Child Care

There's No Market Failure in Choosing to Stay Home. So Why Subsidize It?

J.D. Vance would like to give money to people for choices they're already making—without a workable plan to actually pay for it.

Veronique de Rugy | 9.10.2026 2:01 PM

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(Photo: Tatsiana Nelipovich. Illustration: Adani Samat/Midjourney)

Vice President J.D. Vance wants to pay married parents to stay home with their children, and he wants to do it with money Congress appropriated to help low-income families afford day care. Whatever one thinks of the goal, which may prove popular, the proposal fails every test we should apply to government subsidies.

That's because the proposal corrects no market failure. It pays people for choices they're already making. It adds a new claimant class to a budget that cannot carry the ones already promised something. And it does all of this without a workable plan to pay for it.

Under a draft rule now circulating at the Department of Health and Human Services, married couples in which one spouse works at least 35 hours a week and the other stays home would become eligible for the federal child care subsidy—about $9,000 per child, per year—as payment for "parent-based childcare." The money would come from the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), a $12 billion block grant created in the 1990s to help low-income parents pay for care while working or........

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