor-force participation as their main policy goal. Certainly, high employment rates are often a salutary indicator of societal health, given the beneficial economic effects and the inherent dignity of work. But there are also human goods that aren’t economic. Employment numbers are not the sole or even the highest end of politics.
There are, at any rate, natural preferences that public policy should account for. According to a 2019 Gallup poll, 50 percent of women with children under the age of 18 “would prefer to stay at home and take care of the house and family.” With women who are not currently employed, that number jumps to 67 percent. Mothers who have left the workforce to raise their children are doing so because they want to.
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans like McCarthy insist that family policy should incentivize parents to reenter the workforce as quickly as possible, pointing out that mothers (and to a lesser extent, fathers) staying home would hurt the economy. But what about the other features of civil society — notably, the family? Clare Ath, a mother of young children who serves as the county commissioner of West Virginia’s Jefferson County, recently argued in an article about Joe Manchin’s push to add a work requirement to the CTC:
While a work requirement may sound like a good policy, in practice, it could be devastating for many of our rural families. That’s because many of the non-working, low-income households that Senator Manchin wants to make ineligible for the child tax credit include a group essential to the development of West Virginia’s youth: grandparents.
Our Appalachian region has been plagued by substance abuse and a continual decay of family foundations. The opioid epidemic has led to an entire generation of children with parents unable to care for them. In the majority of cases, the responsibility of care then falls to grandparents, and most of them are no longer in the labor force.
Are we really willing to gut these fragile civic structures in the service of economic productivity? The progressives’ push for government child care is wrong, but it’s at least internally consistent with what the Left believes about government and the family. But conservatives, especially those who consider themselves pro-family and pro-life, should know better.
To be sure, influential conservatives such as Yuval Levin have advocated an expanded CTC for years. And as many right-leaning advocates of the CTC have written, there are practical ways to address — or at least offset — potential drops in the labor-force-participation rate as a result of such policies. (A letter to Congress last year signed by a number of major conservative thinkers — including National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez and Ramesh Ponnuru — suggested pairing the CTC with the Earned Income Tax Credit, which would incentivize work and provide extra relief for mothers and fathers who continue to hold jobs while raising their children.) But a possible reduction in employment is insufficient grounds to object to a policy such as the CTC.
Those who want to help American families should be open to policies that actually help them rather than focusing myopically on employment or economic growth.