An Economics Platform for SoCons

[DC Al Fine]

One of the things that's bothered me as a social conservative is how commentators of my ilk tend to ignore economics. The comments section aren't much better, with a mix of Reaganites fighting the battles of the 1980's, and Dems who pull the "voting against their interests" card while glossing over areas where the Democratic fiscal platform clashes with socon interests (e.g. Immigration), or glorifying the 1950's economy like we glorify the 1950's family.

With that in mind, what do you think a fiscal platform for social conservatives should look like?

Here are some rough ideas I have:

1) Broadly capitalist with a generous welfare state

2) Generous subsidies for parents

3) Support for the working class getting established. E.g. Expanding the EITC.

Thoughts?

[Potus]

Are we talking about developing a general, un-circumstantial social conservative economic platform or what economic fights social conservatives should have in modern political context?

[RI]

Here are some rough ideas I have:

1) Broadly capitalist with a generous welfare state

2) Generous subsidies for parents

3) Support for the working class getting established. E.g. Expanding the EITC.

I'm biased, but those would be a great start. I'd also add:

4) Universal paid maternity/paternity leave
5) Heavy sin taxes on alcohol/tobacco/etc.
6) Increased tax incentives for charitable/religious giving
7) Elimination of the "marriage penalty"
8) Look into something like Utah's Housing First program
9) Some sort of private education subsidy program or something. Not sure exactly.

[RINO Tom]

Are you referring to some type of "socially conservative populist" or something?  Because there's nothing contradictory at all about being a social conservative and believing in Republican economic policy ... it describes a whole lot of wealthy, educated voters all across the South.

[RI]

Are you referring to some type of "socially conservative populist" or something?  Because there's nothing contradictory at all about being a social conservative and believing in Republican economic policy ... it describes a whole lot of wealthy, educated voters all across the South.

I'm assuming we're taking a "zero-based" approach to the platform, divorcing social conservatism from all existing party-based economic policy and then rebuilding it.

[DC Al Fine]

Are you referring to some type of "socially conservative populist" or something?  Because there's nothing contradictory at all about being a social conservative and believing in Republican economic policy ... it describes a whole lot of wealthy, educated voters all across the South.

You're certainly welcome to make that argument RINO Tom, but I'd suggest that current GOP economic policy does not do a good job of encouraging marriage and stable family formation, especially for the lower middle class and down.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I suppose more support for families where only one partner works? Presumably the male, if you want to be truly soccon.

How about Distributism, if you want something radical?

[Classic Conservative]

I am a social conservative but I could never in a thousand years get behind that because, I am a capitalist and economic libertarian more than a devout Social Credit/Huckabee Social Conservative

[Mr. Reactionary]

Socially conservative policies should encourage people to live as families.

- Treat married families on welfare/loan programs equal to or more favorable than single families. For example, Charles Murray in Losing Ground looked at the perverse incentives against marriage in welfare programs. In terms of benefit levels and program coverage, it makes much more economic sense in the short-term for a poor pregnant woman to remain single; the opposite was true prior to the Great Society.

- Increase Survivor's Benefits for spouses in Social Security. Rewards families who remain together until death instead of divorcing.

- Increase refundable child tax credit to $2,000 per child.

- Encourage public housing which can accommodate larger/extended families to encourage family support networks.

- Compensated Maternity/ Paternity Leave for all businesses employing 50 or more people in interstate commerce.

- Exempt child support payments from the definition of taxable income.

- Modest health criteria for food stamps eligible foods, such as limits on sugary drinks, caffeine, and candy.

- Increase in funding for WIC, including outreach to both Crisis Planning Centers and Planned Parenthood, so that pregnant women can be better informed of assistance available to mothers.

- Any of the policies designed to encourage school choice, such as vouchers, general tax credits, or funding for non-religious private school programs like busing, math books, and SAT prep.

- Increase taxes on alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, wagers, brothels, mixed-fiber shirts, or whatever immoral things your religious sect believes.

