Clinton’s Child Care Plan Could Get Very Expensive And Be Totally Worth It

[LebaneseDude 6,146]

Via HuffPo

Hillary Clinton has said that helping working parents would be one of her primary goals as president and, last week, she let the country know what she has in mind. If she’s president, Clinton said, she’d work to make sure no family has to spend more than 10 percent of its income on child care expenses.

That’s a big goal. And it’d come with a big price tag.

Earlier this year, when the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget analyzed the campaign agenda of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), it assumed that his own, less detailed call for universal child care would end up costing the government about $35 billion a year. When Make It Work, an advocacy group, put together proposal for universal child care that would include children up to age 12, it suggested that it would eventually require $100 billion a year in new money.

Still, the figures convey a sense of scale. Fully realizing Clinton’s goal would likely require the federal government, and thus the taxpayers, to come up with tens of billions of new dollars every year. That’s real money, even by Washington standards — less than what the federal government spends on Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, most likely, but still a vast increase over what the federal government currently spends on Head Start and other federal programs for young children.

So do the advocates for such a program flinch at such high costs? Hardly. They say such a substantial investment in early childhood is long overdue. And they have a lot of evidence on their side.

The American family changed and public policy hasn’t

It starts with the science. Researchers have shown conclusively that the first few years of life are a critical period for brain development. Young children who grow up in nurturing, stimulating environments are more likely to develop the skills they need to succeed later in life — like learning how to control their emotions, or staying focused long enough to solve a difficult problem. Young children who grow upwithout those supports are at much greater risk of emotional, intellectual and even physical problems that can cause them to struggle in school or the workplace, or, in the worst cases, to run afoul of the law.

That would mean, first and foremost, giving working moms and dads more freedom to stay at home with children when they are in their first weeks and months of life — by guaranteeing paid leave to all workers, as every other country in the developed world does. Then, for parents with slightly older children who want or need to work, it would mean setting high standards for out-of-home care, including higher pay for child care workers.

That last part helps explain why a plan like Clinton’s could get so pricey. Today, median pay for child care workers is just $9.77 per hour, which works out to an annual salary of $20,320 — less than parking lot attendants make. At those salary levels, it’s difficult to attract the most talented caregivers and then keep them on the job for more than short periods of time. As Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California-Berkeley, said, “The low pay endemic to early care and education undermines building a skilled and stable workforce, shortchanging the majority of children and families.”

Simply raising the minimum wage to $12 or $15 an hour, as Democrats and their allies have proposed, would obviously make a big difference. Clinton has proposed additional measures that could boost wages for some caregivers even more. But if child care centers end up boosting pay for their workers and hiring more staff in order to improve the ratio of caregivers to kids, they’ll have to raise their prices, too — which is why providing enough federal assistance to cap child care costs at 10 percent of income, as Clinton as proposed, could get so expensive.

The taxpayers would ultimately have to shoulder that burden, one way or another. But they would get something for their money. “Yes, it’s expensive,” Boushey said. “So are public schools, and if we want our nation to be competitive, that’s the way to think about it.” Julie Kashen, policy director at the Make It Work campaign, said early childhood spending is actually an investment: “We know, from study after study, that the first five years of a child’s life are critical to what happens later.”

This isn’t just a talking point. Research on early childhood suggests that the spending tends to pay off in the long run, since it means future workforces are more productive — and less likely to require remedial education, public assistance or attention from the criminal justice system.

The crude version of this, which every advocate repeats, is that every $1 of spending on early childhood care yields $8 in future returns. That’s probably optimistic, in the sense that it assumes all children are getting exceptionally high-quality early childhood programs with exceptionally talented instructors. But there’s lots of reason to think that spending more on early childhood now would yield larger returns later.

Americans like to say that nothing is more important than a child’s well-being. But U.S. public expenditures on early childhood are currently among the lowest in the developed world. Clinton wants to change that — and it’s easy to see why.

[LebaneseDude 6,146]

Clinton's own ambitious "pie-in-the-sky" plan, but one that has significant returns.

I'd argue that it's something that all Americans want and believe in. Proper child care yields a healthier more productive population later. 

Hopefully it'll work out.

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

Good for ha Hope this works out, its a great step in the right direction.

On a slightly related note, can we catch up on our policies on parental leave post childbirth too? (Maternity/Paternity Leave)  

[LebaneseDude 6,146]

2 minutes ago, ItsTommyBitch said:

Good for ha Hope this works out, its a great step in the right direction.

On a slightly related note, can we catch up on our policies on parental leave post childbirth too? (Maternity/Paternity Leave)  

It's mentioned in the article:

That would mean, first and foremost, giving working moms and dads more freedom to stay at home with children when they are in their first weeks and months of life — by guaranteeing paid leave to all workers, as every other country in the developed world does. Then, for parents with slightly older children who want or need to work, it would mean setting high standards for out-of-home care, including higher pay for child care workers

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

7 minutes ago, LebaneseDude said:

It's mentioned in the article:

That would mean, first and foremost, giving working moms and dads more freedom to stay at home with children when they are in their first weeks and months of life — by guaranteeing paid leave to all workers, as every other country in the developed world does. Then, for parents with slightly older children who want or need to work, it would mean setting high standards for out-of-home care, including higher pay for child care workers

Mess, idk how I skipped just one paragraph  

Even bigger yay then  

[LebaneseDude 6,146]

Just now, ItsTommyBitch said:

Mess, idk how I skipped just one paragraph  

Even bigger yay then  

It's k. It's a wall of text lol... I just thought it's all relevant.