Over Labor Day weekend (because irony), the New York Times reported on Vice President JD Vance’s plan to pilfer money from a program that provides childcare subsidies for low-income working parents and instead give it to married couples in which one parent stays home with the children. The purpose, of course, is to encourage “traditional families” — hetero married couples with children, in which the father goes to work and the mother stays home and tends to the children. Sure, married same-sex couples in which one parent stays home, or situations in which the father stays home while the mother goes to work might also be covered, but we’d have to be stupid to not know that this is what they are getting at.
The way it would work is that these families would get an additional $9,000 a year to help cover the money lost by one parent choosing to stay home with the kids instead of working. That would not be a terrible idea, save for the fact that, rather than creating a separate program, the money would come directly from the Child Care and Development Fund that is meant to fund child care for working families.
What’s The Problem?
Well, the first part of the problem is with the way the Child Care and Development Fund functions in the first place. Much of the money goes directly to the childcare programs, and qualifying parents receive vouchers they can give those programs in order to get subsidized childcare for their families. So these programs (where people are already underpaid) would be underfunded and therefore less available to the parents who need it.
The $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund, which is run by the Health Department’s Administration for Children and Families, was created during the Clinton administration to support the employment of low to moderate-income parents. It subsidizes the care of children up to age 13 and currently offsets the costs for caring for about 1.3 million children.
Hold up, New York Times. Are you saying it was part of Clinton’s welfare reform, a tiny bit of help for those we’d immiserated in the hopes of appeasing Republicans, and now JD Vance wants to take it away? Yes. That is what they are saying, apparently.
Under the current rules, most of the money is distributed to states, which in turn distribute it to parents, usually in the form of vouchers or direct deposits to child care providers.
To qualify, parents must prove that their income is lower than 85 percent of their state’s median income and that they are working, in school or receiving job training. Some states set a lower threshold of 60 percent of the state’s median income.
It would be one thing if all parents who meet the qualifying threshold were given cash grants of $9,000, to be used for childcare, or if we decided to be normal and just subsidize and properly fund daycare and preschool for all children to begin with and then offer something to parents who choose to stay home. That, I think we could talk about. But that’s not what this is.
Many people have brought up that this means that working parents — including those who might qualify for something like this — would technically have money taken out of their paychecks in order to pay stay-at-home parents to not work. I get that, I also get why it gets people’s hackles up, but I would also argue that that’s a little bit of a Republican argument. That being said, this is pretty clearly about JD Vance wanting to punish working parents for not living the life he believes they should lead. It’s about taking something away from them and giving it to those whose lifestyle he approves of.
I am actually not at all opposed to the idea of compensation for parents who stay home and care for their children. It’s an inherently feminist (and pro-labor) idea. Back in the 1970s, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Rossa, and Selma James started the Wages for Housework campaign, arguing, among other things, that women who stay home (and those who don’t but still do all the housework when they get home from work) contribute to the capitalist economy and ought to be fairly compensated for the work they do. While it’s been more popular internationally, particularly in Italy where maternal employment rates are still fairly low (61 percent of women with children don’t work), a lot of Black feminists in the United States adopted the idea as well. Today it’s more often referred to as “care income” and refers to the idea of providing income to anyone of any gender who is caring for children, elderly relatives and relatives with disabilities, and even the environment. Child tax credits, caregiver stipends for those who care for veterans, and universal basic income plans are all versions of this basic idea (albeit less radical).
In about half of all other countries — including 28 of the 38 OECD nations — the government actually funds parental leave. In Sweden, parents get 480 days leave to split between them and get paid 80 percent of their income during this time, through social insurance. Additionally, until a child is eight, parents can request to work at only 75 percent of their full-time hours and cannot be fired or lose any benefits or pension for doing so. In Norway they get 49 weeks of full pay or 59 weeks at 80 percent of their pay. In fact, the US is one of only seven nations that does not have any kind of parental leave mandate whatsoever. The other nations? Papua New Guinea, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, and Tonga. So, us and some very tiny island nations.
There are lots of things we can do to make things better for those who want to be parents, who want to do work that our society has deemed unwaged labor (frequently work done by women, surprise!), in ways that benefit us all.
Who Is This Really For, Though?
It’s not for women. It’s for men who are resentful of the fact that they have to work with women and who feel they have been deprived of the submissive wives and mothers they feel they are owed.
It’s for men who have been inordinately enraged for the last two years over a silly video made by some young women working at an Australian skincare company.
Weirdly enough, the Right has in its own way actually become increasingly hostile to the idea of waged work. Well, for women, anyway. A common refrain over the past few years has become, more or less, “Feminism wants to take women away from the loving embrace of their families and children in order to force them to be drones for some soulless corporation.” At the same time, you hear these same men complain about how men are suffering because women are stealing all of the jobs that are rightfully theirs. Or that “this economy is daycare for women” (frequently “Jewish day care for women,” because the antisemitism is also strong in this cohort), referring to the jobs women have as “email jobs.”
Over the last few days, X the Everything App has been filled with men getting extremely weird about the news that 98 percent of the jobs created last month went to women (a big part of which was teachers returning from summer break).
And when I say weird, I mean “asking Grok about what Ted Kaczynski would have thought about it, in a manner suggesting that he had some pretty good ideas about life and things” weird.
While I hate to admit it, the extremely creepy Stefan Molyneux inadvertently made a point — that when men have good incomes, they form families, and when women get good incomes, they often don’t (or, as he put it “preen, consume, and travel. No kids.”)
Unfortunately, he didn’t consider why this might be the case for many women, apart from us being shallow and generally evil. The fact is, men often get more out of marriage than do women. A whole lot of women are deciding that they don’t need that shit and instead will live their best lives for themselves. Perhaps the lesson here is not that women need to earn less or not have jobs as much as that men should be less terrible. Not listening to men like Stefan Molyneux, in fact, would be a good start to that journey.
There is a reason why, when discussing Vance’s plan, Fox and Friends brought on gutter misogynist Michael Knowles to talk about how great it was, and not, you know, a woman.
I like how the first big take there is “Normally we hate the idea of the government paying people to stay home, but this one works for us!” The second is that they like that this program encourages marriage rather than discouraging it — largely by claiming that only single mothers qualify for the current subsidy. This is not true. While 80 percent of those who do use the subsidy are single mothers (unsurprising, given the whole “one income” thing), 20 percent are married couples, both of whom need to work in order to support their family.
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We absolutely should, as a society, make it as easy as possible for people to live the lives they want. If people want to get married and have children, there are lots of ways we can make that a more accessible dream — cancel student loans, subsidize daycare, preschool and college, socialize health care, fund parental leave, have more affordable housing. If people don’t want to get married, that should be doable as well. If they choose to be single parents, we should make sure they have everything they need.
That’s not what the Right wants. They want stay-at-home moms so badly that they are willing to even give up some of their core principals to get them. What we need to do is make it clear that we have far better ideas about to help all families — and individuals without families — thrive. Not just the ones living the lives we want them to.
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Couchfucker's proposal sounds better in the original German: Kinder, Küche, Kirche
This is perfectly consistent with the Republican policy of giving taxpayer money ONLY to people who don't need it.