We have to have enough families in which there is man as husband, woman as wife, with as many kids as they're open to having in order to have a society. That isn't important just because of having sufficient number of taxpayers. It's important because it's what God has called almost all of us to do. There ought not be these big Fortune 50 companies buying up all of the single family homes. Yeah. It ought to be illegal. That's an underreported story. It is very underreported, but we're going to change that in 2026 at Heritage. It's disgusting. Welcome back to The Kevin Roberts Show. I'm Larry O'Connor. Now, last week in our episode, we talked about Heritage's new Four Cornerstone Initiative, focusing on the most important building blocks to re-found America, celebrating our 250th anniversary. This week, it's time for the deep dive into the first of those cornerstones, the family. That's right, family first. You hear it all the time that the building block of a civilization is the family, and it's most apparent when the family starts to break down. That's why we're going to talk about all of the policy ideas in Heritage's landmark family policy paper. And we've got Kevin Roberts to help us break it down. Mr. Roberts, always good to see you. Thanks for having me back. So why do conservatives need a family policy? Because the family has become broken. And that's happened for a lot of reasons. I think social, cultural, perhaps religious, certainly economic. And then I think government along the way, especially starting in the 1960s at the federal level, aggravated those trends, probably accelerated those trends. And so as we're sitting here in the middle part of the 2020s, one quarter of the way into the 21st century, we realize all of the policy successes that the political right has had recently, especially because of Trump, but also some great state governors. All of those are almost inconsequential if we don't figure out as conservatives the right policy for the family. Now, that doesn't mean that government can pick up a magic wand and wave it and the marriage rates suddenly are increasing and birth rates are increasing. But it also doesn't mean that there isn't a role for government to play, even if it is just to completely get out of it. We've got some ideas in this paper that's come out. Yeah, let's talk about the get out of the park. Because he is my instinct, my reflex as a conservative. When I hear anyone in Washington, D.C. talk about a family policy, my instinct is stay out of my family. Sure. You have no business in my family. Leave me alone. Culturally, economically, that's my business. And that's fair. In fact, that's my inclination, too. It's an inclination to everyone here at Heritage. And so a couple of steps. The first is then we say, well, how are we going to reverse the decline in the marriage rate and the decline in the birth rate as a society so that we can, and not to be dramatic here, so that we can even have a society? How can we do that in a way that allows the United States to be an economic powerhouse and not rely on immigrant labor? How can we do that in a way that actually allows a sufficient number of men and women who want to serve in the military to do so? These are just a couple of examples. And then we said, well, let's, moving to the second step, let's research what the government has done to actually harm family formation. I mean, there's a dozen disincentives in federal policy, and there have been for 45 or 50 years against family formation. And it isn't that we're making the claim that that's the entire reason for this. People make individual choices. This is still largely a free society. We want it to be that way. But by virtue of opening that question, and keep in mind what we do at Heritage is we ask questions. Sure. Sometimes come up with answers. We took a third step, and it's this. And we ask the question, what if there's something government can do to incentivize an increase in marriage rates, maybe in birth rates? There have been a handful of other countries that have done this around the world with mixed success, assuredly, but it's not wholly negative. I mean, it is mixed in a couple of cases. And so what we're saying is if you then, moving on to the fourth step, which is the cost-benefit analysis, if you look at the cost of just staying on this trajectory because of the first inclination that you and I have, which is just stay out of my business, let me do what I'm going to do. Right. As a society, we've answered that question and said we don't even have a replacement birth rate. And so how do we fix that? Maybe automation can help with that. But if we were to spend a little bit of money, especially with tax incentives, where as conservatives, we've largely made peace with most of those, you know, not all of those. And if we would be willing for a half decade to see if some of those on sort of a pilot basis would work, is that worth the experiment? We've said at Heritage, yes, because we've tried everything else and it isn't working. Well, and the fact is, even if our inclination is to, you know, just stay hands off or ask the government to stay out, when the left has power, they quickly do institute policies that do end up putting us where we are right now, which, as you said, the family concept kind of is broken. So, if anything, policies to reverse those policies and get us back on track. No, it's true. And we have to remember the maxim that the law is a teacher. It isn't just the law. It isn't just a set of guidelines we have to adhere to in a very positive way. can be a teacher. And so if the law, evidenced by