Whatever problems Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) had when announced as former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick a month ago, he is now hitting his stride and put in three masterful performances last weekend on the Sunday talk shows of ABC, CBS, and CNN. 

He cogently pinned the blame for inflation and the border crisis where it belongs, which is on the disastrous policies of the Biden-Harris administration, while effectively questioning the character of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN).

The highlight of Vance’s performance was when he made the positive case for a pro-family Trump-Vance agenda. “What President Trump and I want to do on family policy is make it easier for families to start in the first place,” Vance told CBS’s Margaret Brennan. “We want to bring down housing costs so that if you have a baby, there’s actually a place to raise that baby. We want to increase and expand the child tax credit. … We want to provide more options so that people are raising families in a thriving and happy way in this country.”

Vance successfully contrasted this pro-family set of policies with Vice President Kamala Harris’s “anti-family” ideas. “She has said things like it’s reasonable not to have children over climate change,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash. “I think that’s the exact opposite message we should be sending to our young families.”

The Democratic Party’s obsession with raising the cost of energy, as it has successfully done in Harris’s California and Walz’s Minnesota, is anti-family. More importantly, so is the version of an expanded child tax credit pushed by the Biden-Harris administration. 

“President Trump has been on the record for a long time supporting a bigger child tax credit, and I think you want it to apply to all American families,” Vance told Brennan. “I don’t think that you want this massive cutoff for lower-income families, which you have right now. You don’t want a different policy for higher-income families. You just want to have a pro-family child tax credit.”

Extending the child tax credit to all families, not just targeting low-income families as Democrats want, is important for more than fairness. It is also pro-child. The way Democrats designed their child tax credit increases existing marriage penalties in the tax code. The way Harris wants to expand the child tax credit is anti-child because it makes it more likely more children will grow up without a married father at home.

Although Democrats like Harris are loath to admit it, mountains of research conclusively prove that children do better when raised in a married household compared to when they are raised without a father in the home. This is especially true of boys. Children from married households are more likely to graduate from college, more likely to be employed, and less likely to be in jail than those raised by one parent. If making it more difficult for parents to get and stay married isn’t anti-family, what is?

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For decades, the Democratic Party’s idea of family policy was to cut low-income families a check, as if money could make up for a father’s absence. The result has been record-low marriage rates and growing income inequality. 

Vance is articulating a new direction that recognizes that if young men and women aren’t starting new families together, something is fundamentally wrong with the system as a whole. An expanded child tax credit won’t solve all our problems, but it would be a step in the right direction.