Today’s Republican Party aspires to be a pro-family movement, but it has struggled to turn that desire into much more than a plea for people to have more children. Twice in the past two days, the GOP presidential ticket has demonstrated that it has no idea how to help people care for children once they’re born.
Yesterday, Donald Trump spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where he was asked whether and how he would make childcare more affordable. The answer was, even by his standards, confusing and rambling:
I would do that, and we’re sitting down, you know, I was somebody, we had Senator Marc Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue, it’s a very important issue, but I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because childcare is childcare, it’s something, you have to have it, in this country you have to have it. But when you take those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly, and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, it’s gonna take care. I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country. Because I have to stay with childcare. I want to stay with childcare. But those numbers are small relative to the kinds of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’re taking in.
That’s a lot of words, from which it’s hard to reach any conclusion except that Trump not only has no plan for lowering childcare costs, but has not thought about the issue at all. What do tariffs have to do with day-care prices? This writer doesn’t know, and neither does Trump. The economist Brad DeLong, inspired by South Park, has referred to this sort of “solution” as the underpants-gnome theory of policy. Step 1: Jack up tariffs. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Affordable childcare!
[David A. Graham: The fakest populism you ever saw]
Vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance was asked basically the same question at an event in Arizona on Wednesday. Although he is supposedly the deeper policy thinker on the ticket, his answer was barely more sophisticated:
One of the things that we can do is make it easier for family models to choose, or for families to choose whatever model they want, right? So one of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is make it so that that, you know, maybe, like, Grandma or Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more.
The idea that young families can just rely on relatives is nearly as out of touch as Mitt Romney’s infamous 2012 suggestion that students could start a business by seeking a loan from their parents. Vance assumes that everyone lives near family members. A Census Bureau study published two years ago found that almost 60 percent of 26-year-olds live within 10 miles of where they grew up, but that means 40 percent do not.
Even those who live near family may not be able to rely on them for help. Vance was famously raised by his own grandmother, who stepped in because his mother struggled with addiction; he wrote about that experience in Hillbilly Elegy and speaks warmly about his “Mamaw” on the campaign trail. That relationship is not typical. Mamaw was able to care for young J.D. in part because Papaw had a good union job that enabled him to provide for a family, and then a pension; his wife stayed home with the children. Such arrangements are rarer now, and besides, many Americans work deep into their older years and aren’t available for babysitting.
Vance seems generally averse to looking outside the family for childcare support. In 2021, he tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” who, he said, would rather not have both parents working. The fact is that many families who might prefer to have one breadwinner and one caregiver simply can’t afford that arrangement, and for them daycare is a normal response. Vance has said that he and Trump represent the “most pro-worker Republican ticket in history,” but they’re scant on details about how exactly they’d bring back jobs like Papaw’s. Trump criticized the UAW for striking last year, and his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board as president were more friendly to employers than to workers.
At the Arizona event, Vance did offer one suggestion for cutting childcare costs: lowering barriers to entering the business.
“We’ve got a lot of people who love kids, who would love to take care of kids, but they can’t, either because they don’t have access to the education that they need or maybe more importantly because the state government says you’re not allowed to take care of children unless you have some ridiculous certification that has nothing to do—nothing to do with taking care of kids,” he said.
[Annie Lowrey: The reason child care is so hard to afford]
Vance is part of an emerging and persuasive bipartisan consensus that licensing requirements in many professions are too onerous. But cutting red tape is unlikely to significantly lower day-care costs. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote in 2022, childcare’s fundamental problem is that it’s highly labor intensive, and labor costs money. At a time when wages have risen and jobs are plentiful, day-care operators are losing employees to higher-paying jobs.
The gap between rhetoric and concrete results is a recurring theme of the fake populism of Trump-Vance Republicans. The GOP insists that it has become a pro-worker party in addition to a pro-family party, but when its policies are subjected to even minimal scrutiny, they seem to offer little to no benefits for working families. It’s enough to drive one to become a childless cat lady or gentleman.