Low-wage work is great for getting somebody from 75% of poverty to 150% but a person who's never been above 150% FPL by age 35 is extreeeeeemly unlikely to climb to like 250% or 300% by 45 or 50.

Ask ANY employer who employs lots of "marginal" minimum wage workers, i.e. people who are at the edge of work being worth it in terms of benefits, and they'll tell you the same story: employees drift in and out, and nobody expects upward mobility.

The key thing to grasp here is that *reservation wages* are a heckuva drug. And the key factor setting reservation wages for parents isn't just benefits, it's the availability and cost of childcare.

But my actual point here is that the "benefits" of the work that someone JUST on the edge of being incented into work are.... small. They're largely jobs everybody knows will be automated away within a few years anyways.

Meanwhile, "role model" effects cut both ways. The literature is pretty clear that while welfare reform boosted maternal labor force participation, it *worsened* a lot of child outcomes, especially for boys.

It turns out, the work that parents do at home is not zero-marginal-product! A lot of people who are barely-worth-hiring in market jobs are in fact extremely productive as parents, and having that parental attention is beneficial for kids.

(Here somebody is gonna chime in about "genetic confounds" but I'll note that virtually all studies with genetic controls are exclusively among middle- and high-income families; nobody thinks leaving your 3 year old unattended for 6 hours is good for child development)

That's why FUNDAMENTALLY I think the question at hand is:

Is parenting worthy work which society desires to support?

Do we think that it is important to take measures to ensure that the next generation 1) is born at all and 2) receives significant parental input?

I know a lot of people are sharing this thread as, "wow, for a conservative, Lyman is okay," so let me absolutely wreck your image of me by reframing the question for my conservative compatriots:

Do you want your church to die or not?

Speaking to my fellow dyed-in-the-wool ideological social conservatives, you have a choice: adopt pronatal policies which remove destructive obstacles to family and childbearing as this plan does, or watch the continuing collapse of the cultural norms you cherish.

I agree with my fellow conservatives who talk about things like "the dignity of work" and who worry about "cultures of dependency"

but y'all

*parenting is work*

*"dependency" on daycare is the same problem*

"The government will double your minimum wages for episodic and unreliable work so that your dependency can be outsourced to a daycare provider" is not going to somehow create a nation of can-do self-starting Horatio Algers.

So that's why, while I do not think that @swinshi 's view is bad, I do think it is 1) incorrectly weighting the benefits of the work in question and 2) not a view conservatives concerned about the decline of the family and social capital should really have any interest in at all.

Now because I know at this point some conservative readers are gonna be like, "LYMAN'S CLEARLY A COMMUNIST LYING ABOUT HIS POLITICS" I must provide at least one example of a big spending program I oppose, so, here you go. Don't subsidize daycare: https://ifstudies.org/blog/why-a-child-allowance-is-preferable-to-subsidized-child-care