The GOP’s False Pro-Family Delusion

 

Republicans endlessly bloviate being the party of "family values" and being pro-family.  The reality is something far different from Republican lip service.  "Family values" in reality translates to trying to force Christofascist dogma - including forced birth on minors through abortion bans - on all of society even as the GOP is currently headed by a man who is utterly bankrupt morally and who is the antithesis of what are true Christian values. As for being "pro-family", the GOP's actual policies do little or nothing to aid families and efforts to block Medicaid expansion, cut aid to poor families and children,  and the pursuit of a reverse Robin Hood agenda in favor of the wealthy actively harms countless American families.  Recent incoherent speeches by Trump on childcare costs and insane statements by JD Vance who would force childcare burdens on grandparents and other relatives underscore the reality that the GOP has no plan to aid working families.  Meanwhile Trump's promises of across the board tariffs - which he idiotically claims would be paid by foreign countries and companies - would drive up costs for families and consumers significantly.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the GOP's false pro-family narrative:

Today’s Republican Party aspires to be a pro-family movement, but it has struggled to turn that desire into much more than a plea for people to have more children. Twice in the past two days, the GOP presidential ticket has demonstrated that it has no idea how to help people care for children once they’re born.

Yesterday, Donald Trump spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where he was asked whether and how he would make child care more affordable. The answer was, even by his standards, confusing and rambling: . . . it’s hard to reach any conclusion except that Trump not only has no plan for lowering child-care costs, but has not thought about the issue at all. What do tariffs have to do with day-care prices? This writer doesn’t know, and neither does Trump.

Vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance was asked basically the same question at an event in Arizona on Wednesday. Although he is supposedly the deeper policy thinker on the ticket, his answer was barely more sophisticated: . . . So one of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is make it so that that, you know, maybe, like, Grandma or Grandpa wants to help out a little bit more or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more.

The idea that young families can just rely on relatives is nearly as out of touch as Mitt Romney’s infamous 2012 suggestion that students could start a business by seeking a loan from their parents. Vance assumes that everyone lives near family members.

Even those who live near family may not be able to rely on them for help. Vance was famously raised by his own grandmother, who stepped in because his mother struggled with addiction . . . That relationship is not typical. Mamaw was able to care for young J.D. in part because Papaw had a good union job that enabled him to provide for a family, and then a pension; his wife stayed home with the children. Such arrangements are rarer now, and besides, many Americans work deep into their older years and aren’t available for babysitting.

Vance seems generally averse to looking outside the family for child-care support. In 2021, he tweeted, “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” who, he said, would rather not have both parents working. The fact is that many families who might prefer to have one breadwinner and one caregiver simply can’t afford that arrangement, and for them daycare is a normal response. Vance has said that he and Trump represent the “most pro-worker Republican ticket in history,” but they’re scant on details about how exactly they’d bring back jobs like Papaw’s. Trump criticized the UAW for striking last year, and his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board as president were more friendly to employers than to workers.

At the Arizona event, Vance did offer one suggestion for cutting child-care costs: lowering barriers to entering the business. . . . But cutting red tape is unlikely to significantly lower day-care costs. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote in 2022, child care’s fundamental problem is that it’s highly labor intensive, and labor costs money. At a time when wages have risen and jobs are plentiful, day-care operators are losing employees to higher-paying jobs.

The gap between rhetoric and concrete results is a recurring theme of the fake populism of Trump-Vance Republicans. The GOP insists that it has become a pro-worker party in addition to a pro-family party, but when its policies are subjected to even minimal scrutiny, they seem to offer little to no benefits for working families. It’s enough to drive one to become a childless cat lady or gentleman.