Yuval Levin has already noted Robert Stein’s article explaining how federal policy overtaxes parents, and why remedying that situation ought to be central to tax reform. He also does a nice job of explaining how this reform would build on the success of Reagan’s tax cuts without slavishly imitating them.

The new child credit would accomplish several significant policy goals. First, it would offset the anti-parenting bias created by Social Security and Medicare. Second, the credit would help simplify the tax code by getting rid of other exemptions and credits that apply to ­children. Third, and very important for many families, it would end the bias against families with a stay-at-home parent now caused by the child-care credit (which applies only if both parents are working for pay). And finally, it would reduce effective marginal tax rates for many middle-class families.
Such an approach would also be very popular with a vital political constituency — middle-class parents — thereby opening the way to further tax reforms that would both help to pay for the new credit and correct other important deficiencies in the tax code. It could stand as the centerpiece of a new tax-cutting agenda.

Michael Barone has also recently written in favor of pro-family tax reform: “The post-World War II tax regime, with its big dependent deductions, produced the equivalent of a generous children’s allowance for married parents. Republicans should try to tilt tax policy in the same direction again.”

Both Barone and Stein pitch their arguments to conservatives, but the type of pro-family tax reform that Stein advocates ought to be attractive to liberals as well. (It’s revenue neutral and it doesn’t tilt to the rich, thus disposing of the two chief objections liberals have raised against tax cuts over the last generation.)

Stein and I have done some work together on this topic over the years — see here, for example.