7 Comments
Mar 10, 2021Liked by Will Wilkinson

Since Trump, NR has lost damn near all its credibility and your points are strongly illustrative of where their actual “beef” lies. Cass is upset that undeserving people that irresponsibly reproduce (what he is saying but won’t be that crass about it) will not be made to feel the pain of their irresponsibility.

The Puritan scolding that is and has been the constant refrain from NR for many years is just so damn obvious to anyone that bothers to look.

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I say we keep the work requirement but we allow one mom to pay a different mom to watch her kids, while the other kids' mom pays her to watch *her* kids, and then they swap the kids they watch so they each end up watching their own kids but they pay each other so they both get the benefit of the dignity of work.

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This is a brilliant idea! Get some foundation to set up a giant childcare services "sharing economy" corporation. Kidcorp "hires" all eligible single parents as contractors and the parents hire KidCorp to provide childcare services. Kidcorp assigns them their own kids for # of hours necessary to qualify for the child allowance and pays parents exactly what they paid Kidcorp for the childcare services they provided (minus payroll taxes?) Everybody gets the allowance without doing anything different. But ALSO, they can use the Kidcorp app to ACTUALLY hire and pay each other for childcare services if they want.

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Placing a call to Open Philanthropy....

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This is fundamentally Cass trying to provide an incentive either to 1). “Force” single mothers to marry a working partner 2). Disincentive single women from having (more) children.

When he says the family is the key unit, he means the nuclear family with 1 mom 1 dad (who works) and as many children as they can produce. This is social policy achieved by other means, that may result in some poverty reduction.

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Well said. Wish I would have made it this clear.

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Great to see you push the sword in all the way to the hilt here. Not sure how well this analogy works, but Cass' position seems like the last helicopter off the island of Reaganism. The times have finally found this 40-years dominant ideology and, as you note, he is basically fighting a rear-guard battle to squeeze some vestige of the Reagan-era into a minimally acceptable social and economic policy. Disregarding the influence of any white paternalism (I agree not a little bit is there!), I wonder whether and to what extent you think there's just a basic assumption about human nature that conservatives hold that leads Cass to think this way. I wager it has something to do with the differences between Locke and Rousseau, Smith and Marx...

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