getting rid of disincentives and safety net programs to marriage, but then maybe having a couple of tax incentives, as we've written about in this family policy paper, toward marriage, to encourage marriage, the law can, beyond just the material incentive for marriage in that policy, the law can actually encourage people maybe to get married sooner. That's one of the issues that we're dealing with as a society, is this much delayed marriage date and obviously fewer people doing it. All right. People on the left are going to be talking back to their screen or maybe they're putting it in the comment section right now. I hope so. I know they are. They're trying to create a conversation after all. They're saying you conservatives, you want people to get married young. You want them to have tons of babies, but you'd never do anything to actually support the families. You want all these babies out there, but you're doing nothing to help them, to educate them, to help feed them or anything like that. All right. What's your reply in the comment section to that? Boy, where do I start? Well, Well, first of all, we want to help families by getting rid of all of the anti-family policy in federal and state work. And I would like to think that there would be some members of the political left who would be willing to join us in that. But the second is on education, it's conservatives who have saved public education in this country. It's conservatives who have been exclusively the advocates for the greatest education reform that puts choice back in the hands of parents and students so that we don't have zip code discrimination against poor kids, that they have to stick to this awful public school that wouldn't even be appropriate for a third world country and instead could go to a very fine school. I can go on and on. But the point is that I would end with a note of encouragement even to the radical left. And that is, how about we realize we're not going to have a society if we don't at least have this conversation? What we aren't saying at Heritage is we have all of the answers. And so if there are some solutions from other people on the right or in the center or even on the political left about how we arrest this decline in family formation, then let's have that conversation. The problem is some people on the left, not all of them, don't even want to have that conversation because they can easily see immigration, whether legal or illegal, being the answer. And we know that's a real problem for the future of American society. All right. Let's give our libertarian critics a moment. Fair. Especially fair on this issue. What if they hearing this and they saying OK sounds to me like you proposing some sort of Western European welfare system dressed up in conservative language tax incentives subsidies for families How is that any different than a welfare Look it a fair question And it one that over the three years that we spent working on this first family policy paper we wanted to deal with and we wanted to steel man that argument because that's our inclination too. I mean, there's, I don't think there's any organization in Washington, D.C. that has fought against the excesses of the American welfare state more than we have. But unlike our best intentioned libertarian friends who would get rid of it entirely, And actually, don't begrudge them that. There's a valid argument to be made there. We as a conservative institution for 50 years have talked about how you reform safety net programs so that it can benefit the people who really need it. If they're permanently disabled, then that's a permanent program. I don't think anyone has a problem with that. Probably not even libertarians. I didn't even mean that as a joke. But maybe someone is temporarily unemployed or they temporarily have an issue. Even as conservatives, we would say for on a temporary basis, if they're looking for work, let it be a real safety net program so they get back on their feet. We're saying if you're doing that and you actually want to sustain the ability of the government to fund itself and not rely on immigrant labor or really high taxation rates for a smaller population, why not experiment with some incentives to good behavior? We are admittedly more comfortable with that than our libertarian friends would be. But even we at Heritage, a little more comfortable with that, would want to make sure that it's done on sort of a pilot basis, that there's some really good accountability to see if it's actually working. And not to have the hubris to say we're just going to do this forever, but let's actually try to tweak it and modify it and encourage states to sort of be in their own legislatures in competition with one another. to see if maybe, maybe in the next quarter century, we can begin to arrest this decline in marriage rates by some innovative policies. So some states will be the big baby boom states and other states will be the beginning. You want to have babies? Go move to that state. It won't be around much longer. I see no problem with that as a conservative, although there would be a limit on how much money we want to spend. Sure. So that's a fair argument from our libertarian friends. All right. Now, you're talking about demographics. You're talking about, you know, the numbers game and all of the sort of societal danger signs if you start to see the family erode and people not having babies. What about the moral case for family and focusing policy toward family? I think that there's a moral aspect of this, isn't there? That's the most important and moral in the pluralistic American sense, which is basically