Conservatives Shouldn’t Expand the Welfare State for Their Own Ends

The day’s hubbub concerns a forthcoming Trump administration proposal to supply families with a parent who does not work and remains at home with as much as $9,000 per annum. First reported by The New York Times, the White House’s draft, seemingly the brainchild of Vice President JD Vance, would extend to new applicants—that is, to married applicants—funds from the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). On the platform once named and known still as Twitter, where the debate over the idea’s merits and demerits is most prominently unfolding, fiscally minded conservatives are accusing the policy’s advocates of harboring socialistic impulses, while those advocates are labeling said conservatives the enemies of the family. But below the dizzying altitude of accusations of socialism ascendant, and quite aside from whether the Leviathan in Washington, D.C., ought as a matter of principle to encourage one model of family life and discourage others, a simpler consideration deserves consideration: It is far from likely that the Trump administration’s best efforts will manage to achieve the ends for which they are purportedly being made.

Analysts including Patrick T. Brown, Thomas Savage, and Daniel di Martino have elucidated the practical defects of design that would muck up the workings of the White House’s reform. If governance were as simple as identifying a social or economic ill, subsidizing “good” habits and behaviors, discouraging “bad” ones, and entering nirvana, politics would be a much simpler business. However, many more complexities are tucked away in American society than men of system dream of, and human nature does not facilitate easy and obvious A-to-B solutions to the difficulties that confront governments.

The causes of the decline of the American family cannot be reduced to economic stimuli, and paying individuals to form traditional families does not yield the successes hoped for—a fact which the President’s advisers who admire the Hungarian model ought, by now, to know. The dangers of welfare expanded are not compensated for by the illusory benefits anticipated—in vain—by its evangelists.

No new monies are to be siphoned into the CCDBG even as the number of eligible families rises; this, defenders of the reform say, should silence objections made on the basis of fiscal responsibility. But the effects of welfare ought never be reduced to the line items on the federal budget. True, social spending is herding the American people, like so many bison, toward a fiscal cliff. But the most significant effect of such spending is its tendency to alter the psyches and worldviews of its recipients, the teachings it imparts to the American people. If independence and, to a large degree, self-sufficiency are characteristic American virtues, it should not be stamped out where it is found among intact families, no matter their annual income. The dollars designated for the CCDBG may remain constant, but adding a new class of Americans to the rolls of those dependent on federal largesse is no small matter.

The logic of requiring welfare recipients to work—however “discriminatory” against mothers who would prefer not to work and rather to raise their children—rests on the proposition that a primary objective of any program ought to be to help recipients to earn enough to no longer need government checks—to become independent once again. Among all publicly guaranteed rights, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “the right of the poor to obtain society’s help is unique in that instead of elevating the heart of the man who exercises it, it lowers him.” It “publicizes inferiority and legalizes it.” The White House seems not to have thought of this. Worse, the draft CCDBG reform would withhold checks from stay-at-home mothers who take up remote or part-time work—the sort of work that would not detract from parental obligations. No one in need ought to be subjected to a program that incents continued dependence.

If the White House’s partisans in this debate are not mistaken, if the CCDBG’s funding level remains constant, they have eliminated, inadvertently, a central argument lobbed in the direction of conservative objectors. If political exigencies foreclose the possibility of destroying the welfare state generally and the CCDBG in particular, they say, why not alter the program’s parameters to end “discrimination” against mothers who prefer to be at home? Yet, as Brown notes: “Already, the CCDBG doesn’t serve all children eligible for childcare support, because its funding levels are set by Congress. Not even 1 in 7 children who could be eligible for CCDBG funds get assistance—17 states operated waiting lists for CCDBG slots in 2025.” The White House’s draft reform would cause “the number of low-income children accessing childcare [to] fall because their slots were taken by other families, higher up the income scale.” Grant, in the spirit of charity, that no additional subsidies will be provided—itself a dubious proposition. This would amount, practically, to precisely what those in favor of the White House’s reforms say cannot be done: a diminution of the reach of welfare.

Of course, welfare programs have, in the course of American history, been reformed for the better. Families—and particularly low-income families—could be assisted by policies that establish sound money, lower consumer prices and housing costs, and facilitate job creation. But for all their merits, such reforms, long the objectives of conservative and libertarian economists, seem too mundane to a White House bent on breaking from the pre-Trump Republican party. The administration’s statism will succeed no better than the statism of its opponents.