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50 years later, the culture wars debate over the child care crisis has barely budged

Conservative counterproposals to Biden’s families plan look to promote the traditional family at a time when marriages and birthrates are at record lows.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have laid the groundwork for a national child care system, saying it would have placed the government on “the side of communal approaches to child rearing [and] against the family-centered approach.”

Fifty years later, as President Joe Biden makes subsidized child care for low- and middle-income families a major plank of his legislative agenda, the socially conservative argument against his plan sounds much the same as the one Nixon aide Pat Buchanan was making when he wrote that veto message.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., argued that Biden’s prescription would “incentivize women to rely on the federal government to organize their lives” in an interview with the Fox Business Network soon after Biden announced his plan last month. In a tweet, she compared the proposal to Soviet-style child care. Continue reading.

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