JD Vance is right about stay-at-home parents — but his solution is all wrong

Should the federal government pay parents to stay at home so they can better raise their children?

The Trump administration thinks so, and is working on plans to allow a stay-at-home spouse to collect as much as $9,000 per child each year, depending on their economic circumstances, from funds potentially available from the Health and Human Services Department. 

The driver of the program appears to be Vice President Vance, who has long championed more traditional family values where parents and “young children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent.” 

Vance is right that parents should have more opportunities to spend time with their young children. But instead of paying people not to work, why not give businesses stronger incentives to make it easier for working parents to stay home when they need to? 

Sorry if I sound so cynical, but like so many government programs, this one will almost certainly be abused.

Federal programs have had a long history of fraud, stretching from welfare, Medicare, housing and farming subsidy overpayments to the awards of food stamps, school lunches, unemployment and, most recently, COVID payments to people who did not qualify or simply swindled the government. Do we have any doubt that this handout will suffer the same consequences?

And who’s going to enforce this new program? The federal government, whose workforce has shrunk 10 percent since President Trump took office? And who will be eligible? Mothers? Fathers? Aunts? Uncles?

Good luck figuring that out — and then stopping the payments once they have started.

The $12 billion fund that Vance is targeting would mostly be distributed to states, which would then provide the funding for dependent care facilities,........

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