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Foreword: One Generation Away Oren Cass Home Building Survey, Parts READER FEBRUARY 2021 Foreword: One Generation Away Oren Cass 11 Home Building Survey, Parts I & II American Compass Research 18 Let Them Eat Daycare Wells King 39 A Family Benefit Oren Cass, Wells King, and Sean Speer 45 Policy Proposals Samuel Hammond, Neil Gilbert, and Michael Lind 133 Family Foundations Helen Andrews, Kay Hymowitz, Patrick T. Brown, and Lyman Stone 189 Our Mission To restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity– REORIENTING POLITICAL FOCUS from growth for its own sake to widely shared economic development that sustains vital social institutions. SETTING A COURSE for a country in which families can achieve self-sufficiency, contribute productively to their communities, and prepare the next generation for the same. HELPING POLICYMAKERS NAVIGATE the limitations that markets and government each face in promoting the general welfare and the nation’s security. AMERICAN COMPASS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with headquarters at 300 Independence Avenue SE, Washington, DC 20003. All contents Copyright © 2020 by American Compass, Inc. unless otherwise noted. Electronic versions of these articles with additional footnotes and sourcing are available at www.americancompass.org. 3 Home Building American family life has long been associated with the “white picket fence,” a symbol of twentieth-century, middle-class nostalgia. Such ideals are better reflected not by the fence but the home it surrounded, in which families found shelter and security, parents raised children, and wealth was built up and passed down. That home has fallen into disrepair. Fewer people are getting married; fewer children are being born; and they are more likely to be raised by single parents. Conservatives must embrace the task of rebuilding it. Home Building offers a blueprint for buttressing the American family. A survey of parenting-age Americans assesses the family’s state, priorities, and preferences as well as its policy attitudes. Essays by Helen Andrews, Kay Hymowitz, Patrick T. Brown, and Lyman Stone explain why conservatives need a positive family policy suited to the needs and interests of the American people. American Compass’s Oren Cass and Wells King weigh the arguments for improving family benefits and offer a new proposal, with responses from experts across the political spectrum. Essays by Sean Speer and Neil Gilbert offer lessons learned about crafting and implementing family policy from abroad, while Michael Lind and Samuel Hammond widen the scope for family policy to transform existing programs and approaches to reform. A range of other experienced policy experts offer potential pathways for reform as well. 4 Table of Contents 11 Foreword: One Generation Away OREN CASS Preserving our national inheritance requires public policy to get the family right. 18 2021 Home Building Survey, Parts I & II AMERICAN COMPASS RESEARCH Let Them Eat Daycare 39 WELLS KING The American system of innovation, combining strategic investment and private enterprise, made our nation’s industry the envy of the world. It can pave the way for widespread prosperity and security again today. A FAMILY BENEFIT The Family Income Supplemental Credit 45 OREN CASS & WELLS KING A proposal to expand the social compact for working families 75 Reactions to a New Social Compact Commentators and policy analysts react to our proposal for a Family Income Supplemental Credit. 97 Canucks in the Cradle SEAN SPEER Canadian Conservatives successfully championed universal child benefits and have lessons for their neighbors to the south. 5 109 Family Feud: Child Allowance Edition The Niskanen Center’s Samuel Hammond and the American Enterprise Institute’s Scott Winship debate the case for a “child allowance.” POLICY PROPOSALS 133 7 Proposals to Make America More Family-Friendly Writers and analysts from across the right-of-center apply a family-focused lens to contemporary policy challenges. 153 Seeing Like a Pro-Family State SAMUEL HAMMOND Addressing our fertility and family-formation crises will require us to push the boundaries of family policy and embrace a whole-of-society approach. 163 Friendly for Which Families? NEIL GILBERT The experience of “family-friendly” policy abroad makes one lesson clear: no policy is friendly for all families. Family Policy for the 177 Working-Class Majority MICHAEL LIND A pro-worker agenda must treat families, not individuals, as the basic units of public policy. 6 FAMILY FOUNDATIONS Why Bother with Family? 189 HELEN ANDREWS If conservatives do not speak for the family, who will? Our Conjugal Class Divide 199 KAY HYMOWITZ Marriage has evolved to meet the ideals of the well- educated and left too many Americans unwed and insecure. Family Form Follows Function 209 PATRICK T. BROWN Effective family policy begins from the institution’s ultimate roles and purposes. 