Republicans Re-Gifting Ideas

Ross Douthat drags out the old "We've destroyed the American family unit!" canard again, just in time for the holidays, and digs through the closet of old GOP chestnuts until he finds an idea he likes and re-wraps it for his column today.

Millions of Americans know this all too well, because the darker possibilities the Christmas stories hint at — divorce, abandonment, childhood suffering — are realities they have to live with every day. But that unhappy knowledge isn’t evenly distributed. In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families — the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class — are less and less likely to have them.

This domestic dissolution plays a role in a host of socioeconomic ills: stagnating blue-collar wages, weakening upward mobility, stalling high school graduation rates, even the increase in juvenile obesity and diabetes. But it isn’t an issue that politicians of either party are particularly comfortable addressing. Liberals worry about seeming paternalistic and judgmental; conservatives recoil from the idea of increasing the government’s role in the most intimate of spheres. Thus America has a crisis of family life, but no family policy to speak of. 

He's wrong on both counts there, because he wouldn't be Ross Douthat otherwise.  Liberals don't worry about being paternalistic and judgmental when it comes to helping Americans who are truly in need, and conservatives have no issues with "the idea of increasing the government’s role in the most intimate of spheres" when it comes to legislating how, if, and when a woman's uterus should be used, and it doesn't get more intimate than that.

What conservatives like Douthat mean by "family policy" is federal legislation blocking abortion and contraception as "against God's plan" and criminalizing as many medical professionals as possible who may provide those services to women.  It's ridiculous and backwater, and yet he completely rejects what nearly every other industrialized country outside the US has.

But there are costs to the European approach. Government-guaranteed leave often gives less financial relief to a mother or father who is already at home full time. And Europe’s overall web of regulations and job protections makes the labor market more rigid and less accommodating to part-time work — which is the kind of work that mothers, especially, tend to want. (A recent survey of American parents found that 58 percent of married women with children preferred part-time to full-time work, compared with 20 percent of husbands.)

A more flexible alternative, championed by the conservative writers Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert Stein, would change the way we tax families, dramatically expanding the child tax credit in order to ease the burden on parents with young children. Their proposal would leave contemporary Baileys and Cratchits with more disposable income and more options without favoring one approach to parenting over another. 

So no, why should we have what Canada has?  It would be bad for business and would mean fewer jobs.  Instead, we should have tax cuts, which solve everything, the same old re-gift that conservatives give every year when this "state of the family" column is written.

Obviously, neither generous parental leave nor an expanded child tax credit is a magic bullet for the problem of family breakdown. But if Democrats were championing the first idea and Republicans were championing the second, we would at least have the beginnings of a healthy conversation about family policy, instead of the conspicuous silence that surrounds the country’s biggest social crisis. And it’s hard to imagine a policy debate that’s better suited to the season.

Actually, Democrats have been trying to expand the child tax credit for years now and recently tried to expand the payroll tax credit in order to give families more of what they earned this year.  Republicans blocked it.  In 2010 President Obama proposed doubling the Child Care Tax Credit as well as increasing funding for child care subsidies for working families.  Republicans blocked it too.  They blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act while they were at it.  Republicans are entirely uninterested in families and taxes, unless it means making them pay more so that we can cut taxes on the rich.

Republicans don't want to have a conversation about family policy, because their entire family policy consists of outlawing abortion and treating women like second class citizens and their needs as financial burdens on the American business owner than men don't generate.  And Ross Douthat is one of the reasons why we can't have that discussion, with his mealy-mouthed "both sides are at fault" nonsense.