Grand New Party and a New Creepy Breeding Program

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Like Republican Pod People seeking to dominate American society, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam advocate tax benefits for married couples who haphazardly breed as a method of wooing working-class voters in their new book "Grand New Party". Ross Douthat is one of those Atlantic smart-kid types, and Reihan Salam had the gall to badmouth the classic movie Fletch (not winning a lot of friends over on this end). Anyways, Kerry Howley offers her impressions of the book seeking a new GOP paradigm at TPM:

Privileging one, dominant idea of the family comes with costs that R&R never really grapple with in their breezy book, and those costs fall almost exclusively on one gender. Through the tax code, R&R wish to change the relative prices of women's options, rendering childlessness more costly and early motherhood less so. They want the federal government to stake a position on the proper role of women, and that role involves a heterosexual marriage with children. While conceding that this is politically infeasible at the moment, R&R write that "we should be willing to stigmatize illegitimacy by tying a tax relief to responsible parenting." (Responsible parenting=parenting by legally married couples.) This is a policy that punishes poor women unable to find marriageable men, gay and lesbian partners unable to access legal marriage, and any other number of people who are responding rationally to their environment, doing the best they know how for the kids they have.

Please allow me to be more blunt. Children already get help from Uncle Sucker, as property taxes pay for the schooling of these filthy, little urchins. Now this "modern conservative" wants to reward "responsible" parenting with tax benefits, which would imply that the federal government should set some kind of "societal standard" about what a proper parent is. This represents the lack of respect for a constitutionally-limited republic, and shows a willingness by the new political zeitgeist to buy off votes from the public troff. Totally shameless seems to be the new norm.

The unintended consequences of government-intervention in this regard range from the average joe's taxes going up to some Brave New World type scenario to breed beneficial voting patterns for whoever is in charge. Douthat and Salam seek to capitalize on cultural conservatives values with the promise of the government cheese, but they oughta know that the best things about the American government is a constitution to keeps the King of England out of your face, laws providing for natural rights of our citizens , and strong military/law enforcement institutions to keep enemies/criminals from destroying society. Everything else is just politicians trying to rip you off.