the Judeo-Christian tradition that emphasizes natural law. we have to have enough families in which there is man as husband, woman as wife, with as many kids as they're open to having in order to have a society that isn't important just because of having sufficient number of taxpayers. It's important because it's what God has called almost all of us to do, to actually live in harmony, for the most part, with someone else. and all of Western civilization and most other civilizations is based on this, it's particularly relevant now because we've seen the deterioration of other institutions beyond the family that are sort of our moral protectors. The church writ large, you know, whatever church comes into your mind when I say the word church, it's been imperfect in being an advocate for this, maybe because the government has intruded, the government itself, the military, schools. If you want to fix the family and you want to make the moral case for the family, it's actually the beginning of making the moral case for the very existence of civilization, of civil society. So our point in Heritage is let's be philosophically consistent and start with the family to begin with. So let's take that thread on the moral aspect and the Judeo-Christian focus on family, and let's go back in history for a moment. When America was founded, it was founded by Christians who were looking for a safe harbor for the most part at the beginning. And they brought that Protestant work ethic with them. And in America, suddenly they got injected with steroids in a way. The work ethic became so important here in America. The primary focus was still to raise your family, but you worked so you could support your family. Something changed. Something happened where now you don't even work anymore. You have a career, and that career has become your identity. And it's sort of flipped right now. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I'm saying? Is that, first of all, historically, how did that happen or when did it happen? Is it a problem? And is that part of the sort of focus that needs to be re-engineered so that work is not first, family is first, work is there so that you can have a family? You know what I mean? Oh, I completely track with you. And back in my graduate school days before I locked into what I ended up focusing on, which was the history of slavery, really the history of slave families. I did a lot of study of demography and family formation from early America all the way through the modern. And what motivated me to do that, inspired me really, was the Moynihan Report. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, serving the LBJ administration, wrote a report on the black family. We're now at Heritage sort of revitalizing that. My colleague Delano Squires, I think, is the leading scholar on this. I wonder how Senator Moynihan would feel about Heritage revitalizing his report. I mentioned to, unfortunately now, late friend Dr. Ed Fulner. I said, man, if Moynihan were around, I'd love to have him at Heritage. And his response a couple years ago was, I think he'd love to be at Heritage too. Who probably wouldn't agree on everything. But what I'd love about Moynihan, just to complete that side note before coming back to you. I sidetracked you, but it's fascinating. Our audience probably has figured that out, too. He was intellectually honest. And that was sort of the thrust of the report. But all of that to say, there are probably eight or nine or 10 really big factors that converge, especially after World War II, to create the situation you described. Some of those factors are good, like being able to be geographically mobile, whether you're a man or a woman married or not. These are things we celebrate as a free society. But the one thing that really aggravated all of them, even if they were good factors, that made them challenging and created the situation where economic materialism came before the dignity of work and therefore family was the emphasis on material well-being. And sometimes critics, both on the left and the right of this, I think about Neil Postman in the 1980s very famously, talking about amusing ourselves to death, they make you think as if there's something wrong with the free market or wanting to make a lot of money. That's not the claim that we're making at Heritage. It's just to say, keep all of the possible goods in life in the proper order. And so it's perfectly fine to want to go make a lot of money. It's perfectly fine if you as a couple want to have two full-time incomes. The reality is a plurality, if not a small majority of working women would like to work fewer hours to do what? To spend time on family. Spend time on the family. And obviously, at Heritage, we believe fully in their choice to do so. The purpose of talking about the policy isn't to tell them what to do, but that if they want to make that choice, to be able to provide a small incentive in federal policy to do what? So that maybe the dignity of work, the importance of families zooms ahead of the sheer calculus about economic materialism. In other words, our material success as a consumer society has actually aggravated some of these factors that otherwise are good. There's also certain words you hear that the left use, but conservatives use these words now too. It's become part of our vernacular. We don't think of American citizens as fathers or mothers or children. They're workers. Notice that that a Marxist word to call them workers or producers or even a company has a human resource department because a human being is really just a resource That part of the perspective