[RFayette]

A few thoughts (largely agree with Blackraisin here):
-Increase per-child tax credit substantially
-Eliminate marriage penalty in tax code
-Probably the most controversial one:  substantial additional tax credit for married couples with children under age 7 with one spouse staying at home and another potential one for parents who choose to homeschool their kids
-Strong increase in earned income tax credit for lower earners (staggered appropriately to prevent "negative income" at point when salary increase is canceled out with lower benefits) but this increase only applies to married couples
-Make divorce much harder (not an economic platform, but would obviously have significant economic effects)

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Generous welfare benefits for single parents are tricky since there is a tendency to make fathers relatively economically superfluous, especially with the effect of marriage on eligibility for means-tested programs. Replacing these means-tested programs with some sort of universal basic income could be an improvement in this respect if it is designed carefully, though it doesn't remove the problem altogether. One would hope then the financial security benefits to the middle class from such a program would be more cohesive than any unraveling caused by giving one person more financial autonomy from their partner. 

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's pretty difficult to square the welfare state with the objective of promoting "family values" in the traditional sense. In truth, the welfare state promotes alternative family structures and reduces the strength of traditional family structures by granting women more autonomy. One has to look at families as an economic arrangement; they have been throughout human history and they remain economic arrangements. As a result, social programs will necessarily change the shape/structure of households/families. After all, families were the original social safety net and the creation of the social safety nets/insurance schemes of the 20th Century almost certainly played a role in dramatically altering families.

This is my attempt to stay that there's no "going back" to the idealized family/household model of the 1950s. So long as women remain in the labor force and birth control is easily accessible, divorce rates and single motherhood/fragmented families will be a relatively normal fact of life. I think increased welfare provisions could ameliorate the negative social impacts of these facts but it remains to be seen how a subsidy would promote "nuclear" families: in all likelihood, the idea of long-term marriages being a widespread/desirable phenomenon was not the result of preferences but rather the result of constraints.

Basically, I don't think that the welfare state and "social conservatism", as it is commonly understood, are all that compatible. I suppose that there could be incentives built into the system that promote "marriage" but one has to ask whether or not this would be a good thing. It could just as easily promote bad marriages that lead to domestic abuse as it could lead to stable families. Social conservatism really needs to evolve beyond the nuclear family and accept the fact that other family structures are workable/desirable and worth defending.

Edit: by the way, I'm not attempting to bash/condemn social conservatives here. If more conservatives thought long and hard about this topic, they'd almost certainly come to the conclusion that markets erode traditional familial structures as much as left-wing social policy. I'd be willing to support some of these proposals because I see the former by-product of the market as being even more despicable/disgusting as attempts to foster traditional families.

[tschandler]

You really can't do it without coming across as a socially regressive women belong in the home vibe. 

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's pretty difficult to square the welfare state with the objective of promoting "family values" in the traditional sense. In truth, the welfare state promotes alternative family structures and reduces the strength of traditional family structures by granting women more autonomy. One has to look at families as an economic arrangement; they have been throughout human history and they remain economic arrangements. As a result, social programs will necessarily change the shape/structure of households/families. After all, families were the original social safety net and the creation of the social safety nets/insurance schemes of the 20th Century almost certainly played a role in dramatically altering families.

I think the way we square that circle is to tweak the incentives in the welfare system to strongly encourage 2-parent households and marriage in order to retain or get additional benefits.  I agree that both markets and the welfare system can have disruptive effects on the nuclear family, so the socon position should be to direct government action toward the preservation of that institution.

That sounds easy but, in practice, it could produce a lot of perverse effects. I suppose, what I'm trying to say, is that there isn't an easy way to utilize public policy to produce particular cultural or social outcomes. I'm sure that the marriage rate would increase if various welfare benefits were attached to marriage but would those marriages be "de jure" and not "de facto"? Would those marriages be healthy or expressions of your notion of "family values"? I don't think so!

Keep in mind that I'm actually sympathetic to "social conservatism" insofar as a few Christians on this forum, who are genuinely concerned about families and do not simply use the term "family values" to refer to gay marriage or abortion, use the term. In a certain sense, I share your concerns but from a different angle that treats "families" as a very broad term that encompasses any sort of tight-knit, intimate, long-term social group. Unfortunately, the same problems are present as far as that concerned: how can social policy build a stronger sense of community or stronger/long-lasting social networks? I'm not sure but it's a difficult challenge.

