Dem
51
Ties
3
GOP
46
J.D. Vance is very ambitious and dearly wants to be president. He knows the war in Iran—which he privately opposed—will be an anchor around his neck. Consequently, he is working on shaping a 2028 platform that will appeal to various demographics in the hope that his policy positions will overshadow his public support for the Iran war and the fact that he is a mean person with the charisma of a dead skunk.
His view is that women belong at home taking care of lots of babies who then grow up to be Republican voters. But how to express this as a policy position? He is a big supporter of a plan the administration is cooking up to take money away from working mothers and give it to traditional stay-at-home housewives. In the 1990s, HHS created a fund to help low-income parents (read: single mothers) afford child care so they could work and not be on welfare. What Vance champions is repurposing this money to give stay-at-home moms $9,000 per child per year to take care of the kids. The change simultaneously hurts (poor) working mothers and helps trad (house)wives.
This could be the main thrust of Vance's 2028 campaign: discourage women from taking paying jobs by paying them to stay at home with the kids. Back to the 1950s, via a different setting on the time machine. Vance once tweeted: "It turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more 'freedom' in the paid labor force."
About 74% of women with children under 18 have paid outside jobs and 26% are stay-at-home moms. The latter are Vance's primary target group. But there is a secondary—and much larger—target group: working class men who are competing with women for jobs. Getting women out of the labor force strengthens the position of men in sectors where both men and women work.
Of course if Vance runs on this, his wife, Usha, had better stay at home and not resume her career as a high-powered corporate litigator. Surely they can make it on his $235,100 salary. But the problem for his plan is that many other couples cannot make it on one salary alone. Prices are so high now that women work not so much for "personal fulfillment," but because they need the second income to live on. If the plan goes through and a woman has three children, the $27,000 she then gets from the government (tax free?) might be more than she can earn in a paid job and maybe she will indeed decide that the highly subsidized trad wife lifestyle is for her. Republicans bristle when Democrats want to give some favored group free taxpayer money, but are all for it when the money is going to their favored group, in this case, trad wives.
This plan is the direct opposite of what the Democrats want. They are for increasing the child care tax credit and generally making child care more affordable, so more women can work to help support their families. Many women understand that not having a job, work experience, or skills makes them completely dependent on their husband. If the husband misbehaves in any way or decides to trade them in for a newer model, they can't easily survive a divorce because how would they then support themselves? Husbands also understand this. So implicitly, the Vance plan shifts power from wives to husbands and causes economic grief for low-income single working mothers, few of whom vote Republican. What's not to like here? (V)