Their plan would send all parents checks totaling up to $3,600 per child and hand out new subsidies for day care. No questions asked and no strings attached.
That is not pro-family policy, no matter how much Democrats will claim it to be.
If pulling families out of poverty were as simple as handing moms and dads a check, we would have solved poverty a long time ago. There is substantially more to lifting families out of poverty than government-provided income, and for decades, there was a bipartisan consensus that work, marriage, and community were critical pieces of poverty reduction.
The corrosive effect of cash payments with no strings attached was once widely accepted. In 1988, then-Senator Biden expressed concern that the “welfare system has broken down” because “it only parcels out welfare checks and does nothing to help the poor find productive jobs.”
