Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Whom Should Government Serve? Kids Vs. Grandparents

Policies like taxes, criminal sentencing and entitlements can support or harm families. We can’t afford to ignore that.

June 28, 2018 at 3:00 PM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

One of these people can vote. Which do you think will get more government spending?
Photographer: Yusuke Murata/Taxi, via Getty Images

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How does the government balance the interests of parents and children? How should it?

I argued in a column last month that the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from parents at the U.S. southern border is cruel and an offense against the inherent dignity of both. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen pointed out that these families are hardly the only ones broken up by U.S. public policy. He cites a 2010 study finding that over 1.2 million incarcerated Americans have children under the age of 17. “These separations can be traumatic,” Cowen argues, “and they help perpetuate generational cycles of low achievement and criminal behavior.”