
Supporting the indispensable institution is deeply conservative
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American families are suffering. Young Americans are faced with ever-increasing prices, stagnated wages, family-unfriendly childcare options, and fewer permanent housing options. As a result, many of them are putting off marriage and family formation until later in life, when they hope to feel financially secure.
With an election on the horizon, leaders within both parties are trying to make the case that they’re attuned to the needs of families. However, while the GOP ticket has its own proposal to support families, many within the Republican coalition remain skeptical of any kind of direct financial assistance to families.
For example, after former President Donald Trump selected Sen. JD Vance to be his running mate, the Wall Street Journal editorial board argued that Vance’s support for using the tax code to support families was incongruent with the American conservative tradition. On the same day, this argument was given new social-media life by Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports and the popularly appointed leader of “Barstool Conservatism,” who tweeted: “You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids? We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron. If you can’t afford a big family don’t have a ton of kids.”
For the last few months, many in this corner of the Republican coalition have been claiming that “small government conservatives [are] feeling out of sorts” with GOP candidates who want to use the levers of power to support families, including some who want to push a specific vision of what family life ought to look like. However, the Journal and their allies are wrong when it comes to the history of the Republican Party on families. History shows us that Vance’s argument for using the tax code and the powers granted to the federal government to directly support families is entirely consistent with the American conservative tradition.
In fact, elements of the Republican Party have supported using federal power to explicitly promote pro-family policies since at least Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. While the exact details of these pro-family programs have changed over the last 120 years, President Roosevelt, the godfather of a more muscular American conservatism, was the first of many conservative leaders to shift the conversation toward supporting the family.
Then as now, the American family faced enormous threats. Economic insecurity, the rise of eugenics, declining birth rates due to increased industrialization, migratory divorce mills out West, and corporate interests all threatened the family unit. As a result, Roosevelt believed that it was incumbent upon the federal government to protect this “best and most characteristic [institution] in American life,” the family. Roosevelt and his allies waged an all-out war against pro-business and other interests, like the National Association of Manufacturers, who primarily wanted to push mothers into the labor force.
Roosevelt took his support for families a step further than public addresses and strongly worded letters on cultural decline by advocating in favor of restructuring America’s tax system to be more accommodating to families. He argued that tax rates “should be immensely heavier on the childless and on families with one or two children, while there should be an equally heavy discrimination in reverse, in favor of families with over three children,” and that single working men should receive a “far heavier share of taxation” than families.
Roosevelt’s position on changing the tax code, and the criticism he received for doing so, is reminiscent of Vance’s position today. In the same interview derided by Portnoy, Vance argues that “if you’re making $100,000 [or] $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate, than if you’re making the same amount of money, and you don’t have any kids.”
The debate about how conservatives should support families as a matter of public policy didn’t take a century hiatus between the death of Roosevelt and the rise of the New Right. Conservatives since Roosevelt have picked up this mantle, with perhaps no single policy more beneficial than the Republican-backed Revenue Act of 1948. The bill dramatically lowered the individual income tax rates, increased the uniform per-capita tax exemption to $600, and introduced income splitting for married couples, giving them “the right to file jointly by summing their total income and halving it, with each spouse taxed on only the halved amount.”
These changes may sound minimal, but they had a dramatic effect on family life during this period. The historian Allan Carlson found that the increase in the per-capita tax exemption “meant that a married couple with three children, earning the median national income of $3,000, would be relieved of any income tax by this provision alone.” And the introduction of universal income splitting provided American families major savings annually.
By introducing income splitting nationwide through the tax code, the federal government directly favored married couples who, after the change, “had separate tax brackets with thresholds set at double the tax brackets for singles.” This gave massive incentives for couples to get married and start families, “as a single worker could double his bracket thresholds by marrying a nonworker.”
However, by the late 1960s, activists within the Republican coalition moved to abandon the family in favor of dogmatic anti-tax philosophies that favored flat rates above all else. Led by anti-tax activist Vivien Kellems, who testified in front of Congress that “all we single people want is the same tax break” as married people, this effort spurred the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1969. The law fundamentally transformed the American tax code in favor of single individuals by removing income splitting, ending the benefits to married couples.
But this new tax regime didn’t simply equalize the tax treatment for every filer. Rather, the bill created massive new tax penalties for married families with two full-time workers, which was especially harmful in the late 1960s as more mothers were beginning to enter the workforce in large numbers.
While many Republicans have only paid lip service to the economic needs of the American family over the interceding few decades, recent legislation and proposals from a cadre of lawmakers and think tanks show that some Republicans, like Sen. Vance, are beginning to go back to the conservative tradition, and chart a new course for conservative pro-family policies.
Sen. Mitt Romney recently introduced a revised version of the Family Security Act, which would meaningfully increase the child tax credit for families. Sen. Josh Hawley has also put forward the most generous refundable parent tax credit to help families raise their children. Additionally, proposals like American Compass’s Family Supplemental Credit (Fisc) would pay a generous monthly supplemental credit to working parents beginning in the fifth month of pregnancy until the child’s 18th birthday.
Sen. Marco Rubio has introduced the Respect Parents’ Childcare Choices Act, which would reform the Child Care and Development Block Grant to better support the preferences of all parents on child care, eliminate marriage penalties within the program, and support families more broadly. Sen. Rubio and his colleague Sen. Mike Lee were also instrumental in expanding the Child Tax Credit in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017.
Conservatives are once again beginning to realize that they can use the powers afforded them to affect positive change for families. As Sens. Hawley, Romney, Rubio, and Vance have made clear, the tools are at their disposal. And they have a rich conservative tradition to draw from for it.
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