A Plan to Pay Married Mothers Not to Work

The parents of young kids don’t have it easy in the United States.

The country doesn’t have mandatory paid parental leave.

It does not send out a child allowance.

It doesn’t offer universal prekindergarten or provide day-care subsidies to all families in need.

For the first five years of their kid’s life, parents are mostly left to figure it out on their own, negotiating a complex patchwork of federal, state, and local initiatives and spending far more than they can afford on diapers, formula, nanny shares, and the like.

These policies—or the lack of them—have harmed long-range educational and employment outcomes, eroded public health, entrenched inequality, discouraged couples from having children, and stressed the bejesus out of parents.

For this crisis, Vice President Vance has a solution: send cash to married parents who stay at home with their kids.

According to a report by The New York Times , the White House has drafted a plan to allow nonworking married parents to collect payments from the federal Child Care and Development Fund.

It will not surprise you to learn that I, the author of a book called Give People Money , think that providing cash to families taking care of their kids at home isn’t a bad idea at all.

Yet given how rickety and stingy the country’s system of early-childhood support already is, the specifics of Vance’s proposal could produce astonishingly cruel results.

That’s because he proposes to fund this new benefit by taking financial resources away from working single parents. [ Kendra Hurley: The biggest obstacle to universal child care: babies ] Currently, Washington distributes a $12 billion pot of CCDF money to the states each year.

Governments use the cash to subsidize the cost of day care for low-income parents who are working, enrolled in school, or attending a training program.

The typical beneficiary receives $700 a month, in the form of a voucher or a direct payment to their child-care provider.

Four in five recipients are single mothers, many living on poverty wages.