Vance-Backed Rule Would Pay Stay-at-Home Parents $9,000

The loudest criticism is coming from the right. "Paying people to stay home and not work is in fact paying people not to work, and we don't want that," Robby Soave wrote in The Hill. "That is a system that is begging to be taken advantage of."

Writing in the Washington Examiner, former Florida legislator Carlos L. Valdes argued the plan "would take a program intended to help parents obtain childcare while they work and redirect it toward paying some parents not to work outside the home," and warned Republicans not to "invite a socialist idea into the tent because the subsidy is directed toward a household arrangement many conservatives admire."

Manhattan Institute economist Daniel Di Martino, also in the Washington Examiner, called the proposal well-intentioned but said Congress should expand the child tax credit instead, warning the rule would create "a new class of fraud" and a lobby pushing to grow the program.

Patrick T. Brown of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center told The New York Times he is "a big proponent of more support for stay-at-home parents" but opposes this plan because it adds no funding, which "would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents — particularly single working parents — worse off."

Joel Griffith of Advancing American Freedom, the think tank founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, told The Hill: "I don't believe that we should be using the tax code to sway people's decisions one way or the other, to penalize people for having more children, or to incentivize people to have more children."

On the left, The New Republic's Liza Featherstone called the plan "reactionary trad wife nonsense" that pits working mothers against stay-at-home mothers, and a New York Times opinion column argued the point is not to help married parents but to hurt single mothers. Steve Forbes wrote in Forbes that the idea would inadvertently hurt families rather than help them.