219 Escaping the Parent Trap LYMAN STONE Addressing America’s fertility crisis happens to be what parents want. 227 A Family Tree: The Past and Present of Public Policy and the American Family Required Reading 7 Coverage & Impact In the New York Times, Oren Cass explained how “ To strengthen a nation’s commitment to universal child benefit shared expectations and obligations, and programs violate the to sustain broad-based political support, principle of reciprocity a program should ask recipients to do at the heart of a durable their part in supporting themselves.” social compact, and made the case for the Fisc. “ Another round of fascinating polling from American Compass.” - Robert Orr, Niskanen Center “ Great to see continued thinking about this crucial area—evidently one that will figure strongly in conservative thinking in the years to come.” - Gladden Pappin, American Affairs At The American “ Perhaps this is ultimately why family Conservative, Emile policy is such a debated issue in our Doak highlighted politics: it strikes at some of the core Helen Andrews’s essay, assumptions of our American regime. describing it as a The debate over the proper balance “microcosmic primer” of liberty and virtue isn’t going away on the core debates of anytime soon.” family policy. “ This is a really cool project from American Compass, doing a month of articles about family policy, springboarded by a new survey of family preferences.” - Lyman Stone, American Enterprise Institute 8 Oren Cass joined The Dispatch podcast for “ What has been missing from American politics and an in-depth discussion policy making is a conservatism that takes seriously of how conservatives the ways that public policy could really take on and should approach address failures in our markets and things that are family policy and child not going well in the economy.” benefit proposals. Oren Cass joined the Solidarity Policy Collective “ We recognize working and earning as a meaningful podcast to debate and important thing…that is distinct from a state child benefits with of being in a household that doesn’t do that. Matt Bruenig of the [These] are things worth recognizing the value of left-wing People’s and trying to preserve as we make policy.“ Policy Project. “ Encouraging to see so much fresh thinking about family policy from conservatives this year. Today: Important new proposal to strengthen financial foundations of working families from Oren Cass and Wells King at American Compass.” Brad Wilcox, Institute for Family Studies On Tucker Carlson Tonight, Oren Cass discussed the Home Building survey’s finding that most families prefer to have one parent stay home with young children, and what that means for policymakers. 9 AMERICAN COMPASS | February 2021 Preserving our national inheritance requires public policy to get the family right. 10 Foreword: One Generation Away OREN CASS At the outset of his first inaugural address as governor of California, Ronald Reagan made the vital observation that “freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.” The beliefs, values, habits, and capacities necessary to sustain a prosperous democratic republic are not some innate feature of human nature, as both the historical record and conditions in much of the modern world affirm. We can never take for granted the need for successive generations to develop those traits anew. How does this happen? Here, Reagan was mistaken. Freedom “is not ours by way of inheritance,” he continued. Rather, “it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” Empirically, this is untrue. Notwithstand- ing Thomas Jefferson’s infamous exhortation that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants” and his fear that “god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” most American generations have indeed inherited their citizenship in a free and prosperous country. The American people do not expend their effort building from the same starting point as their predecessors; the charge is to preserve and improve upon what they have inherited. Reagan’s emphasis on continuity and tradition in one sentence sits awkwardly beside his denial of it in the next. It is emblematic of the dissonance between conservatism and libertarianism underlying the American right-of-center’s thinking, coalition, and policy agenda. The libertarian conception of 11 AMERICAN COMPASS | February 2021 individuals as free agents controlling their own fates is diametrically opposed to the conservative view that sees individuals entangled in a dense web of obligations to, and relationships with, those who came before, those with whom they must coexist, and those who will follow. Reagan’s insight about freedom’s fragility, and the importance of ensuring its persistence into the next generation, is perhaps the strongest argument for the conservative outlook. " Conservatives are well attuned to the ways that liberal antipoverty efforts can deepen poverty by eroding the imperatives of responsible family formation. We should carefully examine our own projects through the same lens. To complete Reagan’s thought, then, the point cannot be that freedom “is not ours by way of inheritance” but rather that we cannot bequeath it like one.
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