The response of the conservative establishment to this crisis has been to double down on shoveling women into the work force. In 2018, the American Enterprise Institute released a report on paid family and medical leave in collaboration with the Brookings Institution that specifically cited a recent dip in the number of American women working as a problem needing to be solved. “Research shows that the proportion of working women in the U.S. has fallen behind that of other countries,” the A.E.I. website lamented. “Access to paid leave has been shown to promote labor force attachment, especially for women, which is vital for economic growth.”
In this fixation on economic growth, even when it means nudging into the work force women who would have preferred to stay home, all sides of the political spectrum are in agreement, from the conservative A.E.I. and the centrist Brookings to the liberal Center for American Progress, which crows that if child care assistance and other family-friendly policies became the norm, “the United States would see an additional five million women in the labor force and $500 billion in increased G.D.P.” It is precisely this cross-ideological consensus that has allowed the problem of the two-income trap to get worse for so long.
What is needed are dissenting voices. The conservative Independent Women’s Forum has had some success promoting the idea of “Social Security earned leave,” which would give new parents up to 12 weeks of paid leave in exchange for delaying their retirement benefits by weeks or months. The plan has the benefit of being budget-neutral over the long term, because parents borrow against their own retirement benefits, leaving everyone else unaffected. Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, and separately Senator Marco Rubio, have turned this plan into proposed legislation, making it an excellent example of policy entrepreneurship on the part of the Independent Women’s Forum.
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