Episode #45: Patrick Brown
Welcome to our latest edition of WonkCast: People Power Policy.
There’s a fundamental challenge in crafting public policy to support children and families.
What sounds like a shared, unifying goal sits on top of differing and even directly contradictory perspectives about the right relationship between the state and families.
Coalitional partners can align around a policy idea while still having genuinely divergent views on what support for families is, what purpose it serves, and even what family means.
Today’s guest, for example, is a conservative who has partnered with progressives on the child tax credit, but also sees its purpose less as an anti-poverty program than as a way to reduce the financial friction families face.
Patrick Brown is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and he writes the weekly newsletter Family Matters, a must-read for anyone working on child and family policy issues.
Our conversation centered around what matters and is becoming possible amid growing cross-partisan dissatisfaction with the status quo in family policy.
One big unlock it generated for me was that the familiar question of “how much should government do?” obscures a harder one; what would it take to design future family policy that gives more families more options and support, without imposing assumptions upon them about what a family should be.
