Now the story of a political movement at risk of losing everything, and the one weekly newsletter that had no choice but to try to keep it all together. If it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters:

• …But It Might Work For Us: You can’t gimmick your way to family affordability

• Dozens of Us: Who is my neighbor?

• It’s Me, Hi: Substack Live on New Mexico next Wednesday

• Parting Shots

…But It Might Work For Us

The Democrats’ better-than-expected night in this month’s elections has caused some to start tossing the word “affordability” around like some kind of magic trick.1 The overriding progressive impulse, as we can see from New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill’s promise to freeze energy prices, or soon-to-be-Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to make city buses and child care free, or the Los Angeles City Council’s vote this week to permanently ban any rent increases that surpass the general rate of inflation, is to use command and control policies to subsidize demand and hope to make it up on the back end with tax revenue.

Traditionally, conservatives have been the ones pointing out that chasing an affordability crisis by subsidizing demand won’t actually solve the long-term dynamics. Without a sufficient attention to growing the supply side of the economy, tax credits, transfers, and subsidies can only reallocate who bears the bill — it doesn’t actually lead to greater “affordability.”

President Donald Trump swept into the White House a second time on the back of popular frustration with the highest rates of inflation in four decades. In ways both good and bad, he has helped break the GOP of its brittle fealty to only proposing policy proposals that fit into the window bookended by 1996 Bob Dole and 2010 Michele Bachmann. Yet the past week showed the administration’s instincts are struggling to match the moment — with new ideas that gesture towards the middle class, but ultimately provide some cheap populism rather than actually taking the cost of living seriously.

Health Care

Let’s start with the hotly-discussed Covid-era health care subsidies. On Truth Social, the President tossed out the idea of taking the dollars meant to cover part of the cost of buying health insurance on the ACA exchanges, and having them be “SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE” instead. Read one way, this wouldn’t do much — giving individuals subsidies they could then give to insurers to purchase insurance is hardly that much different than giving the subsidies straight to insurers. Another way of interpreting it — the way favored by Sen. Rick Scott — is that the money would be put in Health Savings Accounts, rather than being put towards insurance premiums.

HSAs are great if you are young and don’t get sick (in which case you likely weren’t buying an exchange plan anyway.) They are not, however, a substitute for insurance, particularly if you are prone to giving birth, having children fall out of trees or break bones, or require more than infrequent visits to the doctor. As James C. Capretta wrote for AEI, “the value of the enhanced ACA credits [would be] far less than the charges patients receive when major health problems present themselves.”

The concept of “insurance” involves trading some up-front premium for having your downside risk covered — and the GOP’s answer to rising premiums in a post-Obamacare world can’t just be gesturing towards the flawed pre-Obamacare world. One could imagine a health care bill that sought to modestly streamline some of the “essential” benefits that insurers must now cover — ideally, paired with supply-side reforms to increase the number of doctors, site-neutral payments and select antitrust reforms to keep insurer networks from squeezing out smaller providers, maybe even some kind of federal reinsurance scheme to give insurers a little more financial leeway to keep premium increases modest — without attacking the concept of social insurance the way an HSA-forward health care plan would.

Tariffs

Per the New York Times, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and others have been pushing the administration to grant tariff exemptions to household staples like meat, pineapples, and avocados. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox and Friends that the Trump administration would be considering lifting tariffs on coffee (which has seen prices rise roughly 20 percent since the beginning of the year) to give consumers some relief.

“You’re going to see some substantial announcement over the next couple of days in terms of things we don’t grow here in the United States, coffee being one of them,” Bessent said. “Bananas, other fruits, things like that. So that will bring the prices down very quickly.” Are you suggesting that removing tariffs might make household goods cheaper? Does that mean adding them might make things more expensive? You’re telling me this for the first time.

I don’t expect we’ll ever get an explanation as to why it took over half a year for the tariff schedule to recognize the fact that there is not and never will be sufficient domestic production of these household staples, just I don’t expect the President would ever admit the “Liberation Day” rollout introduced maximum chaos for minimal gain. But the Supreme Court could very well strike down the administration’s reliance on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as the rationale for their broad-based tariff regime. The exemptions being considered by Lutnick and Bessent clearly indicate some kind of backing down from the maximalist approach is necessary.

Instead, we’ll probably see the White House look for alternate theories to advance their tariff-heavy approach to making trade more “fair.” In conjunction, the President is talking about a $2,000 “rebate” from tariff revenue (despite tariff revenue having already been promised to helping pay for the One, Big, Beautiful Bill and/or the national debt), perhaps means-tested for only those making less than six figures. A one-off payment might ease some of the political problems caused by tariffs for the midterms. But it won’t solve the affordability crisis when it comes to big ticket items, particularly…

Housing

The pièce de résistance of this week’s stumbles towards a pro-family agenda was the President’s suggestion, apparently at the behest of Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, to create a new, 50-year mortgage product to give would-be homebuyers an extra 20 years to amortize the cost of their house.