problem here isn it when you focus on families and what priorities should be No it true And I would add to that list the phrase human capital I know people who use that in other phrases. I hate it, though. It just makes no sense. It reduces our humanity down to like, okay, how do we look on your balance sheet? We're human persons. We can be very productive, especially in the American context over most of our history. But we have emotions. We have desires. We have longings. And a lot of those, thankfully, especially in the United States, have to do with excellence in work. And for most of our history, including in the era of the Protestant work ethic, there was front and center the dignity of work there. But if we're going to have family as the key cornerstone, as we're arguing in this family policy paper, we have to get all of this rightly ordered and understand that before we even think about going to work, before we even think about what we're going to call ourselves and what work or what HR is going to call us, that we are human persons who exist in a community. And that community is healthiest when it is composed of many healthy families. All right. And finally, with regard to history and our founders and their focus on families, if they believe the families were, I think the phrase was first school of virtue. I remember hearing that bounced around. If that's what the founders viewed our families to be, then how should conservatives or Americans today sort of take that language and focus it into policies that we're living with? We should maybe even use that phrase, although I guess it's slightly outdated. But in a recent book that I wrote, I reprised Ronald Reagan's exhortation that he came back to often as president of the United States, and that was to spend time around the family dinner table. And so you ask often in our conversations, Larry, about things I'm gleaning from the trips I make around the country. And the most common advice that I give people other than keep the faith, be encouraged, you know, treat each other well and civilly is spend time with family and or friends. If you're not yet married and don't yet have a nuclear family of your own that you've started around the dinner table. And I mean that literally. And so for our younger colleagues here at Heritage, a lot of whom are single, I encourage them go out and have dinner with your friends, with obviously with your extended family. That's the kind of way that we honor what the founders meant by the first school of virtue. Because what they meant by that was that the family becomes the first institution that transmits values from one generation to the next. I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, I think vividly, very fondly about family dinner, especially around my grandparents' table. Very serenely, sort of was very natural. You learn values. You learn how you treat other people, even when there's a difference of opinion on the two things you're not supposed to talk about at the dinner table, politics and religion. We talked about both, as you might imagine. But the point is we need more of that if we want our politics, which is downstream from all of that, to improve. I was the youngest of four boys, Dr. Roberts. So the only thing I learned at the dinner table was eat faster, you won't get seconds because my brother's speed means. It's a very important rule. It is. Yes. You've said, obviously, you put family first in the four cornerstones, rebuilding the American family, I've heard you say, is sort of the most important thing you do here at Heritage if you're going to accomplish anything. When did that conviction crystallize with you? I guess about 10 years ago when I made the move in terms of career transition from higher ed to public policy. And I mean, I will fight for lower taxes and smaller government and right sized foreign policy and military forever. You know, all conservative values. But I realized if we don't get the family issue right as individuals, but also as Americans writ large for civil society, then our work on all of those issues almost is immaterial. I'm not saying to give up and all of that. But the reason that I think I had that light bulb moment is because there had been so many consecutive years of declining marriage rates and declining birth rates. And it was about that time, 10 or 15 years ago, that the American birth rate went below the replacement rate. And I started getting very worried about it. All right. So there's going to be some Zoomers and maybe some younger millennials either who are watching this, listening to this. And they're saying, OK, boomer, fine. Done with your lecture, which, by the way, is inaccurate. We're Generation X. Thank you very much. Yes. But they recognize the reality that financially starting a family right now is, frankly, impossible the way they see it. right now. It's unrealistic. So how do you acknowledge that without sort of lowering expectations and lowering demands or hopes that we have for this younger generation to start their families, acknowledge the reality of that, and then turn the policies out that will alleviate that stress they're feeling? I acknowledge it fully, and I limit that with them, and it's something that has changed remarkably over the last 40 or 50 years. The second is I would encourage these friends in younger generations to realize there are a lot of factors that have gone into that. And so, yes, we will at Heritage be advocating for a couple of new ideas that we think will incentivize marriage, but it's not as if we think those are the answers. Other answers that are necessary for