Working-Class American Families Are Desperate for Relief. Here's What Would Help Us | Opinion

"If we have one more kid, one of our incomes will be completely eaten up by childcare."

I can't tell you how many times I've heard this from friends and colleagues—a constant worry that twenty and thirty-somethings have these days. A recent American Compass survey revealed that 55 percent of Americans are having fewer children than they would like to—up 5 percent from 2021—and the most cited reason is affordability.

Yet we are frequently told by many in the government and the liberal media that the American economy is running on all cylinders. We're told daily that Americans who are concerned about the economy are paranoid or biased against the Biden administration. This might be a little more compelling if the survey data supported a partisan split in opinion. But it doesn't. When asked "Should the federal government provide more support for families with children?" Democrat and Republican respondents replied in the affirmative 83 percent and 69 percent respectively. For Republicans, it was a 17 point swing in just a few years.

We have a quickly increasing, bipartisan majority of citizens who feel that our government isn't doing enough to protect the interests and the agency of American families when it comes to how many kids they have. Americans are by and large in agreement that the challenges families face require action from our government to address.

What would that look like?

Unfortunately, neither party has anything compelling to offer American families, who are offered the compassionless, libertarian economic reflexes of conservatives or the tendency of progressives to advocate for solutions that ignore fiscal consequences and lack accountability between benefactor and beneficiary.

A policy that was actually tailored to the needs of working families would focus on things like industrial policy, with government creating incentives for bringing manufacturing back to America. A new industrial boom would facilitate a meaningful increase in the creation of living-wage jobs for Americans across the education level spectrum. The CHIPS Act was a productive step in this direction. In an article by The Columbus Dispatch, it was reported that the creation of Intel's new campus in Ohio would create 7,000 construction jobs and 3,000 permanent positions. The average salary was estimated at $130,000. This is a win worth celebrating for both the college educated workforce and the working class.

It's an obvious way to help parents struggling to pay for childcare: Make it obsolete with jobs that pay enough for the other parent to stay home with the kids. Imagine the relief a working-class family would feel if they could decide to have one parent stay at home because the other parent has a secure, well-paying job. Or the freedom that one emergency wouldn't leave a family broke. This cannot be a vision that is merely relegated to the memory of a once wonderful chapter in American history. Americans should look to the future with hope, as opposed to longingly looking to the past in disappointment. Strong industrial policy that encourages job creation and investment in America can help flip the script in this regard.

But government should be more direct as well. The Family Income Supplemental Credit (FISC) was crafted under the premise that working families should receive direct monthly payments per child beginning during pregnancy, with the total funds a family can receive "capped at the family's income from the prior year." This proposal creates a cash benefit for working families to help propel them onward and upward during the expense-ridden journey that is raising a family—without incentivizing joblessness. Receiving the benefit is tied to working.

While aspects of this proposal might be inconceivable in the eyes of some Republican lawmakers, it is encouraging to see that there are conservative policy makers that possess some capacity for creative economic thought. And the survey data shows that Republican citizens are the group with the fastest growing desire for our government to do more to support families. Perhaps the Republican establishment­—whose family policy is more Darwinian than socially conservative—would do well to pay attention to this reality.

As quickly as the world is changing, the circumstances American families face are evolving as well. The rapid inflation of the past few years has eviscerated the pocketbooks of our lowest earners and stretched middle America too thin. The wages of many have failed to keep pace with inflation. Interest rates have barred an entire class of people from accessing loans for homes and vehicles.

As much as Americans are told everything is okay, many are crying for relief. The question is whether we will allow the wool to be pulled over our eyes by our unproductive and detached media and lawmakers, or believe the American people.

Skyler Adleta is an electrician in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.