#Family
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” — GK Chesterton
“Good news on the cultural front is rare in 2020s America, so we should gleefully celebrate recent updates from the Census Bureau about the resurgence of 2-parent families raising children“– Steve Cortes
Fact: 50 yrs ago, 90% of American children lived with both married parents, but that number started to decline from the 1960s onward. The number of children living with a divorced or never-married single parent 3X’d from just 9% in 1960 to 28% in Y 2005.
The tide has turned
Now, for the 1st time since the 1980s, over 70% of American children live with both married parents again. The trend is too small and too new to claim victory yet, but the trend is promising in here as it represents a positive and very welcome return to traditional family structure.
The Big Q: How does society strengthen and stabilize those families?
In a society that increasingly promotes toxic cultural rot, enabled by big business and its toady allies in the federal government, private institutions must flourish or the torch of Western Civilization will extinguish.
No institution matters more than Families with Fathers, and we need policies that will, once again, empower families to thrive. That means a return to an America where a family can comfortably exist on 1 income.
This goal is not some strange, wild, unpopular wish of only religious traditionalists. In fact, studies widely support the notion that most Americans do not welcome the present structure of both parents working full time.
A Gallup poll found that the majority of women with children under 18 anni want to stay home with their children rather than work.
Even among women without children, the same survey reported that 39% of women prefer to be homemakers rather than working outside the home.
An earlier Forbes poll revealed that 84% of mothers identified the financial security to stay home with children as a goal. In that survey, 33% of working women expressed resentment toward their partner for not earning enough to make that aspiration a reality.
A more recent research study from American Compass found the goal of traditional family structure to be especially pronounced among working-class citizens, with 71% of them stating that they do not want both parents working full time.
Here are the Key steps to empower families to live on 1 income again, as follows:
- Education Choice – Far too many American families are trapped in failing, monopolistic government schools. Many of these schools indoctrinate children with toxic narratives like the anti-white bigotry of Critical Race Theory and the scandalous lies of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Let’s free these families to make the same choices that wealthy families can make and choose private or religious schools. Such options will build stronger families and encourage parents to have more babies and stay home to raise them, knowing that tax dollars will fund families instead of corrupt school systems and unions.
- Financial Incentives – America should learn from Hungary, a country with a formerly plunging birthrate that now sees a material uptick in childbirths through loans and incentives for families. A married woman can take out a loan of about $30,000 that is gradually forgiven with children and totally erased at the third child. A married woman with four children is tax-exempt for life. Such practices could work well in the United States too. In addition, the tax deduction for children should be far larger. The current expansion of the refundable credit to $3,600 per child is a welcome move, but not nearly aggressive enough, especially in light of the recent Biden inflation spike that makes childrearing more costly than ever. The deduction should be at least $10,000 per child.
- Trade/Offshoring Protection – We populist nationalists need to embrace the agenda of protection and reject the establishment GOP notion that economic protectionism is some dirty word. President Trump showed the power of properly deployed tariffs in deterring Chinese economic exploitation of American workers. Before the ‘Virus’, 2019 was the best year in history for American workers, with 6.8 percent overall wage growth, and even higher pay raises for working-class and minority citizens. Let’s protect American industries from crass mercantilist abuses, thereby raising wages to support families on one income. In addition, our tax code can be changed to materially punish firms that offshore production, especially by taxing overseas revenues of such firms, regardless of whether the proceeds are repatriated.
- Immigration Control – America today has a foreign-born percentage of population at nearly 14 percent, the highest in a century, and very near the all-time high of 14.8 percent from the late 1800s. But back then, America had no government social safety net at all, it was literally sink-or-swim for new migrants. In addition, assimilation was expected and enforced. Neither scenario exists today. In California, fully 55 percent of immigrant-headed households receive some form of public assistance, per the LA Times. It might surprise many Americans to learn that migrant-heavy California has the highest poverty rate of any state in America. It’s time to get serious and totally eliminate illegal immigration, and to limit and reform even legal migration. Right now, a moratorium is in order, a pause. Let America heal from the pandemic and the lockdowns physically, financially, socially and then let’s restart limited legal migration with much better merit-based filters to select new immigrants who will add to our prosperity and love our ideals. Such migration protection will vastly improve the lives and prosperity of citizens looking to build families.
So, as we pursue the right mix of populist economic nationalism, President Trump’s (45) America First movement can continue pave the way for stronger “extraordinary” American families thriving on 1 income.
Have a positive holiday weekend, Keep the Faith!