Policies that I think that "social conservatives" ought to consider and policies that I support:
-paid daycare/tax credits for parents to finance daycare(if you think that mothers should be in the labor market, that is)
-universal, free preschool
-some sort of access to a universal trust that's given to every parent per child; there could be a sovereign wealth fund in the vein of norway and proceeds from this could finance the trust. at "majority" age, the child would receive a second "trust" but the parents would receive the first.
-increased funding of public recreational facilities, which would give families a better means to give their children an enjoyable/healthy upbringing.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Very generous parental leave

Very generous day care subsidies

Very generous adoption subsidies

Very generous subsidies for women with an unwanted pregnancy willing to give the child up for adoption, to cover the cost of pre- and post-natal care

Basically, if you want fewer abortions and more families together, you have to attack those problems where they lie. I don't have numbers, but I'd have to imagine that many women would consider carrying a pregnancy to term to give up a child for adoption if their health care costs for doing so weren't going to be financially ruinous. Similarly, more people would consider adoption if it didn't entail spending tens of thousands of dollars on top of just the regular costs of raising a child.

On the marriage front, we all know that financial woes can have significant impacts on relationships. Guaranteeing generous parental leave for the birth (or illness) of a child helps families prioritize each other over work. Similarly, granting generous subsidies for day care helps families not have to stretch themselves thin to the brink of disaster. Many marriages that might otherwise succeed fail because of the strain put on them by financial concerns.

[Foucaulf]

Hoping the perspective in this thread isn't just "let's subsidise these people instead of those people."

Here's five policies to think over. What about free trade, corporate compensation, businesses shutting down on religious holidays, kidney/surrogacy markets and price controls?

[Mr. Reactionary]

This crazy guy from Texas wants to amend the Constitution to impose a Torah inspired mandatory rest cycle, during which debts are cancelled and family time and stuff.

http://constitutionalism.blogspot.com/2012_09_09_archive.html

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Are you referring to some type of "socially conservative populist" or something?  Because there's nothing contradictory at all about being a social conservative and believing in Republican economic policy ... it describes a whole lot of wealthy, educated voters all across the South.

Philosophically, it's more than possible to be both fiscally conservative/economically liberal* and socially conservative. In practice, though, you can end up with what social conservatives consider undesirable outcomes. From a free market perspective, women entering the workforce doesn't pose anything close to a problem. From a sociological perspective, it may have contributed to growth in divorce rates, decline in child production, increase in child obesity, disappearance of traditional family structure, etc. Free trade makes sense as an economic liberal. Nevertheless, loss of manufacturing could be seen as one of the reason for the decline of cities, ruining of the urban economic situation, reliance instead on government handouts, growth in urban crime rates, collapse of poorer families, and so on. An economy where you're economically insecure due to demands of an employer might cause a female employee to delay childbirth. Lack of a social safety net for single mothers might result in more abortions, and the same goes for poor married couples. The shortest way of trying to say all of this is that a citizenry that is atomized, individualistic, "Randian", and commercialistic is going to forget some previously very important social institutions, the Church among them.

*Sorry for the terminology mix-up, it's just hard to think of what the heck "economically conservative" means, as a "traditional" economic setup is far removed from the type of economy modern "conservative" politicians shoot for.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

What I think is most important here is that an electorate that finds employment hard to attain and that is put in the position of viewing itself as marginalized and excluded is going to place greater political pressure on the public sector to provide for them and feed into socialist organisms. Conservatives at the turn of the century realized this, to an extent, producing the populist political style of Theodore Roosevelt. Marx himself seems to have come to the same conclusion in that, in a society that reduced every individual to mere economic ability (as opposed to family, social, and religious structures that had previously held greater importance), "class consciousness" (and I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek here) would form; ie once we were reduced to economic units, those economic units not receiving their "fair share" would band together; non-economic social institutions are thus an important part of maintaining the "present structure" whatever that might be, and that's something that latter 20th Century conservatism completely overlooked.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Conservatism isn't all that compatible with unfettered markets, anyone who is intellectually serious ought to understand this fact. There's a stark gulf between the demands of "tradition" or "cultural continuity" and market outcomes; there's a contradiction between a system that simply allocates resources according to the preferences of consumers and the demands/objectives of various strands of conservatism, whether theological or simply reactionary. The logic of the market will tell you that liberalized labor flows and liberalized capital flows are highly desirable but this is the cause of "McDonaldization" and has certainly resulted in rapid/dramatic cultural change. As a result, I'm going beyond Cathcon here: I don't think it's possible to be a genuine conservative and a proponent of, say, the Republican Party's pablum on economics.

