Here we go again…

The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would pay a married parent to stay home and care for their own child, funded out of the existing Child Care and Development Fund. Vance has championed it and it borrows from a bill Rubio wrote in the Senate. It’s a draft, it doesn’t need Congress, and it could take effect as soon as next year.

First the facts, then my opinion, because both sides are getting parts of this wrong. It’s an existing pot, not new money. The income limits aren’t changing. Unmarried couples don’t qualify and non-working single parents still don’t either. HHS lawyers have reportedly raised questions about conditioning a federal benefit on marriage.

My position, and I’ve held it consistently: this is a subsidy. If it came from a different administration, the same people cheering would be calling it exactly what it is. I’m pro-family and pro-nuclear-family, and I’m still not pro-subsidy, because the obvious solution is to stop taxing families so heavily in the first place. That option exists. They have the tools to do it through reconciliation and they choose not to, because cutting is harder than spending.

Two things can be true. You can like a politician and still say when they’re doing the thing you’d condemn from anyone else.