Hillary Clinton said it takes a village to raise a child. Elizabeth Warren's solution is a $700 billion federal program.
On Tuesday, Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and presidential candidate, unveiled her Universal Child Care and Early Learning plan to turn high-quality child care into a federal entitlement. The federal government, working with states, localities and nonprofits, would subsidize a network of licensed child-care facilities that meet new federal standards for curricula and care. Families earning up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level would pay nothing for child care. Wealthier families would pay no more than 7 percent of their annual incomes.
For many American families, however, the biggest challenge is not funding care but finding it. Warren's proposal wouldn't fix that problem. Instead, it might create a situation in which parents who already have child care they like wouldn't be able to keep it.
Warren's plan would dramatically increase demand for an already-limited number of day-care slots, as out-of-home care suddenly becomes "free" or much less expensive for millions of families. The plan would also be available to parents who stay at home with their children, encouraging families to use day-care services they don't necessarily need. The result could be 12 million children, almost double the number currently enrolled, heading off to day care.
That's if their parents can find a place for them. Warren's plan does not address--and could exacerbate--one of the main reasons child care is so expensive and difficult to come by in the first place: the heavy regulatory burden imposed by states.
Day-care licensing is generally managed at state and local levels, and the requirements can be notoriously onerous. Massachusetts is pursuing new background-check requirements so strict they could affect 30 percent of day-care workers in urban areas. A recently implemented District of Columbia rule requires day-care workers to have college degrees.
Warren's campaign literature emphasizes that the program will be funded entirely by the "Ultra-Millionaire" tax on families with a net worth of more than $50 million. But it ignores this sleeper tax on families worth much, much less.
These pressures would be intensified by the Warren plan's requirement that day-care providers who want to participate in the federal subsidy program pay higher wages.
There is no question that day care is painfully expensive, and parents desperately want to know that, while they're at work, their children are well cared-for. But the United States' child-care challenges are not wholly--or even mostly--creations of the federal government. The introduction of an aggressive federal entitlement isn't the way to solve them.
Editorial on 02/23/2019