W. Bradford Wilcox cites the findings of American Compass’s 2021 Home Building Survey in a piece about why families prefer cash payments to subsidized child care programs.
The American family may have entered a period of crisis, but a rich conservative literature—from political philosophy to sociology to journalism—can help us to better understand the root causes and guide policy reforms to the family’s renewal.
Self-styled conservatives should not be aiding and abetting the push for class-warfare taxation by adding to the collection of proposed tax-rate increases on workers, investors, entrepreneurs, and business owners.
American Compass executive director Oren Cass argues that a policy that sustains people in joblessness is not ultimately anti-poverty.
Our policy debates center on helping working families, but they routinely fail to capture those families’ preferences for their own lives or for policies that would help them most. Proposals Read more…
I want to find new ways for conservative governing principles to help the family, but I want to avoid labeling a policy as “conservative” simply because it purports to aid families.
Gina, a single mother of three in southwestern Ohio, recently told me that being a mom saved her from despair and addiction. “It’s my life. It’s everything to me. It’s Read more…
An important insight deep within the structure of the Fisc is that much of the trouble ailing families right now is not strictly poverty; it’s fatherlessness.
An injection of cash to poor families might be less of a handout and more of a hand up, acting as much-needed capital for families by allowing them to afford the things necessary to stay employed.
No-strings-attached cash through a child allowance does not sever social ties or lead to the commodification of parenthood. It maintains expectations and parents will earmark for their child’s needs.
Lump-sum payments will decrease the incentive for fraud while eliminating the inequity regarding length of pregnancy.
A pro-worker agenda must treat families, not individuals, as the basic units of public policy.
With few “marriageable” men employed in the kinds of decent-paying occupations that make them attractive as potential husbands, marriage has slipped out of reach for far too many poor and working-class Americans.
If families are people, and corporations are people, it stands to reason that families should be allowed to incorporate and file their taxes accordingly.
It is time for conservatives to look beyond discrete proposals and to approach family policy as an orienting goal that can enable other political goals and as an investment in the nation’s long-term prosperity.
The American health care system is far from family-friendly. One feature stands out: employer-sponsored health insurance.
Where do families want to live? Urbanists will point out that the high price of housing in walkable, city neighborhoods indicates that demand is especially high. Suburbanists will note that Read more…
K-12 education is the single greatest family policy lever at our disposal.
Regularly lost in the debate over family policy are those children separated from their families or without a permanent home—namely, the hundreds of thousands of American children in the nation’s child welfare system.
Oren Cass and Wells King have added their proposal, a parenting supplement they call the Fisc, to a list of ideas designed to reduce the fiscal burden on parents relative Read more…
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