‘Project 2029’ floats free child care — or $1,000 to stay home

A thousand dollars a month to stay home with your own kid, or free daycare if you'd rather not. That's the pitch buried in this "Project 2029" document, and credit where it's due: somebody on the left finally noticed that half the country doesn't want to hand their toddler to a stranger at seven in the morning. That's progress, actually. For years the assumption baked into every Democratic child care plan was that the goal is universal daycare, full stop, and if you wanted to stay home that was your quaint personal choice to subsidize yourself.

But look at the mechanics here before anyone gets excited. This is still a plan built around a federal check and a federal program, which means a federal bureaucracy deciding who qualifies, how the credit phases out, which "utilization" counts, and which providers get blessed with public money. That's not a family getting freedom to choose. That's a family getting a menu written in Washington.

The honest version of this idea doesn't need a 2029 blueprint. Let people keep more of what they earn, expand the child tax credit without means-testing games, and get out of the way. Families have been making these calls without a government stipend attached for generations. The fact that Democrats are floating cash for stay-at-home parents at all tells you their own base is tired of being told daycare is the only respectable option. That instinct is right. The delivery mechanism, as always with these people, is where it gets complicated.