The Updated Romney Family Plan

Over on the home page, Yuval Levin and Scott Winship heap praise on the new iteration of Mitt Romney’s Family Security Act. This is notable as Winship, the director of poverty studies at AEI, did not like Romney’s first draft of the bill, which had no work requirements.

He wasn’t alone. Oren Cass of American Compass criticized the first iteration along the same lines. Cass, who had advised Romney previously, seems to have had some influence on the new iteration. The new proposal has modest inducements to work and to marriage that the previous version lacked.

Levin and Winship explain some of the political logic:

The earnings requirement would reduce the reach of the benefit, and therefore reduce its potential to support family formation and reduce short-run poverty. Yet it’s a modest requirement, meant to mitigate perverse incentives but not to fully replace the emphasis on work and marriage that defines the TANF program (which would be retained under this new proposal). To us, the balance seems roughly right. This proposal will appeal to reformers who actually want to both support parents and encourage work and marriage — which means it could unite most conservatives, though it is also likely to have less appeal than Romney’s original proposal to some progressives who mostly liked that original version because they saw it as a path toward a universal basic income (UBI).

It’s definitely a bill that more conservatives can support, as it replaces a number of more complex and parsimonious programs with an expanded and simplified support for families.

It’s also been very interesting — and very telling — to see the lines on which liberals and progressives are opposing this bill. They are mad that the bill is paid for by eliminating SALT tax deductions that overwhelmingly benefit affluent liberals.

I’d be very curious to see if a 2024 Republican picks this ball up from Romney and runs on it.