EXCERPTS
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts introduced a universal child care proposal on Tuesday, the latest in a series of ambitious policy ideas from Democratic presidential candidates.
Ms. Warren’s plan, the Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act, would create a network of government-funded care centers based partly on the existing Head Start network, with employees paid comparably to public-school teachers. Families earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level would be able to send their children to these centers for free. Families earning more than that would be charged on a sliding scale, up to a maximum of 7 percent of their income.
The plan would be funded by Ms. Warren’s proposed wealth tax on households with more than $50 million in assets, her campaign said.
“The guarantee is about what each of our children is entitled to,” Ms. Warren said at a campaign rally in Los Angeles on Monday, announcing her plans to introduce the bill. “Not just the children of the wealthy, not just the children of the well-connected, but every one of our children is entitled to good child care.”
Mark Zandi and Sophia Koropeckyj, economists at Moody’s Analytics, estimated that the plan would cost the federal government $70 billion per year more than it currently spends on child care programs, but would be fully covered by revenue from Ms. Warren’s wealth tax. Their cost estimate was based on the assumption that the plan would produce economic growth by giving lower- and middle-class families more spending money, allowing parents to work longer hours, and creating more and higher-paying jobs for child care workers.
“The proposal quickly lifts economic growth, as the stimulus created by providing financial support to lower-income and middle-class families more than offsets the negative fallout from increasing taxes on the very wealthy,” Mr. Zandi and Ms. Koropeckyj wrote.
Ms. Warren framed the issue broadly: not just as a matter of access to education, but as a means to promote economic growth and address gender inequality in the work force. Mr. Zandi and Ms. Koropeckyj wrote that the cost of child care had “weighed heavily on female labor force participation,” because some women who can’t afford it are unable to work outside the home as a result. In a post on Medium on Tuesday, Ms. Warren repeated a personal story she has often told before: that if it hadn’t been for her Aunt Bee, who helped care for her children, she would have had to quit her job as a law school instructor.
Katie Hamm, vice president for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal think tank, said that framing was significant. “It reflects the fact that the issue has clearly grown into the public policy sphere and the economic policy sphere, where before it had been relegated to a family policy issue or an education issue,” she said.
The Center for American Progress is one of several organizations — also including the National Women’s Law Center and the Center for Law and Social Policy — that Ms. Warren’s staff consulted in developing the proposal.
Ms. Hamm said the plan addressed what she identified as the three pillars of child care policy: affordability, quality and wages. Focusing on just one or two of the pillars could have unintended consequences, she said; for instance, a program that subsidized child care and set quality standards could come at the expense of a living wage for providers.
Ms. Warren’s plan and her language in presenting it reflect the shifting ground on which the Democratic primary is being fought. Strongly progressive economic plans, which were the exception as recently as 2016, are now the norm, and cost is not as popular an objection as it once was.
“When people say, ‘That’s going to be really expensive’ — yes, it is: This will be about four times more than we have invested in our children, but that’s exactly what we need to do,” Ms. Warren said at her rally on Monday. “I am so tired of hearing what the richest country on the face of the earth just can’t afford to do.”