This is worse than the other ideas, in that it could actively work against its intended goal. Allowing people to opt into a 50-year mortgage means paying a higher interest rate, for longer, compared the traditional 30-year mortgage (banks would likely require a higher rate to compensate for the higher risk over the longer time horizon.) Borrowers who take longer to build meaningful equity could be left substantially underwater in the case of another housing downturn, and the lower monthly payments would likely be capitalized into the price of the house anyway. As Tiana Lowe Doescher writes at the Washington Examiner, monkeying with the terms of housing finance will not, actually, bring down the cost of housing, particularly relative to other supply-side reforms. (And, according to both Politico and the Daily Caller, Pulte’s brainchild has received no small amount of pushback from within the adminisitration.)

In terms of pure politics, it is worse than a crime, it is a fault. “Fifty-year mortgages will only compound the idiocy of indenturing the young for the profit of elderly asset holders. The idea that young Americans, blocked out of ownership of real assets — most especially the ornaments of middle class and familial life — will seek to conserve the very institutions that dispossessed them is a joke only an overfed ideologue could believe,” writes Michael Brendan Dougherty for National Review. Nothing like telling young men fed up with the “you’ll own nothing, and like it” school of progressive degrowtherism that they can look forward to owning their own home outright around the same time they become eligible for Social Security — both will seem equally unlikely to come to fruition.

In terms of a positive approach, I found myself unexpectedly taken by a nutshell version of populist housing policy from Jonathan Keeperman, he of the nom de guerre L0m3z, suggesting the administration pursue a Canada-like tax on foreign real estate acquisitions, and use the proceeds to fund a federal first-time homebuyers credit (twice as big for married couples, naturally.) There’s just to squeeze elsewhere too — really go after NEPA, do a bully pulpit push celebrating the market-friendly housing reforms pushed by Gov. Spencer J. Cox in Utah and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, give homebuilders some of that sweet, sweet tariff relief, etc.

And if Pulte was interested in supporting families from his current position, he would spend more time trying to figure out ways to cross-subsidize married families with dependents under 18 in our federal housing finance system, rather than his efforts to permit cryptocurrency to be used in mortgage applications, drop minimum credit scores, and other ways of expanding housing finance without actually expanding housing.

What do this week’s policy brainstormings have in mind? They all offer a kind of populist slop version of working-class politics, a “it’s one banana, Michael, how much can it cost, ten dollars?” approach to real economic frustrations. The goals — affordable health care, cheaper consumer goods, lower mortgage payments — are all good ones. But you can’t gimmick your way there, and trying to do so suggests an unwillingness (perhaps a generational one?) to take the fundamental market dynamics, or the economy’s pressure on families in particular, seriously enough to actually make the cost of living more affordable. Progressive populists think they can socialize the cost and tax the rich to pay for it. The temptation for populists on the right side seems to be that they want to move enough money around to make it seem like they are making things more affordable without actually addressing the status quo.

Some people will say that a conservative agenda will always put the interests of capital first, and that pro-family conservative economic policy is a contradiction in terms. If that’s a veiled criticism about me, I won’t hear it and I won’t respond to it. It is true that some aspects of pro-family policy will unavoidably cost money — a Child Tax Credit large enough to meaningfully benefit parents (say, double the current value?) would require some serious cash. A baby bonus, or cash benefit around the time of child birth, would be a little more cost-effective, but would also require an actual outlay of political and fiscal capital.

But you can’t spend your way to prosperity (or to a baby boom), nor can you subsidize families enough to make up for stagnating growth. Other approaches to lowering the cost of living require government doing less — empowering builders to build, deregulating the supply and provision of new health care approaches, removing the added trade barriers to businesses in non-strategic industries and allow market forces to do what they do best. Prioritizing the needs of families in domestic economic policy means recognizing those areas where traditional conservative insights can be put to use, but packaged in populist enough ways that can deliver some short-term political punch while pursuing long-term efficacy.

If your long-term affordability plays, like boosting the supply side of key household purchases, are successful, households will benefit directly, and you can use the enhanced growth to help pay for the ideas with unavoidable price tags. But if your economic agenda falters, you won’t have the coffers or tenure to pay for your various social program ideas — just ask President Biden.

Dozens of Us

I greatly enjoyed Olga Khazan’s latest piece for The Atlantic, making the straightforward point (it seemed to me) that as parenthood and family life becomes more self-selected, the kinds of social scaffolding that we used to be able to take for granted become harder to find. A parenting app or Facebook group may allow motivated individuals to find an ersatz “village,” but it’s not the same as an organic communities in which people give, take, and find their lives interwoven with peers going through similar stages of life:

“It takes a village” is advice that sounds communitarian, but in fact, it pushes for an individualistic solution to a societal problem. And it can distract people from demanding the kinds of solutions that could truly help families: longer parental leave; more flexible remote-work policies; child-care support; a work culture that accepts the constancy of kids’ sicknesses. Instead, families are left to “ask for help” on their own: You find the village. You join the app. You move closer to your mom. You need to be friendlier, more active, more approachable, more involved.

Those who can cobble together a network—by virtue of luck or wealth or people skills—come out ahead. Everyone else, the “village” wisdom implies, isn’t asking hard enough.

