Gee: Wait, what?! I thought socialism was bad

Help me understand something. Some conservatives are cheering a Trump administration proposal, championed by JD Vance, that would let qualifying married couples receive federal child care money when one parent works and the other stays home raising the kids. Other conservatives are pushing back, calling it socialism. The proposal hasn’t been finalized.

First, raising children is work. Anyone who thinks staying home with little kids is a vacation needs to spend eight hours negotiating with a three-year-old. I get why a family would need that support. I’m writing this to try to figure out how the people celebrating this have dismissed other government assistance as “socialism.”

Has your understanding of why families need help changed, or did you become more comfortable with who would receive it? Government assistance isn’t automatically socialism, but if that’s the word you’ve used to shut down conversations about helping struggling families, I just want to understand how it doesn’t apply here.

More families would compete for the same funding; how do we decide who gets the help?

Where’s the line with this? Is it cost? Is it need? Is it whether the program works? Tell me how this decision is made, and whether it’s applied consistently.

The reported proposal would draw from an existing fund that helps working parents afford child care. This would expand eligibility without adding money, and more families would essentially be competing for the same assistance. That’s when I’d like to know: how do we decide who gets the help? The married parent staying home matters. The single mother who needs child care to keep her job matters. The couple working multiple jobs to stay afloat, yep, matters.

Those families are slightly different, but they’re still trying to raise their children and pay their bills. I’m just trying to make sure that we don’t fall into the “these are the families I approve of” agenda. A parent’s need for help doesn’t become more of a priority based on the type of household arrangement or demographic. After writing all this, I’m starting to think that just maybe we don’t have an issue with helping, but we might have one with the ones that get help.

Listen to Gee and Ursula on “The Gee and Ursula Show” weekday mornings from 9 am to 12 pm on KIRO Newsradio.

Follow @twitter.com/geescottsr