The Daily - Is Child Care a Public Responsibility?

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Many Americans pay more for child care than they do for their mortgages, even though the wages for those who provide the care are among the lowest in the United States.Democrats see the issue as a fundamental market failure and are pushing a plan to bridge the gap with federal subsidies.We went to Greensboro, N.C., to try to understand how big the problem is and to ask whether it is the job of the federal government to solve.Guest: Jason DeParle, a senior writer for The New York Times.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Democrats are moving to bring in the most significant expansion of the U.S. social safety net since the war on poverty in the 1960s, introducing legislation that would touch virtually every American’s life, from cradle to grave.Some fear the plan would raise taxes and create additional red tape on private services. Here’s more information about what the bill proposes.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, as Congress debates a historic plan to make child care more affordable, my colleague Jason DeParle traveled to a small city in the American South to understand how big the problem is and whether people think that the government can solve it. It's Tuesday, October 12th. Jason, we have talked a lot on the show about these two giant infrastructure bills that

congressional Democrats are trying to pass right now. The first one funding traditional infrastructure, bridges, roads, and the second one funding a sweeping expansion of the social safety net. And I know that you have been focused on the second bill and what it has to say about child care. So how does that bill approach the question of childcare? It starts with the assumption that the childcare system in the United States is just fundamentally broken. I think the Democrats think it's broken in two sides. On the parent side, it's just unaffordable for many families. They're paying some of them as much as or even more than their mortgage. On the other side of things, the daycare center side of things,

they're just not able to hire enough people to keep those centers open. I think there's also a philosophical shift that the Democrats have in mind. Historically, child care has been seen as something in the private realm, a family responsibility. Children are cared for purely at their parents' responsibility until they're old enough to go to school. family responsibility. Children are cared for purely at their parents' responsibility until they're old enough to go to school. The Democrats are trying to shift the lens on it to having it be more of a service in which everyone has a stake and that society has an interest and an

obligation to provide. So the Democrats are trying to shift perception of this from a purely private responsibility to a broader public responsibility. And they're willing to spend big money to do it. The cost of their plan is $250 billion over 10 years. And I wonder if you can put that number into context, $250 billion over 10 years, what that means. Well, it means within a few years, spending would rise fivefold. The amount we spend on child care would quintuple. You know, I think for a lot of us, the size of the Democrats' proposal kind of came a little bit out of the blue,

like, wow, that's an enormous amount of money. You know, is the problem that bad? I wanted to find a community where I could investigate that question. And so where did you go? I wound up in Greensboro, North Carolina. You know, I didn't want to go to a place, San Francisco or Brooklyn or Washington, where we know costs are exorbitant. I wanted to find a city where you could get a sense of how it's affecting average Americans. And so what did you find there in Greensboro? I found the problem was really everything that Washington advocates had described it to be, possibly even worse. It was bad in both sides of the equation. Parents were just paying exorbitant amounts for child care, and

it was an expense they really hadn't anticipated. And the directors of child care centers just couldn't hire the workers they needed. There were long waiting lists, staff openings. The system just seemed fundamentally broken, as the Democrats had said. Well, let's talk about these one at a time, starting with the parents struggling to pay for the child care. Tell us about some of the people you spoke with there. I met a woman named Jessica Lawley who works for the Greensboro public school system. Her husband, Matt, is a salesman at Lowe's. Greensboro public school system.

Her husband, Matt, is a salesman at Lowe's. They have two kids, family income in the low 70,000s or so, and they were paying a third of their income, more than $24,000 a year for childcare. Wow. Much more than their mortgage. And are they able to make that work? You know, they had reoriented their whole life, really, around child care.

They wanted to have another kid. They couldn't do that. They had stopped taking vacations. Wait, they're not having as many children as they want because of the cost of providing child care to the kids they have. Yes, that's a common theme. Other people told me they wanted to have an extra child too,

but had decided not to after seeing how much it cost. I think Jessica and Matt made it work in the end only with help from, significant help from Jessica's family. Who else did you talk to about the cost of childcare for their children? I talked to a couple named Jamie and Matt Pritchard, who are both insurance brokers. They have three kids in the childcare all at the same time, and they're paying $34,000 a year. The family makes a bit more than $100,000. They're a middle-income family. These aren't poor people, but they're paying more than twice for child care than they are for their mortgage.

And what did they say is the impact of having to devote $34,000 a year to child care? Matt had gotten into a car wreck. His car was totaled. He got a $20,000 a year to child care. Matt had gotten into a car wreck. His car was tumbled. He got a $20,000 check from the insurance company. And rather than replace the car, they put it into child care. Other families talked about putting off vacations, putting off for clients, repairs or replacements, contorting their work schedules so that somebody went in early

and somebody stayed later so they need as many hours during the day you just got this sense of uh of like the blob in the room you know that child care was something everybody had to work around i mean just to manage their daily lives and jason why exactly does child childcare cost this much money? Tens of thousands of dollars in some cases, what sounds like a third or even close to half of people's after-tax income. Yeah, the average cost of childcare is about $10,000 a year. It's hugely expensive, I think, because it's hugely labor-intensive.

