The Family Policy Pivot

The American heart is in danger of closing to that which matters most: love, marriage, and family. Dating is down, the marriage rate has fallen more than 60% since 1970, and our fertility rate hit a record-low 1.6 babies per woman just last year.

What’s more, no group has been battered and buffeted by the falling fortunes of the family than the American working class. In the last four decades, for instance, the share of children being raised by married parent-home families dropped most among working-class families.

All this matters because nothing is more consequential for the core American values of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” than marriage and family. And on each of those core values, the country is in trouble because the family is. This is what the latest science tells us. Regarding life, the untold “deaths of despair”—deaths arising from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism—that have rocked the nation are concentrated in communities where marriage has lost ground. Regarding economic liberty, or the American Dream, the strongest predictor of poor children remaining stuck in poverty as they move into adulthood is “the fraction of [them] living in single-parent households” in the communities where they grow up. And regarding happiness, recent drops in American happiness can best be explained by the “recent decline in the married share of adults:” no surprise, given the importance of marriage in fostering happiness among ordinary men and women.

This is the story I tell in Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Of course, no leading American politician has lived through the working-class inflected dimensions of this story more—and written so eloquently about them—than Ohio senator JD Vance.

It’s regrettable, then, that the Republican vice-presidential nominee fell into a culture war cul-de-sac over his “childless cat ladies” comment shortly after his nomination. After all, no one knows better than Vance how much our family troubles are driven by both cultural and economic forces.

Vance knows how much the disappearance of good-paying manufacturing jobs has figured in the tragic turn of this working-class family story. How too many men have been gripped by a “male malaise” that has distanced them from the responsibilities of full-time work, marriage, and fatherhood. How too many government programs today penalize rather reward work and marriage. How Big Tech plays a baleful role in American family life. And how much increases in the cost of living have outrun the ability of an ordinary single earner to support a family on their own.

The senator from Ohio is also keenly aware that neither party has done a great job in confronting our “civilizational crisis” in marriage and family. The Democratic Party has too often assumed that family policy is about endlessly turning family functions over to the state—as with the Biden-Harris administration’s ill-fated Build Back Better plan to steer more than $200 billion in new spending on daycare—rather than reviving the family’s functions and fortunes. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has too often been “all talk, no action” for families, assuming that a limited government and a booming economy is all that is needed to keep the family strong. In the run up to the Republican presidential primary, for instance, Gov. Nikki Haley took to the Wall Street Journal to hit plans by Sen. Marco Rubio to advance a number of family-friendly policies as “socialism;” meanwhile, Haley had no concrete family policy agenda of her own to renew the family’s falling fortunes.

When it comes to family, it’s more than time for JD Vance, as the vice-presidential nominee, to take and turn the spotlight away from the culture-war cul-de-sac framing and the usual stale partisan binary about more or less government and toward a new, bold, and positive agenda for family renewal that his administration would advance.

“We should make it easier to raise American families,” Vance said before he entered the Senate, adding that we need to tell the “culture that we are the pro-family party and we’re going to back it up with real policy.”

Here are five policies to make marriage and family life more affordable and more appealing:

• End the marriage penalty where too many working-class families have to choose between Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, or food stamps and getting married in the first place. Vance has already begun to explore legislative remedies to this problem.
• Expand the child tax credit to $400 per month for kids five and under, and $250 per month for school-age kids for all working families. Such a move would make it easier for working- and middle-class couples to afford kids, even on one income. To help pay for this credit and make it fair to all working families, the next administration should eliminate the Child & Dependent Care Credit (which only goes to families with young children being cared for by someone besides their parents) and allocate that money instead to a child tax credit that goes to all families with young children.
• Make birth free. Right now, in the wake of having a baby, too many families are stuck with a big bill, even though they are on the verge of spending thousands and thousands of dollars on raising the workers and taxpayers of the future. Vance is rightly interested in legislative remedies to this problem; one idea worth considering would be mandating insurance companies cover birth much like the Obama administration mandated contraception coverage.
• Build, baby, build. The surging cost of housing is a major impediment to family formation today. The next administration could take executive action to allocate land from military bases, national forests, and other federal lands toward the building of new developments and towns in every state in the union. Right now, the federal government owns about 28% of all land in the United States. The aim would be to allocate millions of federal acres to develop more than 500,000 affordable homes in developments and towns across America to make it easier for young adults to marry and start a family.
• Launch a national campaign to promote the success sequence. The data indicate that 97% of young adults who take just three steps—get at least a high school degree, work full-time in their twenties, and marry before having any children—avoid poverty, and 86% reach the middle class or higher in their late twenties and early thirties. This is what scholars call the “success sequence.” And yet the attachment of young adults to work and marriage has eroded in recent years. The next administration should get behind a PSA campaign to underline the financial and emotional value of each step for today’s young men and women, with the aim of increasing the share of young adults who take all three. This cultural strategy is especially attractive given that polls show that large majorities of Americans (77%) and American parents (76%) are supportive of communicating the value of the success sequence to the rising generation.

Advancing a positive family policy agenda, one that makes starting a family both more affordable and appealing for ordinary Americans, could not be more important. That’s because strengthening marriage and family are the best ways to revive those classic American values: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This, ultimately, is why JD Vance should pivot toward the positive.