The U.S. government needs to do more for American parents. (See Kristin Bateman's post on a new article by Eric Nguyen examining parents in bankruptcy.) But it's not just Europhile liberals who are saying this anymore. Although, in recent years, "family values" has implied gay rights and abortion, these connotations may be fading as conservatives (like Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and folks at the National Review) embrace the Clintonian arguments made by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in their new book, Grand New Party. (The authors discuss it with Tom Ashbrook, and fellow guest Bob Cutner, here.)

A new consensus is emerging that government should distribute wealth and opportunity more equally, in particular to help parents. As conservatives eschew Reagan's dictum that "government is the problem," (quote at 6:09), it frees Democrats politically to espouse even more ambitious and comprehensive policies. Nevertheless, I fear that taxes and special interests will impede any reform.

Douthat's and Salam's most emblematic proposal is "family friendly tax reform": they argue that the government should expand the child tax credit to $5000 per child, which, they tell Tom Ashbrook, "is just the beginning." For Douthat and Salam, tax policy should help "Sam's Club Republicans" because "investment doesn't just come from capital investment . . . [it also comes] from raising the next generation, and that's something that's very very expensive." (discussion at 13:12 of the podcast). In this way, they sound remarkably like Anne Alstott, a self-identified liberal, who proposed in 2004 that parents be given $5000 a year per child. Alstott justifies the proposal philosophically by noting that parenting imposes enormous costs on parents--Alstott focuses on lower wages and the sheer amount of unpaid work involved; in addition to these and the obvious costs such as food, clothing, college education, and transportation, Nguyen shows that parents pay a housing premium to be in a decent school district--yet parents produce necessary and important social benefits.

If the National Review is on board for $5000, progressives have an enormous opportunity to push very ambitious programs to promote equality and opportunity: funding schools federally and sufficiently, providing universal pre-school (many places, of course, don't even offer full-day Kindergarten), making college in the U.S. as affordable as, say, the University of Oxford, providing universal comprehensive health care, and providing more security in retirement.

But there are two problems: taxes and special interests. Democrats have accepted the Republican baseline that allowing tax cuts to expire constitutes a tax increase, along with the Republican notion that taxes are a "burden" that constitute deadweight loss. The Obama-Clinton debate in Philadelphia illustrates the severity of the problem: I appreciate that Obama would eliminate the cap on social security (although he'd exempt income between the current cap and $250,000), yet he proposed the Clinton-era marginal tax rates as an upper limit for income taxes (Why not, say, the Nixon-era upper limit?) and espoused preserving the capital gains preference. And he was much more "liberal" than Clinton. Nevertheless, recent flooding has tragically provided another opportunity to "sell" Keynesian infrastructure development and public investment. (Remember Katrina?)

Special interests provide no less of a hurdle. David Leonhardt illustrated this problem in a recent column analyzing the Medicare reimbursement scheme. In a no-bid process, Medicare sets the reimbursement prices for medical equipment that is well above market. The system is set to change to bidding after the success of a pilot program, yet the House blocked it (with two Democrats leading the charge), and the Senate will likely do the same. The industry mobilized and won, writes Leonhardt, showing "how a small group of constituents can potentially beat back a policy that's clearly in the public interest but has no similarly committed group of supporters." There's some reason for sanguinity--such as the heroic work being done by the California Nurses Association--but I'm not ready to declare that we've reached "America's Next Chapter."