Matt Yglesias: belief

Transcript context

…But what’s your program? Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything, so you should have a plan for this. What is it? [laughs] As I said, I think both liberal and conservative people should take marriage-incentive impacts on program design more seriously. Liberals should admit that this is a real issue and that we should care about it and that you don’t need to go full Jerry Falwell to see that there’s an advantage to encouraging people to form stable partnerships. I think conservatives should take their own shit on this a little bit more seriously. If we have to spend a little bit more money to make this work, we should do it. The important building blocks of society, the important building blocks of free-market capitalism don’t hinge on the exact spending level on social welfare state programs, I guess, is what I would hope people on the right would appreciate. What else can we do? Public leadership probably matters. It’s probably good for Barack Obama to talk about being a dad, right? That was nice. I think Donald Trump is a poor role model in social and personal life, and that we should encourage elite high-profile people to talk about commitment and marriage and why it’s valuable — things like that. That’s not a program. I don’t think we can make it legally mandatory for people to discuss the benefits of being an involved parent, but I think it’s important. But there’s so many subsidies and taxes in the book. Why not have subsidies and taxes for essentially discouraging divorce and single-parent families?…

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