Hillary Clinton: Fixing Affordability Starts With Families

Mrs. Clinton is a former secretary of state and U.S. senator and was the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

President Trump’s new budget seeks $1.5 trillion for defense and enormous cuts to programs that help families struggling with the rising cost of living. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care,” he said at a private Easter lunch.

This isn’t surprising coming from a president who has dismissed America’s affordability crisis as a “hoax” and a “con job.” For most parents, the crunch is all too real. Our kids will pay the price for the president’s indifference.

National Republicans have no answers for America’s hard-pressed parents. Leaders like Vice President JD Vance and right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation are obsessed with falling birthrates.

They ignore the financial burdens crushing parents who are trying to provide a safe, healthy, middle-class life for their kids. Their answer is too often nostalgia and misogyny: If we could turn back the clock to a time when women didn’t work (and knew their place), the economy would thrive and families would flourish. This is substantively and politically brain-dead.

American families are raising children now, in an economy where both parents work to make ends meet and child care costs rival rent, in a country with no national paid leave and in a digital world they cannot control. Instead of lectures, families need reforms that will improve the lives of children and parents.

The irony is hard to miss: Republicans who paid lip service to helping moms after the Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade continue to oppose policies that would make parenthood more affordable and sustainable.

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