Of course, I don't think that Republicans are actually conservative or that America is a conservative nation. America is arguably the embodiment of "liberalism". It's a country that can't be described as a nation-state, founded upon religious toleration and widely-distributed property ownership; a country where most people hail from somewhere else relatively recently. It's not exactly a breeding ground for conservative thought of the Burkean sort.

[DC Al Fine]

Hoping the perspective in this thread isn't just "let's subsidise these people instead of those people."

Here's five policies to think over. What about free trade, corporate compensation, businesses shutting down on religious holidays, kidney/surrogacy markets and price controls?

Interesting issues. Here is my take a few of them:

Free Trade: I take Hazlitt's position that while free trade is ultimately better in the long run, it can wreak havoc with individual workers in the short term, and those workers deserve compensation for their displacement. This would improve generous education subsidies for younger workers, and early retirement packages for the older workers. Admittedly there is a bit of a bit of an awkward spot for people who are too young to pension off cheaply, and too old for retraining to have a positive economic impact.

Price Controls: Generally a bad idea that often harms the people they are intended to help and mainly served to protect incumbents. (e.g. Rent control) A better solution as Torie and I have discussed, is that if the poor are unable to afford X, then we should give them the buying power to afford X. So in the case of high rents, the solution is not rent control, but rather vouchers, subsidies and more public housing.

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Price Controls: Generally a bad idea that often harms the people they are intended to help and mainly served to protect incumbents. (e.g. Rent control) A better solution as Torie and I have discussed, is that if the poor are unable to afford X, then we should give them the buying power to afford X. So in the case of high rents, the solution is not rent control, but rather vouchers, subsidies and more public housing.

I guess this is generally something easy to agree on, but I'm curious what exactly is X, and since it's the point of the thread, I assume there are pretty generous adjustments based on family size without giving too much inventive.

[DC Al Fine]

Price Controls: Generally a bad idea that often harms the people they are intended to help and mainly served to protect incumbents. (e.g. Rent control) A better solution as Torie and I have discussed, is that if the poor are unable to afford X, then we should give them the buying power to afford X. So in the case of high rents, the solution is not rent control, but rather vouchers, subsidies and more public housing.

I guess this is generally something easy to agree on, but I'm curious what exactly is X, and since it's the point of the thread, I assume there are pretty generous adjustments based on family size without giving too much inventive.

Food, clothing, shelter, transportation(probably public), healthcare , education, with a bit of spending money leftover. Generally a modest, but comfortable standard of living. Personally, I think the best way to go about this would be minimum income programs for the first few things, while maintaining separate programs for healthcare and education since the costs can vary so wildly.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Interesting thread. I would add to this discussion that the particular strain of modern social conservatism that celebrates the capitalist market (as opposed to merely accepting it as reality while cautioning against social innovation) is mostly a product of the Cold War. Note how strongly American social conservatives emphasize individual morality, personal responsibility, and the work ethic - to a degree that is uncommon among social conservatives in most other parts of the world.

[Foucaulf]

I didn't notice DC Al Fine replied to my post, so I should reply now with a fuller explanation.

I shouldn't say that the discussion is bad for focusing on subsidies and transfers, since that kind of thinking is the base of economic thinking on government interventions. The primary question, it seems to be, is nevertheless if social conservatism implies the fate of some institutions and customs should not be determined by market competition.

What DFB or Cathcon have mentioned is just an extreme case of that question.

Applied to DAF's answers to my suggestions, he isn't veering too off script. The orthodox answer to the rent control question is his response. I'd be interested in seeing a SoCon argument for building affordable housing, maybe to minimize the dispersion of people out of the city that would result from a voucher scheme.

The question of whether legislation should ban stores from observing religious holidays is bait for the primary question. A much less trivial question is financial regulation. Should SoCons encourage or clamp down on equity and options markets, and if the markets are too pervasive should government pension plans divest from risky finance, even at the cost of lower returns?

I don't know if there is some SoCon argument against high corporate compensation that isn't just a standard argument against inequality. Maybe reforms to corporate governance will lead to more fruitful discussion.

One last thought, which is specific and speculative. If free trade induces a shift in pornography production out of the country, should the state compensate those with jobs displaced and should it sanction the new country of production?