EXCLUSIVE: Pence group knocks Vance plan to pay stay-at-home parents up to $9K per child

Mike Pence’s old shop is out here warning that JD Vance’s plan to send stay-at-home parents up to $9,000 per child is a Trojan horse for more government. They’re not wrong to worry about Washington strings. We’ve all seen how “help” turns into paperwork, audits, and some agency deciding what a real family looks like. If it comes with a clipboard, it isn’t help for long.

But it’s also a little rich to pretend the current system is some pristine free-market oasis. The government already picks winners. We subsidize daycare through the tax code and programs that shove parents toward the workforce, then act shocked when families feel boxed in. Vance is at least pointing at the real problem: childcare costs are crushing, and parents are doing math at the kitchen table that doesn’t add up. Stop treating stay-at-home parents like they don’t exist.

Here’s the question Pence’s group should answer: what’s their alternative that actually lands for families next month, not in a white paper five years from now? Saying “work disincentives” is easy when you’re not the one paying $2,000 a month for childcare or watching a second paycheck vanish into commuting and daycare fees. If conservatives won’t offer a practical option, the left will. And their version always comes with bigger bureaucracy, more cultural lecturing, and less room to breathe.

We can be both pro-family and skeptical of new entitlements. That means designing any credit or subsidy so it’s simple, capped, and doesn’t require families to prove their life choices to a caseworker. No dependency traps. No federal parenting standards. But a flat “no” from the Pence world isn’t courage, it’s comfort. Conservatives should compete to help families, not compete to do nothing..