Progressive family values

One candidate has some bold ideas to help millions

Every election cycle pundits demand that politicians offer the country new ideas. Then, when a candidate does, the news media pay little attention, instead chasing scandals, real or fake. Remember the extensive coverage last month when Hillary Clinton laid out an ambitious mental health agenda? Neither do I.

Even the demand for new ideas is highly questionable, since there are plenty of good old ideas that haven’t been implemented. Most advanced countries set up some form of guaranteed health coverage decades or generations ago.

Does this mean we should dismiss Obamacare, since it’s just implementing a tired old agenda? The 20 million Americans who gained health coverage would beg to differ.

Still, there interesting new ideas coming from one of the campaigns, and they tell us a lot about how Ms. Clinton would govern.

Wait — aren’t Republicans also offering new ideas? Well, I guess proposing to round up and deport 11 million people counts as a new idea. And Republicans in Congress have moved beyond proposing tax cuts that deliver most of their benefits to the wealthy. Now they’re proposing tax cuts that deliver virtually of their benefits to the 1 percent.

Much of Ms. Clinton’s policy agenda could be characterized as a third Obama term, building on the centerleft policies of the past eight years. That would hardly be a trivial matter. For example, independent estimates suggest that her proposed enhancements to the Affordable Care Act would extend health coverage to about 10 million more people, whereas Donald Trump’s proposed repeal of the act would cause around 20 million people to lose coverage.

Ms. Clinton also is pushing a distinctive agenda centered around support for working parents. This isn’t completely new, but the scale is off the charts compared with anything that has gone before. And this tells us a lot about her priorities.

One piece of that agenda involves 12 weeks of paid family leave to care for new children, help sick relatives or recover from illness or injury. And in case you were wondering, Mr. Trump, who has offered his own threadbare version of a maternalleave plan, was pants-on-fire lying when he claimed that his opponent has no plan. Are you surprised?

Even more striking is a piece that would help families with young children in various ways, such as through universal preschool and public outlays to hold down the cost of child care.

Everything we know about Ms. Clinton’s longterm interests and choices of advisers suggests that family-centered issues are close to her heart. The choice of Heather Boushey, a leading expert on worklife balance, as chief economist for the Clinton transition team says a lot about Ms. Clinton’s priorities.

This looks to me like an attempt to focus on the problems of the real America — not the white, rural “real America” of right-wing fantasies, but the real, real America in which most of our fellow citizens live. And that America is one in which working parents are the norm, in which stay-at-home mothers are a distinct minority, and in which the problem of how to take care of children while making ends meet is central to many people’s lives.

The numbers are striking: 64 percent of women with children under the age of 6 are in the paid labor force, up from 39 percent in 1975. Most of these working mothers are surely doing so out of economic necessity, and we as a society need to reconcile this reality with the need to raise our children well.

A free-market purist might question why we need government policies to help deal with this new reality. But we are, after all, talking about the fate of children, who are to some extent a common responsibility. And child-care economics is in some ways like health economics: We’re dealing with people, not things, and we can’t trust unregulated markets to deliver a decent outcome.

So anyone who complains that there aren’t big new ideas in this campaign isn’t paying attention. One candidate has ideas that could make big improvements in the lives of millions of American families.