Cohabiting couples with children are sought for a “marriage bootcamp,” ads on radio and social media would announce. If they make it through, they’d have a communal wedding at camp’s end and be matched with a mentor couple to help the bond stick. They’d even be paid $5,000 on their wedding day to help encourage family formation.
While the above scenario sounds like a marriage-minded reality TV series, it’s actually an idea from “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” a report put out by the Heritage Foundation on January 8.
That sort of marriage bootcamp—orchestrated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in collaboration with churches, foundations, and private donors—is just one of the conservative think tank’s proposals “to help to reverse the trend of the declining formation of families” and “restore family to the center of American life.”
Government-backed marriage programs don’t have a stellar success rate. The report’s authors admit that past results have been “modest” even while calling for new federally run “relationship education, parenting skills, and father involvement” programs and an HHS marriage propaganda campaign with messages such as “Give her a ring before she gives you a baby.”
Ideas like that seem quaint next to some of the more intensive interventions the Heritage report proposes. These include expanding Trump Accounts—in which the government gives every newborn a $1,000 investment account—”for the sake of supporting relatively early first marriages.” The proposed New Early Starter Trust (NEST) accounts “would be seeded with at least $2,500 upon the birth of a child.” Beneficiaries could access funds upon marrying or reaching 30 years old, with tax-advantaged withdrawals for people who marry before age 30.
The report also proposes a new child tax credit—separate from existing credits—reserved solely for married parents. Under the proposed Family and Marriage (FAM) tax credit program, married joint filers who have a kid together and meet minimum income thresholds could get a $4,418 refundable tax credit—bumped up to $5,521 for a third or subsequent kid—in the year the child is born and for three years thereafter. Families with a stay-at-home parent could get an extra $2,000 per child under age 5.
Costly programs like these are unlikely to actually boost birth rates, considering that countries offering direct cash bonuses to new parents haven’t had much luck.
But at least those proposals have a concrete connection to children and matrimony. Some of the report centers on socially conservative goals that are, at best, only distantly connected to either. For instance, it suggests that age verification for social media and online pornography “should be the law of the land.” It calls for passing the Kids Online Safety Act, which would legally require platforms to protect minors from all sorts of vague harms. Heritage panics about sex robots, surrogacy, and artificial wombs.
The report isn’t all big-government boondoggles and technological bugaboos. Many of its ideas could fit comfortably within a classical liberal agenda and would be worth trying even if they don’t promote particular family arrangements or fertility abundance.
For instance, the report calls for reforming welfare programs, bringing back the gold standard to help curb inflation, eliminating “rent control and stringent zoning restrictions,” protecting gig work and independent contracting, and letting people invest after-tax dollars in flexible savings accounts with gains exempt from further taxation. The authors also rail against overcredentialism and excessive federal education subsidies.
But the authors don’t shy away from repurposing big government programs for their own aims.
Rather than cutting spending as conservative rhetoric of yore once dictated, they suggest refocusing it toward pro-natalist efforts—for instance, directing the National Institutes of Health to “prioritize and expand funding for research into the underlying causes of infertility” and making “restorative reproductive medicine” eligible for Title X Family Planning Award funds. They also call for expanding Family and Medical Leave Act eligibility—which provides a right to 12 weeks of unpaid but job-protected leave to care for family members—to six months for new mothers.
The report also recommends “making family policy goals and considerations explicit conditions” of myriad federal grants and punishing grant recipients that “discriminate” against marriage and families. It also suggests adding a standard “Family Impact Appendix” to every major federal rule, for “identifying channels that plausibly affect marriage stability and childbearing.”
Taken all together, Heritage is advocating a reorientation of the entire federal government toward favoring married parents above everyone else.