the full solution are making sure that what the government has done to make it difficult to build, federal level, state level, local level, goes away. I know Zoomers and younger millennials say, oh, Robert, you're talking about deregulation. We're tired of hearing about that. It's real. It's a super real problem. And my colleagues have quantified the effect of that. Dude, it's been almost a year since the fires in California and the government's, I think, allowed permits for one new house to be built, maybe two. I mean, that's the problem. Yeah, it's awful. The second thing is there ought not be these big Fortune 50 companies buying up all of the single family homes. It ought to be illegal. That's an underreported story. It is very underreported, But we're going to change that in 2026 at Heritage. It's disgusting. And the third thing is, and we're beginning to fix this, the administration has begun fixing this, accounting for the fact that we want all human persons, even illegal aliens, to have nice lives. I would like for them to have nice lives in their home countries. Respectfully, there has been an overwhelming demand on a shrinking supply of homes. Why is there a shrinking supply? Because of the aforementioned problems. We have to address all of those problems as they relate to housing while also attacking the other big cost drivers for Zoomers and young millennials, the cost of higher education, the cost of health care. And once they get married and if they have one child, the cost of child care, which I hear from my colleagues and younger friends on Capitol Hill, is astronomical. Yeah. And I've heard Vice President Vance address the immigration issue with housing. And it's, again, another underreported story that people don't put those pieces together. All right. So we've talked about the history. We've talked about the priorities. We've talked about how we got here and what the problems are. Let's talk about the actual policy that's going to be in this Heritage Family Policy paper that I think is coming out the week this episode is coming out. So let's break it down. What are some of the key policies in this paper that you're most excited about? There are a number of things we talk about. There are a few policies we say we will continue to do some research on and probably write about down the road. But there are two. The first is we delineate all of the disincentives in federal law and federal policy toward marriage. And so this is a very friendly nod to our libertarian friends who say, if you're going to spend some of the money, would you at least get rid of these things? Yes, this is very fair. Can you give us examples? Because most people think, oh, what are you talking about? You get a marriage tax credit. You get deductions on independence. What kind of policies right now are in place that are getting in the way of people getting married? Well, there are actually some tax brackets and many tax situations where married filing jointly Cost you more. Cost you more, the penalty. And the alternative minimum tax which we come back at some point has a similar provision The ones and those are very real and my budget policy colleagues really rightly get fixated on them I spent a lot more time as a domestic policy person looking at the effect of safety net policies and was doing a lot of that work in Texas. There are at least a half dozen disincentives to marriage in the broader safety net programs of Medicaid and of food stamps. And so some of those actually could probably be addressed by executive order. But those are ones where there would have to be a corresponding state law to eliminate it. But basically, it costs you money if you report yourself as a single parent. In most cases, the report is as a single mom as opposed to being married. And so just eliminate. Yeah. And if you pair that with what's colloquially called a welfare-to-work program, which is a great success by Democrats and Republicans in the 1990s, you start getting at what we'll talk about in a subsequent episode about another cornerstone, the dignity of work. So those are examples, some examples of the disincentives. And there are similar disincentives in state laws. The second bucket is a new idea, and it's something that expands the so-called Trump accounts, which is $1,000 for children born after a certain date. We want to expand that to a $5,000 tax credit for each man and woman who gets married by the age of 30. The idea being that you've got $10,000 that helps you perhaps with a down payment, or perhaps it helps you eliminate some other debt that's standing in the way of qualifying for even a low down payment home. We're also theorizing, we'll write more about this later in 2026 and 2027, that we might be able to do a lifetime account that's sort of paired with Social Security. But you would have to be open to Social Security reform, which not everyone, even on the right, wants to talk about. What we're doing at Heritage is trying to set the table for a conversation. And just as if you come over to my house for dinner, and I'm not going to require you to try everything on there if you're not sure you're going to like it. But you're, as a courteous guest, going to sit down and say, yeah, I'm going to have a conversation with you about all this. That's what we're doing at Heritage. In this paper, you will not find every solution to this gargantuan problem. But as we looked at the center right in the United States, with all due respect to other conservative organizations, no one on the institutional level was willing to plant the flag and say, this is the existential question for us in