What’s been missing from the Social Security debate? A good scapegoat (the AARP won’t do anymore; sorry USA Next), and the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society has found one in deadbeat procreators: those workers with small families or no children who are getting a “free ride” on the backs of large families, which contribute more children, and thus more future workers, to the Social Security trust, but will not receive a return on their investment of “human capital.” According to Howard Center President Allan Carlson, writing in the group’s publication, The Family In America, the heart of the Social Security problem is actually a fertility crisis, made worse by Social Security “disincentives” for raising children and traceable back to the bra-burning ’60s. Among Carlson’s proposals for “Making Social Security Reform Family-Friendly,” is a tax credit of 25% of their total FICA taxes per child, for the child’s first 13 years, so that a family with four kids would pay no Social Security taxes until the oldest turned 13: the larger the family, the longer the tax break. If that sounds like a hint at a deeper motive than saving Social Security, it should. Carlson’s contention that large families don’t get a “return” on their contribution of future workers rests on a fundamental difference of definition on the entity involved in Social Security between liberals, who see the entity as a group of individuals all in more or less the same boat — the grown children of both large and small families entering the same system — and social conservatives, who see the entity as the family unit, which, as such, does not get an extra “return” for the heads it added to the pool. Carlson’s beef is that it wasn’t always that way, and that what people have forgotten about the New Deal is its potent support for social conservatism, with many of its backers arguing for strong breadwinner families and mandatory training in homemaking for girls, and against working mothers, “day-care schemes,” and the Equal Rights Amendment. In order to save Social Security, Carlson writes, we should reflect upon its pro-family roots: favoring working men and not covering women’s jobs, such as teaching, nursing, clerical work or farm labor, because women ought to be encouraged by the state to rely upon their husbands’ provision. Those do sound like the days.