Sen. Mitt Romney's plan to pay parents up to $15,000 a year to help raise their kids is being hailed as "wildly ambitious" and innovative, reports The Washington Examiner.
"Mitt Romney is putting forward a wildly ambitious proposal to re-orient the American welfare state toward children," conservative commentator Ramesh Ponnuru wrote in Bloomberg.
"The federal government transfers a hefty chunk of national income from younger people to the elderly. The Utah Republican senator wants more money to go to the parents of minor children."
Under Romney's Family Security Act, single parents earning up to $400,000 would be eligible for direct, per-child cash payments. Families with children up to 5 years old would receive $4,200 per year per child in $350 monthly payments, and families with children ages 6 to 17 would receive $4,000 per child, or $250 per month.
"I do think a lot of people see it as a leveling of the playing field as opposed to a massive social program," Boyd Matheson, opinion editor of the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, told the news outlet.
"It's budget neutral and consolidates a number of existing programs into a program where people are able to get checks on a monthly basis and therefore have capacity to care for their families," he said.
Romney's proposal would cut child poverty in the U.S. by up to one-third and deep child poverty by half, according to an analysis by the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank.
"The Romney plan is an improvement over the Biden plan in three ways," Matt Bruenig, an analyst at the progressive People's Policy Project think tank, wrote in a blog post. "First, it provides more benefits. Second, it uses the Social Security Administration, which should increase participation, among other things. Third, it likely phases out at a higher income level than Biden's plan does, which will make the program easier to administer and more universal in its coverage."
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said Romney's proposal is "an encouraging sign that bipartisan action to reduce child poverty IS possible."