the United States. Let's at least start the conversation, posit a couple of solutions. We're going to go fight for those solutions. And maybe we have sort of this wonderful pro-family Manhattan project in the 2020s and 2030s. Well, you're going to get some attention with that and get people talking, which is sort of what you like to do. Let's get back to housing for a minute. I've got a friend who is dating a girl, would love to take it to the next level and propose. He's still living at home because it is it's forget about building a home or buying a home and starting a family with your wife. He can't even get out and live on his own in an apartment and rent. What needs to be fixed about our housing system? You touched on a couple of them there, but I've read that there's like demand side subsidies right now set up by our government, which makes no sense. It's not that doesn't fit with supply side economics or with free market economics for that matter. No, it's a huge problem. And there is some progress being made by the Trump administration on eliminating some of those demand side subsidies, which just aggravate the problem. But there are also some supply side incentives I hear from homebuilders who want to be part of this problem, not just because of their obvious self-interest, But there are far more subsidies or more incentives on the supply side to build multifamily housing, which you might say just in terms of volume answers the problem. But that's not what the demand wants or the people composing the demand want. They want single family homes and we don't have enough of those being built. And what about the environmental regulations right now? They're a huge problem. Is it federal environmental regulations? They are initiated as federal regulations that state and local jurisdictions implement. But then there are also both independent of the federal regulations, state and local rules. And this is a problem in every large metro area in the United States, because almost every large metro area in the United States has been run by the left over the last several decades. And as the left has become more radical, especially with one of its dogmas being climate change, you've seen more of those environmental regulations at the local level, which is where a lot of the housing policy, as it were, is set, even more than at the federal level. And now let's bring up one other issue that's hurting the housing industry, or not housing industry, but people being able to afford and purchase a home. And this kind of goes to the core of Heritage's DNA, and that's government spending. all the spending of dollars that we don't have and borrowing future generations and lowering the value of the dollar, that screws with interest rates. And that right there makes it impossible for people to get their first mortgage. You know, that's right. And if the government merely over the next 10 years were to have a balanced budget, if Congress for the first time in many years would just pass a budget, you actually would see very likely improvements in the housing market. You might even see just from that downstream a slight uptick in birth and marriage rates. We want to incentivize that a little bit further. But the point is government spending is a huge problem. Just as we've recorded this episode, Larry, it's probably gone up by $20 billion. dollars. Gosh. So fundamentally, can a nation, while it's celebrating its 250th birthday, even imagine another 250, let alone maybe another 50 years, if they don't fix what's broken with the family right now? I mean, it really can deteriorate that quickly, can't it? It can. We're seeing it in Western Europe now. No, exactly. And that's the lesson from the welfare states is actually because the welfare states in Europe disincentivize marriage, it, I think, accelerated the similar trends there. We're just half a generation behind them there. We want to keep working on all of our other policy areas, but we believe that that almost will be for naught by certainly the end of this century if we don't figure out how to arrest the decline in marriage rates. Well, and by the way, as we're talking about government policies having to do with families and having babies, all you got to do is look at the evil Marxist communist Chinese and their one-child policy. I mean, that's the epitome of evil, what happened to them. And they are, may I say, screwed right now as they look at their future, right? It seems as if it's an irreversible decline. And it's certainly irreversible for the next two generations, maybe generation and a half. And that might give us some solace that as we're getting our house in order with the military, hopefully getting our house in order with the economy with institutions like K-12 schools and colleges and universities, that we also were able to get our house in order as it relates to the most important institution family so that we never have to be in a confrontation with China. Well, it's the Heritage Family Policy Paper. And what a creative name that is. Listen, they put all of the thought into what's in the paper, not the name of it. But it's available this week. In fact, we'll put a link down there in the description of this episode so you can find it yourself. Incredibly important stuff. Next week, we'll continue our exploration of the Four Cornerstones initiative here for our Jordan 50th birthday. Don't forget to leave us some comments down below, especially if you're on the left or a libertarian, because we love responding to them. Subscribe to our episodes, and we'll see you next time on The Kevin Roberts Show. We'll be right back.
