The GOP’s Pro-family Delusion
Trump and Vance have shown that they have no idea how to help people care for children once they’re born.
Today’s Republican Party aspires to be a pro-family movement, but it has struggled to turn that desire into much more than a plea for people to have more children. Twice in the past two days, the GOP presidential ticket has demonstrated that it has no idea how to help people care for children once they’re born.
Yesterday, Donald Trump spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where he was asked whether and how he would make childcare more affordable. The answer was, even by his standards, confusing and rambling:
I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know, I was somebody, we had Senator Marc Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue, it’s a very important issue, but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because childcare is childcare, it’s something, you have to have it, in this country you have to have it. But when you take those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, it’s gonna take care. I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country. Because I have to stay with childcare. I want to stay with childcare. But those numbers are small relative to the kinds of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’re taking in.
That’s a lot of words, from which it’s hard to reach any conclusion except that Trump not only has no plan for lowering childcare costs, but has not thought about the issue at all. What do tariffs have to do with day-care prices? This writer doesn’t know, and neither does Trump. The economist Brad DeLong, inspired by South Park, has referred to this sort of “solution” as the underpants-gnome theory of policy. Step 1: Jack up tariffs. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Affordable childcare!
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Become a SubscriberVice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance was asked basically the same question at an event in Arizona on Wednesday. Although he is supposedly the deeper policy thinker on the ticket, his answer was barely more sophisticated:
One of the things that we can do is make it easier for family models to choose, or for families to choose whatever model they want, right? So one of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is make it so that that, you know, maybe, like, Grandma or Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more.
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