JD Vance wants you to know he has no problem with cats.
Donald Trump’s choice for vice president says that when he expressed the view that childless adults should be forced to pay higher taxes and people who have children should get more votes, and that “childless cat ladies” are responsible for world misery, he didn’t mean to insult anyone’s pet.
Families with children were just more invested in the fate of the country, Vance said. They’re more important. They’re more entitled to a little additional cash, a little extra democracy.
The words seemed designed to amplify the trope of selfish, career-driven women of child-bearing age, and sure enough, the public face of furor over Vance’s words falls within that age group.
Selling out seniors
But there’s another group Vance insulted when he insisted that families with children — and only families with children — were vested in the future of the country. And it’s a group that might not want higher taxes or less voting power. It’s people over 60.
Even Vance, whose loose lips have been busy alienating everyone from fans of the childless Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton to Diet Mountain Dew traditionalists, knows he can’t afford to discuss this quiet part out loud.
That’s because people 60 and over are among the most reliable voters, especially in Florida, and they are crucial to Trump’s core support.
Despite the caricature of selfish retirees who only vote in their best interests, older voters are very much invested in the future. In South Florida, they have been among the most reliable supporters of public education — even though few of them have school-age children.
Almost two of every 10 Broward residents are over 65, and their votes were critical to the passage of a major $800 million education bond issue in 2014. Three of 10 Palm Beach County residents are over 60, but voters in 2022 overwhelmingly agreed to tax themselves to fund public schools.
Vance’s obsession with declining U.S. birth rates, part of the rockiest roll-out of a running mate since Sarah Palin, did not come out of thin air.
Pregnancy as economic policy
It reflects a movement based on jump-scares from wealthy Silicon Valley technocrats such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Their bottom line: More children mean a more robust workforce. Falling birth rates require more American-born babies to avoid an economic armageddon.
In this world view, pregnant women are the cherished means to an end. There’s no place for women of child-bearing age who choose to not have children — with or without cats.
But if fertility is rewarded with tax benefits and more votes, and children are the measure of your investment in America, where does that leave older people who never had children or whose children are grown?
What does it say about the value Vance and his technocrat backers place on our seniors?
Their assessment is never directly addressed, but always insinuated. Aging “arrests creativity,” said Thiel, Vance’s billionaire mentor who funneled millions into Vance-friendly PACs, propelling the political neophyte into the U.S. Senate. Musk bemoans “a civilization that ends … in adult diapers.”
The Project 2025 angle
The stance on aging is dropped into documents like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s toxic blueprint for seizing power and not letting go after November.
Vance has endorsed chunks of the plan as Trump scrambles to distance himself from it. Trump’s campaign issued a threat to anybody trying to tie him to the document. “It will not end well for you,” they warned in a press release.
But Project 2025’s contributors include dozens of former Trump hires. And in the authors’ scenario, traditional Medicare takes a back seat to commercial insurers. Prescription costs rise for seniors.
There’s no mention of cutting Social Security in Project 2025. But separately, Heritage is pushing to raise the retirement age and to cap benefits. By one estimate, caps would bring a person’s income to the poverty level and not much more.
Keep in mind that some of the people advocating bumping the retirement age up to 70 are the same ones who would never consider hiring anyone over 50.
Vance said he has been misunderstood, that he simply wants to shore up the nuclear family ideal. Of course, he also said that the country’s leaders are sociopaths and that psychotic Twitter posters are deranged because they don’t have children.
In the view of Vance, a father of three, children are the antidote to mental instability. But not, unfortunately, to political madness.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
