The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let married couples with a stay-at-home spouse collect federal welfare benefits. The money comes from a 1990s Health and Human Services fund meant to cover daycare so low-income parents could work or go to school. About 870,000 families draw on it now, roughly 80 percent headed by a single working mom, and it pays about $9,000 per child per year. Vice President JD Vance champions the change, and the administration intends to do it without a vote in Congress.

Superficially, the policy sounds good. Children raised in two-parent, single-earner homes outperform every other group in school and in earnings, and those families are the only ones reproducing above the replacement rate. We should want more stay-at-home mothers, and the vice president's heart is in the right place. His plan is still a terrible idea. He is offering socialism-lite, and Diet Coke socialism never beats the real thing.

Republicans spent 30 years arguing that welfare made people dependent on government. In the 1990s, former President Bill Clinton and the GOP restructured welfare to end dependency........

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