Can we be normal about family policy?

Less "natalism" and weirdness, more tedious tax policy!

There’s been a resurgence of interest this spring in “pro-natalist” policy, largely because of a conference on the subject in Austin that scored coverage in the New York Times and other media outlets. The conference itself seemed pretty heavily geared toward right-wingers, and the Trump administration, which has zero interest in bipartisanship or striking a reassuring posture on anything, keeps bringing it up, so the discourse has quickly become unhinged.

We’re getting takes like Moira Donegan in The Guardian denouncing the idea that “American women should be tricked or coerced into having more babies — or encouraged in doing so with an expanded welfare state.”

Since the publication of One Billion Americans, I have been attempting to reckon with the fact that many people have intense personal feelings on this topic, and many of those feelings are driven by specific framings.

A politician once described to me a potential policy idea that involved an up-front cash payment to new parents to defray the financial burdens that come with a newborn arriving just as parents are (often) taking time off work to spend with their newborn. “Oh, a baby bonus,” I said, using the term that in my experience is often used to describe this policy. The person I was talking to made a funny face and said, “Ugh, no, I hate that,” even while standing by the idea of cash assistance to parents of newborns. Meanwhile, we’ve seen a flurry of articles about how “the Trump White House is reportedly considering offering new mothers a ‘baby bonus’ of $5,000 to encourage people to have more children.”

It makes a big difference to many people whether this is described as a paid parental leave subsidy for new parents or a baby bonus to encourage people to have more children.

These are, however, essentially the same policy. Or, rather, both phrases are loose descriptions of a potential policy that leave unanswered many specific policy design questions. But the policy design questions — how to pay for it, is it means-tested, is there a work requirement, is the value of the benefit subject to taxation, how is it administered — don’t cleave the distinction between these two initiatives.

The United States, like other countries, collects vast amounts of money in taxes and then spends those vasts amounts on various things. And one of the many questions we have to address during this process is how to handle the fact that different households have different numbers of people in them. We do not account for this phenomenon in a consistent or coherent way, and it’s worth trying to think more clearly about it. So while recognizing that the world is not going to achieve my desired level of literal-mindedness about anything, I do think it would be constructive if we could talk less about “pro-natalism” (a weird word), and also try to be more chill about other people using weird words, so that we can get into the weeds on these banal policy design questions.

The public school model

If you have a kid between the ages of five and eighteen, the government will provide free childcare in the form of a K-12 public school. Some families accept that free childcare in the form of a public charter school, and increasingly, in places where Republicans govern, they can take at least some of that free childcare in the form of a subsidy for private school tuition. But even though there are a ton of ferocious education policy debates, as long as the child is between the ages of five and eighteen, we have broad consensus that: