Happy Thursday! Last week, Princeton Pro-Life and our Princeton Anscombe Society chapter hosted their annual Reunions event for pro-life, pro-family students and alumni. Professor Robert P. George, a stalwart defender of pro-life, pro-family activities on Princeton’s campus, spoke with Patrick T. Brown, a Princeton alumni and policy fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, on crafting a conservative family policy as debates regarding paid leave, universal child care, and child tax credits gain prominence in DC.
Family Policy Is An Urgent Need
Brown is invested in creating a family policy agenda with bipartisan appeal, where conservatives and progressives find unexpected unity in addressing the potentially catastrophic effects of a U.S. birthrate that has fallen below replacement levels. He has played an active role in advocating for Romney’s Family Security Act, which has unfortunately stalled in the White House due to the administration’s preoccupation with major family and jobs plans. While Republicans and Democrats seem to be in full agreement that the falling birthrate should be of grave concern, Republican leaders are wary of any policy that might dis-incentivize participation in the labor force.
Republicans Wary of Direct Payments
A degree of hesitancy surrounding financial assistance at this time is natural, given the government’s massive recent spending on economic recovery, but as Brown writes in Newsweek,
“The facts on the ground have changed since the 1990s, and so have the threats facing families. The real reason for conservatives to support a universal child allowance is to recognize parenting as a social good, not just a lifestyle choice—to compensate parents for their work raising the next generation and to encourage family life and childbearing as the central focus of a healthy society.”
While some Republicans may never be keen on direct assistance, those concerned with government spending may be pleased to hear that the Romney plan provides for this direct assistance by slashing existing programs which have been shown to have negligible impact on low- to middle-income families, rather than by enacting large-scale mandates and one-size-fits-all programs such as one can expect from the Biden administration. As we’ve written in pervious newsletters, Romney’s proposal eliminates overlapping policies that give direct assistance to families, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and State and Local Tax deductions (SALT).
A Vision for the American Family
Brown and others argue that Republicans concerned with upholding family values would do well to seize this opportunity to create economic conditions for family flourishing. They contend that the concerns of emerging families are not simply an excuse for more handouts, but a call for a greater investment in the preservation and propagation of American family life. In this way, the economic side of the pro-family coin helps make actionable the fight to secure social goods like morality, family life, and community in America by giving parents the time and the space to raise their children according to their particular needs.
