We're always one EPA regulation (and a couple more decades of progress) away from unlocking a path to middle class prosperity for the low-income families.

The problem is an anthropological one. If our family policy is situated in the realm of the material, if we consider these preferences in a wholly positivistic sense – then employment & income mobility are supreme, like here. But the family isn't a sandbox for market capitalism.

The family is a the first natural society. Child allowances are anti-poverty measures, but that's not all they are – not even what they are primarily! They are an attempt at correcting maybe the central externality of market capitalism, that is, the collapse of the family.

The implicit (sometimes explicit) normative claims here either ignore, or outright condemn, the notion that it is socially preferable for parents to work less (under the auspices that it closes a path to "prosperity"). Capitalism has destroyed leisure in the classical sense.

Greater material prosperity, i.e. better income mobility, isn't paired with leisure, it isn't paired with the ability to choose the lifestyle conducive to traditional family formation – certainly not for two earners around the margins and even more so single parents.

This "pro-work" brainworm contains this assumption that if only a parent or the parent trades work for time rearing their children (instead of a stranger) then that is doing a disservice to the child longterm. Where is the conservative harping on about the nuclear family now?

(That also ignores the academic research showing the social disadvantages of childcare.) But where is the conservative that holds the family unit as good in itself? If the family can't function in the sense that parents must outsource their roles, that has to be corrected.