Pro-Family Fiscal Policy

Editor’s Note: The following essay is a lightly edited version of comments the author delivered on Feb. 16, 2022, at an Institute for Family Studies and Ethics and Public Policy Center event in Washington, DC.

It’s an honor to be back in Russell. I began my career in this building, on this floor actually, working for Senator Richard Shelby.  

Back then, I was an LC (legislative correspondent) for banking issues, which doesn’t really translate to our talk today, except that in responding to thousands of constituent letters, I gained an appreciation for how the policies passed here impact real families. And that, of course, is what we are here to talk about—how many families are working hard, playing by the rules, and yet lack basic protections for them and their loved ones to flourish.  

Few people have identified the pressures facing American families better than Patrick T. Brown (EPPC) and Brad Wilcox (IFS). Marriage rates are at an all-time low. Fertility rates are falling even faster. Polls show people are not having the number of children they want, in part due to costs.  

Our government programs are decades old and contain quirks like marriage penalties or leaving out low-income families. And as a person of faith, I was both glad for the Dobbs decision last summer and saddened by the fact that pro-life states, like where I live now, in Texas, were those with the least support for mothers and infants.

The challenges families are facing don’t call for preserving the status quo. They call for significant policy changes to meet the needs families are facing.  

As such, being the pro-family party—as many conservatives would like the GOP to be—is going to take more than being against Democrat priorities and woke ideology. And for Democrats, it’s going to take more thought and compromise and flexibility than a highly partisan plan like Build Back Better that ultimately members of the Democrat party blocked.

We need a fresh, compelling vision for what would really change the experience around having a baby and family in a meaningful way that has broad support. The IFS/EPPC report that Patrick authored identifies many areas where there is broad support.

I want to focus on one of them: The 118th Congress can make it easier for parents—regardless of income level, family structure or work arrangement—to bond with and care for their newborns. To me, this issue is the heart of family policy. 

As a mother of three and researcher into paid leave for over a decade now, I can tell you there’s little good that comes from separating a child from a parent too early, exposing infants to compromised child care situations, cutting off breastfeeding, experiencing job uncertainty, and the severe financial hardship from going an extended period without pay, especially for low-income and single-parent families.

The challenges families are facing don’t call for preserving the status quo. They call for significant policy changes to meet the needs families are facing.  

And yet, too often, this is exactly the case. While more companies are providing paid leave, it’s an exemption not the rule—75% of Americans do not have paid family leave from their employer.  

It’s the 30-year anniversary of Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and yet approximately 40% of workers do not have job protection following childbirth. According to one study, one in four mothers return to work within two weeks.  

We can fix this. Paid parental leave has widespread support across the political aisle, as the polling from IFS and EPPC shows, with 71% supporting a paid leave program for new parents, 62% of Republicans.

Historically, there has been less support for it among conservatives, so I want to just talk to the Republicans here for the next part. I believe that a federal policy that makes it easier for parents to invest greater time caring for their newborn children is a pro-life, pro-work, and pro-growth policy that fits squarely within conservative values.   

Paid parental leave reduces neonatal fatalities and improves health outcomes for mothers and infants. It increases workforce attachment and decreases welfare dependence for mothers by allowing them to stay connected to the labor force. Paid parental leave is even associated with increased father involvement later in life, as the role of men and fathers is something that’s much discussed these days.

Policymakers can structure such paid leave in ways to minimize the fiscal and business burden. I’ve had the privilege to serve on economics working groups through the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, where we’ve modeled a wide variety of paid family and medical leave policies. A six-to eight-week paid parental leave program would cost between $3.5 billion and $10 billion annually, depending on participation. For perspective, this is less than 0.5 percent of the cost of federal entitlements each year.

Or course, paid parental leave isn’t the only popular pro-family policy. We can get rid of quirks in government benefits that actually penalize married couples relative to single earners. We can maximize child care and education choices for families and increase options for alternative education pathways and part-time work. We can reform the Child Tax Credit and reconcile broken government programs to deliver benefits in ways that parents actually prefer to get them.

But protecting infants and new parents is an important and big change in how we think about childbirth in this country—and it would change the lives of millions of families in a meaningful way that legislative correspondents would certainly hear about.

Abby McCloskey is an economist, Founder of McCloskey Policy LLC, and has directed domestic policy on multiple presidential campaigns. She is also a columnist for the Dallas Morning News.