By the end of this month, states are expected to have used up the final $24 billion in additional federal child care funding provided as part of the overall pandemic relief effort. We will all be worse off. Rarely has a single political decision managed to achieve so many worthwhile goals at once, nor does its expiry threaten so many.
Childcare keeps the economy going. We don’t need fancy statistical models to explain that the economy (and our continued survival as a species) depends on people continuing to have children, and the long-term decline in U.S. birth rates is already ringing alarm bells. Of course, it also depends on mothers and fathers being able to enter the labor market and stay there.
But the unavailability and extremely high cost of available child care means that people either don’t have children – bad for them and bad for the economy – or have them and then leave the workforce to care for them – bad for them and bad for the economy.
While there is much talk about young people’s supposed disinterest in children, research has shown that people do not necessarily want fewer children than in recent decades, but the logistical and financial challenges appear increasingly insurmountable. A big part of that is child care, the cost of which rose almost twice as fast as the rate of inflation last year.
This situation is tough enough, but federal funding has been a lifeline. According to a recent report from the Century Foundation, the phaseout could now lead to the closure of 70,000 child care programs across the country and 3.2 million children would lose their current child care placements. The closure of these centers alone will mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, without even thinking about what this will mean for the millions of parents whose only possible opportunity to participate in the labor market will disappear practically overnight. Overall, the think tank estimates that families will miss out on a cumulative $9 billion in income per year.
This is not about “free money” or some other stupid attack on public funding for the greater good. Every serious study on the subject concludes that it brings a significant return on investment, increases economic activity and saves other costs; The biggest disagreement is what multiple we get back for every dollar we spend.
So here we have a funding stream that creates new jobs, maintains existing jobs, keeps women in particular in the workforce, stimulates the economy, encourages people to start families when birth rates fall, and generally produces excellent returns, and ours Decision is to get rid of them Apart from that, as the surprisingly strong post-pandemic economy begins to cool. Why? There are really no rational economic reasons for this and that is why we have to turn to politics again.
Some Republican members of Congress certainly don’t see pushing women out of the workforce as a disadvantage, and others are simply determined to eliminate anything that looks like a welfare program, regardless of merit. But the party that claims to be pro-family should be made to declare such an anti-family position.
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