Thread. A lot of allies on the pro-family right seem to be skipping past Marco's argument on the child allowance presented today in National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/bidens-child-care-plan-is-wrong-for-families-and-ignores-the-lessons-of-the-past/

We all agree we are on the same page that further pro-natalist policies are necessary in this country. The cost of raising a family is prohibitively high for too many and that is causing many working class and middle class families to have fewer children than they might otherwise

We also agree it is best that children be raised by two parents, and that it is too financially difficult for parents to have the option for one of the parents to stay at home while their children are young. Increasing the CTC accomplishes these goals for families making $25k+

The question for making a child benefit universal is how it interacts with anti-poverty programs like TANF. The lessons of the past are not wrong, just because they are lessons from the past. Policymakers face distinct challenges when working with TANF and its recipients.

The wisdom of bipartisan welfare reform is that well-structured anti-poverty programs have features like work requirements, addiction treatment requirements, child support requirements, etc. Those are worth promoting.

Merging pro-natalist policy and anti-poverty policy into one policy creates questions of what you do with these safeguards. The plans presented so far simply eliminate them. This should give conservatives pause.

It's not at all clear why, if the population served by TANF and the population served by the CTC are substantively different populations, they would both be well served by the same program.

If folks believe there are pro-family changes that should be made to TANF. We can and should have that debate. If people believe there are pro-family changes to the CTC -- Marco does! -- we should have that debate.

But it seems prudent to be slow to just ignore the differences in populations served by these two programs and throw them together into one big program. Prudence is a virtue in policymaking as in life.