Conservatism

Expand the Child Tax Credit

Tax Parents Less. Do Not Put Them on the Dole. N.B. This follows "A Parent is Not a Vendor." If policy can pay a parent for being a parent, it can pay a person for being a person. That is the sentence the Vance draft cannot survive. A future Democratic administration will not need to love stay-at-home marriage. It will keep the payee and delete the adjectives. It will call the marriage gate discriminatory, relax the hours test, raise the income cap, and tell Congress the Child Care and Development Fund is oversubscribed, which it will be. Ro Khanna already wrote…

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A Parent is Not a Vendor

Do Not Put Parents on the CCDF Ledger A stay-at-home parent is not a vendor. A Clinton-era work pot is not a family stipend. Do the family work in the tax code. The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let some married stay-at-home parents collect money from the Child Care and Development Fund. Vice President JD Vance has made the idea a priority. The draft invents a new category called "parent-based child care." One spouse works at least thirty-five hours a week. The other stays home with the child. The family meets the income test. The check, about nine…

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Trump is Wrong on Loan Forgiveness

Trump’s Expansion of Loan Forgiveness: An Originalist and Principled Critique The Trump administration’s October 2025 decision to process $400 billion in student debt cancellation for 30 million borrowers under the Higher Education Act (HEA) represents a significant act of executive overreach. By accelerating forgiveness through adjustments to income-driven repayment (IDR) plans-reducing timelines to as little as 10 years for many-the Department of Education has revived and broadened a framework originally developed under prior administrations. This move comes despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Biden v. Nebraska, which invalidated a comparable $430 billion plan for lacking explicit congressional authorization. As an…

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The Conservative Canon

The Conservative Canon With Summaries and Influence on Civics and Policy The conservative canon presented here is a carefully curated collection of 32 seminal works that have profoundly shaped the intellectual and civic landscape of American conservatism. Spanning from the Enlightenment to the late 20th century, these texts-ranging from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to Irving Kristol’s Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea-offer a rich tapestry of philosophical, political, and cultural insights that articulate the principles of limited government, individual liberty, tradition, moral order, and free markets. Including foundational works like John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government The…

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