Washington Would Like To Cast Your Family In A Cheaper Sitcom

The White House is considering paying married parents $9,000 a year to stay home with their children, the Guardian reports, citing a plan described by the New York Times. The money would reportedly come from federal programs that typically help single mothers and low-income families.

So there may be help for your household, provided Washington likes the household you have assembled. Please bring your bills to the audition. We are particularly interested in whether your electricity account has a traditional family structure.

Nine thousand dollars is useful money. It is also $750 a month. If that is supposed to replace a parent's earnings, I would like to know where the administration buys its months.

Are they smaller? Do they come without the fourth week? Can we order the kind where the mortgage company accepts a photograph of a happy family standing in front of the house?

The proposal is still under consideration. Nobody should quit a job because Washington has developed a feeling about the kitchen table.

But what a feeling. JD Vance, who reportedly offered the plan, has spent years criticizing federal support for daycare and championing the parent-at-home arrangement. In 2021 he described paid work as something parents were being offered at the expense of family life, with “freedom” in quotation marks.

The quotation marks are doing an incredible amount of financial planning. Perhaps they can sit around the word “rent” until the landlord agrees it is merely a lifestyle preference.

Parents already make these decisions using an exotic system called looking at their actual lives. Who earns what? Who can change hours? Is there a daycare place? What happens if the one person bringing in money loses the job?

Apparently that last question is impolite. We are trying to recreate a wholesome family photograph, and somebody keeps asking whether the photographer offers health insurance.

There is nothing wrong with staying home to raise children. There is nothing wrong with working. There is something magnificently intrusive about the government approaching both arrangements with a casting clipboard and announcing that one of the families looks more like the family in its head.

And then, wait—the money for this preferred arrangement would reportedly be moved from programs serving families who may have fewer choices already. Economic Policy Institute analyst Chandra Childers warns that draining childcare resources could make care more expensive or less available for other families.

Wonderful. To help one parent leave work, we may make it harder for another parent to get there. The family-support department has designed a revolving door powered by whichever mother is currently trapped in it.

Can we stop arranging people? For five fucking minutes? The children need care. The adults need enough money. Neither problem requires a federal official to stand in the living room moving Dad three inches to the left because the composition feels wrong.

I need to sit down. Fortunately, the administration is reportedly developing a modest incentive for that, subject to its opinion of my domestic circumstances.

But there is more. Policy experts point out that the administration is also pursuing tougher work requirements for Medicaid and food assistance. Some families must prove they are working; another proposed program would pay a preferred group to stop.

Get a job. Stay home. No, not you. You, by the sofa. Hold the baby. Look prosperous.

For $750 a month, Washington doesn't want to support your family. It wants to direct it.