At the Institute for Family Studies, Nadya Williams offered a friendly critique — “the picture Khazan paints only shows how myopic many Americans’ vision of ‘the village’ has become…wholly absent from her piece (aside from a vague reference to “faith communities”) is any discussion of the community best equipped to serve as a family’s village—the local church.” And while Williams is correct to note that for many families, church provides valuable community and material support, it is also the case that the demographic trends Khazan points out mean that even religiously-affiliated parents sometimes have to swim upstream.

“Go to church” remains underrated advice in any number of circumstances, but without proactive efforts from church and community leaders to build the kind of infrastructure that makes interconnectedness possible, it will struggle to resonate with people who aren’t already blessed with a supportive community. Many churches proactively place families with kids at the center of their ministry and activities — others are more responsive to the needs of empty-nesters.

But one does not have to disagree with Williams’ assessment of religious communities’ potential to be hubs of community life to find Khazan’s underlying point — that any social institution ultimately relies on individuals finding the benefits to outweigh the costs, and that organic community can’t be replaced by opt-in apps — compelling. In other words, I don’t think Cartoons Hate Her’s critique (that you don’t want a village, you just want servants) is true, at least in so far as people are willing to sacrifice and pitch in for people that they know and have feelings of community and belonging towards (some, but few, will start up a meal train for a fellow MeetUp user.) People want to belong to community, but they don’t know where to find it, and that’s become a vicious cycle in an era of rising isolation and declining family formation.

An interesting, related experiment on this front may well be The Third Oikos project, being spearheaded by Nicole Ruiz under the auspices of the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies. Ruiz is interested in exploring how “technological shifts toward digital existence have heightened isolation and polarization,” while also offering opportunities for new forms of career and family blending — remote work, flexible scheduling, digital forms of community, and the rest. She promises neither straightforward Luddism nor mindless AI boosterism in assessing how technology and the family will evolve into our next “oikos,” and as such will be well worth following.

It’s Me, Hi

I will be making my Substack Live debut next Wednesday, November 19th, at 12:15 p.m., discussing the New Mexico child care experiment with Harvard University’s Danielle Allen of The Renovator, Anne-Marie Slaughter of New America, and Angela Rachidi of the American Enterprise Institute. We’ll be discussing what lessons New Mexico’s model has for the future of child care policy, concerns about implementation, and more. Join us!

Visit The Renovator

Parting Shots

• An interactive opinion feature by Youyou Zhou allows you to rank possible places to have a family by four factors — one of which has access to abortion and progressive gender politics making up 90 percent of their grade. Caveat emptor. (Washington Post)

• Anna Louie Sussman reviews Leah Libresco Sargeant’s “The Dignity of Dependence” (The Atlantic)

• In New Mexico, implementation of their new child care entitlement remains a big concern, as this piece by Savannah Peters makes clear (Marketplace)

• The nuances can get lost on Twitter, but the gap between Lyman Stone’s latest housing piece for IFS and a related piece I wrote earlier this year continue to close.

• “[D]eclines in maternal mortality explain 47-73 percent of the increase in fertility between 1939 and 1957 among white women and 64-88 percent of the increase in fertility among nonwhite women,” find UNC-Chapel Hill’s Christopher Handy and Washington and Lee University’s Katharine Shester (SSRN)

• As covered previously in Family Matters, Indiana froze child care assistance wait-lists; Chabeli Carrazana reports that the expiration of Covid-era funding is having similar impacts on child care assistance in Arkansas, Oregon, Maryland, and New Jersey as well. (The 19th)

• Families in Tianmen, China, can now get up to seven or eight times the annual income as a result of having a higher-parity birth as the Chinese government desperately tries to reverse its declining population growth (The Economist)

• After Major League Baseball limited most prop bets to $200 in value, the National Football League announced it is banning prop bets in certain categories — the pendulum is swinging…

• Derek Thompson has a gift for picking phrases meant to indelibly sum up social trends — the problem with “monks in a casino” (which is another worthwhile essay) is that monks have a purpose and intentionality in their vocation and the anti-social young men of today decidedly do not. “The pro-social script—date around, marry, settle down, buy a house, have a kid—feels more like a luxury every year. The anti-social script—porn, posting, parlays—feels easy and even costless:”

  Derek Thompson

  The Monks in the Casino

  I. Spishak and Kyle…

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  2 months ago · 874 likes · 42 comments · Derek Thompson

• Marc Andreessen picked a fight with the Pope on Twitter, and lost. Jeremiah Johnson on what the incident says about social media (and, possibly, Silicon Valley overall).

  Infinite Scroll

  Marc Andreessen as Avatar for Societal Decay

  This weekend, billionaire venture capitalist and professional conehead cosplayer Marc Andreessen got into a fight with the pope. The pope posted an incredibly inflammatory tweet that said “Technology sure can be cool! But you should, perhaps, consider ethics and morality and stuff as you develop it!”, and Andreessen took exception, ridiculing the pope w…

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  2 months ago · 541 likes · 73 comments · Jeremiah Johnson

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