In the improv TV series Whose Line Is It Anyway?, host Drew Carey would welcome the audience to a place “where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.” Anyone observing Washington during the Trump administration might have been forgiven for suspecting that the laws of political gravity, especially as they pertained to deficits, had been borrowed from that show.

Today, inflation has changed the channel from Whose Line to The Price Is Right. Policy-makers who would like to see the Republican Party move in a conspicuously pro-family direction will have to rediscover a little old-fashioned supply-side gospel to make that agenda stick.

Republicans who once defined themselves by opposing government red ink during the Obama years discovered that rewarding key constituencies through deficit-financed spending can be fun, actually. Reducing corporate and individual tax rates, reaching genial agreement with Democrats on discretionary-spending levels, and boosting military spending — in a low-interest-rate environment, all that could be borne fairly easily.

But the rules have changed. In 2017, the U.S. was paying the equivalent of 1.3 percent of GDP in interest. It’s since increased to 1.9 percent, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that net interest payments will rise to 3.7 percent of GDP by 2033. Assuming those projections hold, that’s the equivalent of $1.3 trillion spent only on financing consumption that will have already occurred rather than being put toward a larger child tax credit, paid parental leave, or other policies parents might want.

If policy-makers are concerned that a high cost of living hinders family formation, and good evidence suggests that it does, they should first focus on areas that specifically burden young parents. Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that the cost of housing continues to rise as the largest expense related to raising a child, driven up in part by land-use and environmental regulations.

A supply-side approach to the cost of living means recognizing the need to let markets operate more freely, making housing more affordable by increasing supply. A “yes in my backyard” approach might often be associated with expensive coastal cities, but even in suburbs and exurbs it can increase the supply of housing that young couples, especially single-earner households, can afford. Similarly, liberalizing zoning for home-based child care, or subsidizing loans to help child-care centers increase capacity, could help a wider array of providers to enter the market.

In health care, broadening the scope of practice for nurses and professional midwives can give parents more options in finding the kind of care they prefer, while subtly encouraging greater competition in the industry. Most recently, as part of a package of pro-life measures that included a twelve-week abortion ban, the North Carolina state legislature voted to join other states that give certified nurse-midwives the ability to manage low-risk pregnancies and births without physician oversight.

These kinds of reforms are essential in boosting parents’ purchasing power. But D.C. can also take current pots of money and spend them better. In the run-up to the debt-ceiling deal in June, for example, Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio) proposed scaling back the electric-vehicle subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act and using the savings to eliminate marriage penalties in the earned-income tax credit (EITC).

Because benefits are higher for single parents with kids than for married ones, the federal government effectively subsidizes cohabitation through the EITC. A 2016 paper estimated that a single mother contemplating marriage would stand to lose about half her benefits because of EITC penalties, lowering overall marriage rates by 2.5 percentage points.

Eliminating the federal subsidy for cohabitation isn’t conceptually difficult, but it is expensive, which is why Senator Vance’s proposal was so welcome. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the savings from scaling back EV credits would have been enough to cover the cost of eliminating EITC marriage penalties — with a few billion left over for helping to reduce the deficit. The tight time line of debt-ceiling negotiations prevented the proposal from coming to the floor for a vote. But Vance’s pairing of issues, eliminating spending on green initiatives in favor of both fiscal prudence and strengthening marriage, hit populist notes in the service of meaningful policy wins. Similarly, a proposal from Utah Republican senator Mitt Romney, the Family Security Act 2.0, would pay for its proposed monthly tax benefit for parents by eliminating deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) and consolidating other tax provisions.

Another prime candidate for simplification is the child-and-dependent-care tax credit, which reimburses child-care expenses for households in which all parents are working (that is, a single parent working or two parents, both working). In practice, it is largely a tax break for wealthy, two-career households. And economic research suggests that child-care tax credits are passed through from parents to providers in the form of higher prices, to the tune of about 60 cents of every dollar of subsidy. Simply converting the $4.7 billion currently taken by the child-care tax credit into an early-childhood supplement to the child tax credit could give parents of children under age five an extra $250 a year per child.

Another unavoidable consequence of an era of constrained fiscal choices is that it can pit generations against each other. When Republicans made the choice to keep Social Security and Medicare off the table in debt-ceiling negotiations, it was a savvy political move. And the populist strain in the party has learned its lesson from President Trump, that even talking about touching entitlements is a political killer.

Yet as our population ages, the current ratio — six dollars spent on the elderly for every dollar spent on kids at the federal level, according to the left-leaning Urban Institute — will continue to increase. (This, of course, does not take account of spending at the state level, as on K–12 education.) The CBO estimates that spending on Social Security and medical care for the elderly, currently under 30 percent of federal spending, will surpass 40 percent three decades from now.

If Republicans want to materially support families, they must find a way to gradually reduce the oncoming torrent of spending on senior citizens. One straightforward approach is to slow down the addition of new benefits. As the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Pope recently wrote, “Medicare spending on new procedures is the single factor most responsible for the projected surge in the national debt over the coming decades.” Exerting more congressional authority over which new medical codes will be covered by Medicare could help stem the program’s fiscal growth without threatening current benefits. Similarly, tweaking how Social Security calculates inflation could save billions through the miracle of compound interest.

Conservatives who would like more financial support for parents cannot simply partition off any discussion about entitlements. They don’t have to — and, in fact, shouldn’t — make it a central focus of any election campaign. But focusing all talk of budget-cutting on discretionary programs is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it approaches the iceberg of senior entitlements.

Finally, among the lessons our post-Covid economy has driven home is that, contrary to stereotype, supply-side economic thinking isn’t only about top marginal tax rates or the Laffer curve. Applied correctly, a supply-side focus helps us pay close attention to the regulatory barriers and market failures that keep certain sectors of the economy from becoming more productive.

For a brief moment, it appeared that self-styled “supply-side progressives,” such as the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, might push the Left to embrace this approach. But the Biden administration’s strategy around “Build Back Better,” and its implementation of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, suggests that most Democrats still believe there are no trade-offs in advancing various social schemes.

Conservatives can and must be more clear-eyed. Increasing the productive capacity of the economy in areas that burden family formation isn’t as glamorous as splashy new programs, and reforming current spending is politically challenging. But in a political moment dictated by concern about growing deficits, those efforts need to be front and center for pro-family conservatives.

Republicans are caught between competing impulses, with a self-conception as a “working-class party” and “party of parents” that disproportionately draws political support from upper-income earners and seniors. The recent proposal from Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee illustrates that tension: It eschews fiscal discipline and benefits targeted at working-class families in favor of general tax relief that both benefits upper-income households and increases marriage penalties. To advance a pro-family agenda, conservative politicians will almost certainly need to relinquish some of the fervor for holding Medicare sacrosanct and think more strategically about which tax policies to champion.

Our population is ageing, foreign-policy challenges loom, and inflation remains elevated. These are the constraints under which we operate. Trimming the growth rate of entitlement spending and allowing markets to do what they do best might sound like a drearily conventional approach to conservative politics. But an agenda that gives a boost to families coping with the pressures of a difficult economy requires fiscal prudence. To pretend otherwise is to ignore that the rules are no longer made up and the dollar signs really do matter.