A looming child care funding crisis threatens Biden’s economic recovery
Nearly $24 billion in federal aid for daycare centers and preschools is slated to run out Sept. 30, roiling a child care system that has underpinned the White House’s efforts to stabilize the broader economy and get people back to work.
....Daycare and preschool prices remain stubbornly high....Those costs — which typically run families more than $10,000 a year on average — are now likely to creep higher as child care programs compensate for the drop-off in federal aid, hitting American parents already fixated on the increase in everyday expenses. One projection widely circulated among Democrats estimates the funding expiration could boot as many as 3 million children from their programs, costing families up to $9 billion in total annual earnings.
....“It’s going to be really unfortunate timing,” said Whitney Pesek, director of federal child care policy at the National Women’s Law Center. “Child care prices are going to be going up heading into the 2024 election, when everyone’s running on the economy.”
This stuff annoys me. The whole point of this federal aid was to help out child care centers that were in danger of going out of business during the pandemic. That's it. Now the pandemic is over and parents have sent their kids back to day care:
Some things are meant to be permanent forms of social welfare, like food stamps or Medicaid. But loans and grants to child care centers hit by a natural disaster aren't, and there's no reason to claim that this is a uniquely "bad time" to end it. The pandemic is over, kids are back, parents are working, the cost of child care is down compared to the start of the pandemic, and the economy is in good shape. Child care centers are in pretty much the same position they were in three years ago, so there's no reason at all to think that child care costs will suddenly spurt upward. What could possibly be a better time?
This is one of the most callous posts you've made and I've been reading you from the Calipundit days. Child Care is still in a crisis because it was in a crisis before the pandemic. Women dropped out the job market to take care of the kids because childcare is scarce and expensive, other families are spending more for child care than college tuition or a mortgage payment. Meanwhile the salaries for the workers are pitiful because families cannot do this on their own. We need the public school equivalent for childcare just like we did during WWII.
+1
Bro, you 1000% missed the point.
The point of child care assistance wasn't to help the "job creators" (child care provision is really hard, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say almost no child care providers are wealthy). The point of child care assistance was to help the fucking families that need help paying for an expensive necessity so that they can make ends meet.
What the fuck, man? Child care never stopped being an emergency. Access to it (mostly because it's so fucking expensive, and so fucking hard to provide at prices people can afford) has been a crisis for decades.
Seriously, what the fuck?
I don't have children either, but even I know this. What the fuck?
I assume that Drum, like the rest of us, would like more governmental support for child care. But that's not what he's writing about, he's writing about a temporary program during an emergency -- and he thinks that the emergency that it addressed is pretty much over.
I think his post is accurate, which means it's time to fight (again and ongoing) for a permanent child care policy.
universal pre-K and full day kindergarten.
That's fine but what about for the younger kids?
Agree, but as more pre-K and full day kindergarten programs become available, the costs for younger children remain higher, so the cost of childcare will appear to increase. Younger children require higher child: employer ratios. It is more complex than Kevin appears to recognize.
Well, look,after you adjust for the super high inflation of the last couple of years, daycare inflation isn't so bad in comparison! Also, compared to being shot in the head, being shot in the stomach isn't really anything to complain about.
Daycare is insanely expensive, especially in states with requirements for high-quality care. It was hard to afford before the pandemic, and there was a brief period with just a bit of wiggle room, and we are back to misery again.
If it's so insanely expensive then how come so many child care workers make barely above minimum wage?
Because it's the sort of thing that should be supported by the entire community just like public schools. We as a society benefit from quality day care being available even if we don't have kids ourselves.
I was being snarky about so-called women's work. As you know, Bob, for the first half, maybe the first three-quarters of C 20, it's valuation was approximately 'zero'; like the Church Lady was fond of saying, 'how convenient.' Our implementation of Capitalism has a suspicious number of bank errors in their favor that way.
On this topic, Kevin always goes out of his way to mislead readers.
Here he tries to mislead readers on costs as well as the quote about the timing of the cuts. Throwing in his pulled from nowhere, based on nothing assertion that prices wont go up is the misleading icing on the cake.
Kevin is right, but only if you assume that the situation in child care was a.o.k. before the pandemic. In reality the situation was not ok back then. Hence the feeling that something important is being taken away.
In this modern society we want women to earn wages. Fine. But that comes with a price: The children need to be taken care of. If one parent's wages are almost eaten up by the cost of caring for children people will be unhappy. The economy may grow at higher rates than with a stay-at-home-mom system but those profits do not end up benefiting the double working couples, at least not at lower wage levels.