Should the State Pay Stay-at-Home Moms?

Should the state subsidize stay-at-home parents? The Trump administration has drafted a proposal for a plan that would allow state subsidies to go toward parents who are taking care of their children at home. The administration would not be creating a new program, but rather tapping into the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) that was established during the Clinton administration and changing what is eligible for funds, such that married couples making under a certain income threshold can qualify.

The Clinton-era program was created to support low-income parents—people who make less than 85 percent of their state’s median income (or in some states, 60 percent)—who work. It helps fund the care of children up to age 13 and offset the cost of care for 1.3 million children. CCDF funds can be used for daycare centers, home-based daycares, after-school programs, as well as (in some cases) relatives and neighbors who meet state requirements. Parents are not eligible for funds for taking care of their own children. “Under the current rules, most of the money is distributed to states, which in turn distribute it to parents, usually in the form of vouchers or direct deposits to child care providers,” reports The New York Times.

The Trump administration—and Vice President J.D. Vance, in particular—are playing a very particular comms game: It’s considered traditional (and thus commendable) to have a parent stay at home with the kids. Along with baby bonus Trump Accounts, this is a policy meant to communicate to working-class families that the Trump administration—unlike their out-of-touch opponents—actually cares about regular people with normal values and legitimate financial struggles.

The problem is that it’s a terribly designed proposal.

First off, expanding the eligibility without expanding the funding just means that the parents who currently benefit from this proposal would have a much harder time getting close to the same benefits in the future. The program currently pays out $9,000 per child per year; expect those benefits to dwindle if the pool of eligible people is drastically expanded.

Beyond the fact that the right should never give up the fight against welfare and entitlements, this is madness in terms of how the money would be redistributed. Why should a married couple making $95k/year receive money that was intended to help a working single mom making… https://t.co/svKuOKN9Kb

— Beverly Hallberg (@BeverlyHallberg) September 7, 2026

Second, the income cutoffs are severe, not tapered off, as the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Patrick T. Brown illustrates:

One aspect I haven’t seen the CCDBG discourse pick up on is that the WH proposal would make the cutoff very severe – a married family with two kids making $74,500 in Kansas could be eligible for a $9,000 at-home subsidy, but one making $75,001 down the street would be ineligible.

— Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) September 7, 2026

Per CCDF, here’s what various annual income eligibility cut-offs currently are be for a family of four:
CT: $87,516
KY: $81,864
ME: $130,896
SD: $92,340
OK: $76,524
SC: $83,448
WV: $77,064https://t.co/TamY5VMYlL

— Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) September 7, 2026

Third, the way the program is designed is not such that it will necessarily incentivize parents to stay at home—just that it might incentivize one parent not to work: “Giving cash to daycares for working parents encourages work,” notes Lyman Stone on X. “Making a monthly deposit into a household’s account and then yanking it back if dad gets a promotion pretty obviously encourages poverty. Also, the program is NOT targeted at parents raising their own kids at home! It is targeted at one-earner households! Many two-earner households don’t use childcare and many one-earner households do! If you want to support raising kids at home, awesome! Paying women not to get a paycheck is not doing that!”

I personally think parents staying home with their kids should be more culturally encouraged. As it currently stands, it’s a U-shaped curve, where moms from households at the very bottom of the income distribution and at the very top of the income distribution are more likely to stay at home, but moms in middle-income tiers infrequently make that choice.

I don’t know whether that decision should be encouraged via public policy, though. And one thing I know for certain is that this specific policy change wouldn’t even accomplish what the administration claims. The thing that’s perhaps most impressive about this proposal is that it seems to have united much of the policy-wonk right in opposition: Nearly everyone I follow who is conservative and works in family policy sees major problems with the design.

I suppose Friedrich Hayek was right; the road to serfdom is paved with good intentions.

Scenes from New York: “Through an executive order issued on Monday, the mayor is creating the city’s first Office of Worker Power to help workers ‘get informed, connected and organized,’ the administration said in an announcement. The office will be led by Tony Perlstein, a longtime union organizer, who once worked on the docks in Bayonne, N.J.,” reports The New York Times. “‘We’re going to be looking to provide opportunities to working-class New Yorkers to get educated on their rights to form unions and what it means to build power,’ Mr. Perlstein said. ‘We’re going to work to connect workers to organizations that can help them build that power.'”

Zohran Mamdani has talked about increasing “union density” or the number of workers in the city who are in a union, so this appears to be one step toward that.

QUICK HITS

• From Anthropic’s alignment lead:

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. https://t.co/QAIHiFP3QZ

— Evan Hubinger (@EvanHub) September 9, 2026

• “Iran’s oil export revenue is drying up as a U.S. naval blockade strangles shipments from the Persian Gulf and offshore stockpiles feeding China dwindle, putting more pressure on Tehran’s battered economy,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “No Iranian crude has crossed the blockade since it was reinstated by the U.S. Navy in mid-July, according to ship tracker Kpler. Iran is still loading small amounts of oil onto tankers, but those barrels remain trapped inside the Gulf.”
• Here for this nun who sits with unaccompanied kids at their deportation hearings.
• “Evidence that bans are effective has never existed in the scientific literature, said Lisa Bartnikas, an allergist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School,” reports The Washington Post. “Several studies, including her own on Massachusetts public schools, have found that schoolwide food allergen bans have little to no effect on the incidence of allergic reactions.”
• I am a few chapters into Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right by my colleague, Stephanie Slade, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Seriously, buy it if you haven’t already. I’ve become Russell Kirk–pilled.
• “Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois is leading a new political group that plans to spend at least $20 million this fall to help Democrats in battleground races in the midterm elections. The effort could help Mr. Pritzker, a prominent Trump critic and billionaire who is seeking a third term as Illinois governor, raise his national profile before a potential 2028 presidential bid. The group, Ready for the Fight PAC, will soon run ads targeting Brandon Herrera, a hard-line Republican and YouTuber running in a red-leaning Texas border district,” reports The New York Times.
• “Both labs acknowledge the risks but highlight the upsides,” writes Kelsey Piper, in “Losing Control of AI is Actually the Plan,” which is very much worth your time: “Researchers envision a world in the very near future where humans are barely able to understand the rapid-fire progress happening in their data centers, a world where key decisions about the next generation of models are made by the current generation of models—because the decisions are too complex for humans to follow without the guidance of the supervising AIs. ‘As the systems become more capable, the results become harder to interpret,’ OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote in a blog post released on Sunday. Progress on model improvement will then proceed extremely fast and without meaningful human oversight—unless humanity comes together to change course. This transition sometimes gets called recursive self-improvement (RSI). The companies believe it is right around the corner. ‘Based on internal results, I have a strong expectation that this speed of progress could be sustained into recursive self-improvement,’ Pachocki wrote on Sunday.”
• I like this idea:

There should be a guy at every DSA event who asks the most taboo possible question: what are the costs and benefits of your preferred policy and how might you persuade people to enact it

— Andrew Fleischman (@ASFleischman) September 7, 2026