The thing standing between a 28-year-old couple and a second child isn’t the federal income tax. It’s the $2,400 a month they already pay for daycare, the rent that ate the last raise, and the student-loan payment that arrived the morning after the wedding. Zero out their federal income tax for ten years and they still cannot afford the second child.
That is the problem Jayme Franklin’s “Conservatives can fight the rise of socialism by defending the American family”, published by Fox News Opinion, wants to solve with the Young American Family Act. Franklin begins with a reasonable point. Young Americans are anxious about marriage, children, housing, and the future. She argues that the socialist left is recruiting on that anxiety, then proposes eliminating federal income tax for married couples under 35 with at least one child.
The anxiety is real. Fertility has fallen. Young adults are delaying marriage, children, and homeownership because the arithmetic is ugly. The problem is that Franklin diagnoses a cost crisis as a tax-code crisis.
Walk through the budget of an ordinary young family. A two-bedroom apartment in a job-rich metro can cost roughly what their parents once paid for a starter home. Full-time infant care costs about $14,000 to $20,000 a year, depending on the state, and exceeds public-college tuition in 38 states and the District of Columbia. A single hospital stay can consume a family’s deductible and coinsurance. A recent bachelor’s graduate may carry nearly $30,000 in federal student debt. The rent is due every month. The daycare bill is due every month. The hospital does not accept “but Congress gave us a tax cut” as a payment plan.
The proposal would return some young married parents perhaps $400 to $500 a month. That is real money. It is also not a daycare slot, a cheaper apartment, a refinanced student loan, or health insurance that follows a worker between jobs. For a couple earning $60,000, the federal income-tax bill is already modest—well under $1,500 in many cases after the standard deduction and existing child tax credit. The bottleneck is not the IRS.
It is the price of the family.
Franklin’s own evidence gives away the problem. She notes that 34 percent of unmarried parents live below the poverty line, nearly seven times the rate of married parents. Then her proposed benefit excludes the unmarried parents her argument identifies as most vulnerable. A single mother earning $32,000 while working two jobs gets nothing. The Young American Family Act is aimed at a different demographic from the one the piece says is in crisis. That is not a minor drafting error. It is the tell.
The proposal treats the family budget like a tax problem. It is a cost problem. Those are different problems with different solutions.
Childcare makes the mechanism impossible to miss. Quality care requires enough skilled adults, paid well enough to stay. That care must somehow be affordable for parents and profitable for owners. It cannot be all three without public support. Pick two. The United States picked the spreadsheet, cut the workers’ wages, strained the parents’ budgets, and now acts surprised when young people run the math and decline.
Every other rich country subsidizes childcare because the arithmetic refuses to cooperate with ideology. Denmark combines childcare with paid parental leave and healthcare that does not disappear when a worker changes jobs. Sweden’s family policy costs real money and relies on broad taxes; everyone pays. Swedish parents do not sit at the kitchen table calculating the marginal tax rate before deciding whether to have a second child. They ask whether the daycare slot is open, whether parental leave covers the gap, and whether the apartment fits.
The system lets them.
That does not make the Nordic countries paradise. Sweden’s voucher experiment increased school segregation. Denmark’s model depends on institutions America mostly lacks. High union coverage, organized employers, capable public agencies, and a century of bargaining do not arrive by executive order. “Just do what Denmark does” is not a plan. The policy is the tip. The institutions are the iceberg.
But the alternative exists, and the American right’s socialism panic does not make it disappear. The free childcare, free transit, and rent freezes associated with Democratic Socialists are responses to the same cost crisis Franklin describes, minus the part where the cause is named. Both sides agree that young Americans are being priced out. The choice is whether to offer a tax cut that does not reach the cost or public provision that does.
We already ran one version of the experiment here.
In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit delivered monthly, near-universal cash support to families with children. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, child poverty fell 46 percent in one year, from 9.7 percent to 5.2 percent. About 2.9 million children were lifted out of poverty. The expansion lapsed at the end of the year, and child poverty rose again.
The policy went on. The line moved. The policy went off. The line moved back.
That is not a slogan. It is a measurement.
The Child Tax Credit was a temporary patch over permanent holes. Make it permanent. Let it run through the IRS’s existing plumbing rather than inventing a new maze for families to navigate. Subsidize childcare as public infrastructure and pair it with universal pre-K. Fund cooperative providers such as Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, founded in 1985 and still the country’s largest worker-owned home-care agency. Refinance student debt at the same rates the federal government offers banks. Use state preemption to clear away local zoning rules that keep apartments scarce. Fund community land trusts so a starter home is not auctioned to the highest leveraged bidder. Let the Postal Service provide basic banking so a young family is not paying a $35 overdraft fee on a $40 balance.
None of this requires Washington to decide how a family spends its money. It requires Washington to stop arranging the family budget so that landlords, lenders, hospitals, and childcare operators get paid first.
The credit union in your wallet and the rural electric cooperative on the county line are the same America Franklin claims to defend. They are member-owned, practical, and boring in the best possible way. The public library works on the same principle: everybody pays in, everybody can use it. We already know how to build institutions that spread risk instead of dumping it on the family with the least room in the budget.
A tax cut for young married parents is not nothing. A few hundred dollars matters when the account is thin. But it is the family-policy equivalent of prescribing an aspirin for a broken bone. The bone is childcare, housing, healthcare, and debt.
Franklin’s side could be the party that fixes those things. It has decided, for now, that letting families keep an extra few hundred dollars is the same as fixing the family.
It isn’t.
Build the plumbing.