Whenever I’ve run into Richard Reinsch’s byline before, it’s been attached to something sensible and illuminating. Much of his essay in the new Commentary about “right-wing grievance politics” and the need to uphold a “conservatism of self-government and opportunity” matches that description. But there was one passage that left me goggling.

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Reinsch laments, “Some on the right are now advocating large transfer payments to American families to increase fertility.” He claims that “the idea of using government subsidies to direct the behavior of a self-governing people is violative of conservatism,” and calls for “the revival of a supply-side economic and cultural agenda for families, not Hungarian traditionalism.”

This reminds me of the kerfuffle during the 2024 campaign about JD Vance’s comment that people with three kids should pay lower taxes than childless people. It was taken as a provocation even though it was also a description of longstanding features of the U.S. tax code.

In Reinsch’s defense, some conservatives have indeed argued that it violates principle for governments to provide any benefits, such as lower tax payments, for parents. But they have been a small minority among conservatives, including conservatives of strongly free-market and limited-government views.

The U.S. has had some transfers for parents for almost the entire time it has had an income tax (although it now has larger implicit transfers from parents to non-parents). Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush all expanded this parental benefit. None of them was taking cues from Viktor Orbán. None of them saw the dependent exemption or the child tax credit as incompatible with supply-side reforms.

What’s the difference between these barely controversial features of conservatism during the last several decades and the idea that troubles Reinsch now? It can’t be that the proposals are for “large” benefits; that’s not a difference in principle. Is it that some supporters of the proposals hope that they will lead people to have more children? Presumably, making it easier for people to raise kids has always been a motive for these policies.

If conservative critics of the New Right (or whatever we’re calling it these days) want to associate that group with pro-family economic policies, then I’d conclude that on this issue, the New Right is correct. But I don’t think this should be a point of division.

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