You need a lot of people to keep the kids safe. One teacher can take care of five infants at a time. It's especially expensive the younger the kids are. I talked to a child care worker who was changing 20 diapers or more a day. The average child care center spends 50% to 60% of its budget just on labor. And beyond that, of course, you have rent, you've got food, you've got electricity, you've got all the things that you need to keep an environment safe. It costs a lot because it's a very expensive service to provide.

You mentioned a second group of people, which are child care center workers. Tell me about what you learned in talking to them. You know, I was surprised by that. I guess I should have known just how low paid they were, but I confess I really didn't. They rank in the second percent nationwide of earners, really at the bottom. They average wages for a child care worker nationwide are about $12 an hour, $24,000 a year. $12 an hour, $24,000 a year. I met a woman named Yuvika Joseph, a full-time worker in child care whose children were on food stamps and Medicaid because she earned so little. She'd been able to get by for a while because her husband had a job, but once she was divorced, she needed to make more money to get off public aid and support her family. She took a job with

the Greensboro Public Schools doing pretty much the same kind of work, caring for young children at roughly twice the pay. Plus, she would get health insurance in that work. She didn't want to leave. It was kind of poignant. It was her last week at work, and she was holding kids and giving them rides around the courtyard and saying that she wished she could stay. She loved the work. She just couldn't afford to keep doing it for the amount that they were paying her. She's basically being forced out of the child care industry. By the low pay. Yeah. Not because she wanted to leave. I met another woman who really wanted to get in full time. She was doing it part time at a Baptist child care center, a woman named Rochelle Myers, but had to work 30 hours a week at Starbucks because the Baptist center paid $10 an hour and the Starbucks paid $15 an hour and gave her health insurance.

So she was working at Starbucks in order to subsidize her dream job, which was at a child care center. subsidize her dream job, which was at a child care center. She said, you know, I make $10 an hour to shape the future of children and $15 an hour to hand somebody a cup of coffee. This just doesn't make sense. She'd gone to college to get an associate degree in child development. This is a woman who desperately wanted to do this kind of work and yet was stuck at Starbucks most of her, half of her work week in order to make ends meet. I even met a woman who had stayed married longer than she wanted because her wages were so low. A woman named April Crocker who viewed childcare as her calling. She said, it's my dream. I can't, it's my calling. It's my life. It's my passion. I can't live without this, but she can't really quite live with it either.

And she stayed in what she described as a bad marriage for years longer than she wanted to, simply because she needed the supplemental income that she got from her husband's job. Wow. I was really struck by the devotion of the women. You know, how much, a lot of them, there's a catchphrase, it must be a catchphrase of sorts. They always say, it's my passion. I mean, they really seem to want to do this work and their devotion was in a way, a kind of subsidy to the rest of us, you know, I mean, we're getting childcare at lower costs because they're willing to do the work at less money than they could earn by going

to Target or Starbucks or other places or the public school system. I mean, we're riding a bit on their passion and concern for doing this work. Right. And what you're describing are precisely the kind of people that any parent would want to be looking after their children, people who see this kind of work as a calling, as a passion. I mean, that's who you want looking after your kid for five, six, seven, eight hours a day. But these people are saying that the job doesn't pay enough for them to get by. And so they can't do it. And so, of course, that may leave parents and child care centers with people who don't have any passion for the work. Well, the child care center directors have a regular meeting they let me sit in on where they talk about the problems in hiring.

And there's a kind of sardonic gallows humor about being willing to take anybody off the street. I mean, they don't really mean it, but they joke with each other about the bar being much lower than they would like it to be because it's so hard right now to hire. Hmm. I mean, Jason, how can it be the case that child care costs as much as it does for the parents you met in Greensboro, and yet it pays so little to the workers that you met in Greensboro? That almost doesn't make any economic sense. That's what many people would just call a market failure. The fundamental economic laws don't add up. You can't charge people enough to pay for what it costs to provide the service. The American economy is really innovative. It can cut costs in lots of ways. It can make a cheeseburger that middle America can afford. It can't really make a child care center that everybody can afford.

It just costs too much to provide the service. Child care is not the only sector of the economy that shares that problem. And there's many parts of the health care market couldn't function on a purely supply and demand free market conditions. You know, much of the housing sector, the market can't provide an apartment at a price that low income families can afford. Democrats see the child care sector as being a similar economic problem, that it just isn't amenable to free market solutions, and the government needs to step in and make it work. And they're willing to do so with $250 billion of subsidies.

We'll be right back. So Jason, how do Democrats propose using that $250 billion to solve the problems of child care in the U.S., the cost for parents, the low pay for workers. And let's start with the cost for parents. Yeah, the first thing they would tackle is the affordability problem. And they would do it by establishing a cap on what families pay for child care. They'd cap annual expenses at 7% of a family's income. No family would pay more than 7%. So remember we talked about Jessica and Matt Lally. Jessica

works for the public school system. Her husband works at Lowe's and they spend a third of their income on child care. They spend $24,000 a year under the new plan that would go to $5,000 a year. They'd save almost $20,000 a year. Wow. We talked about Jamie and Matt Pritchard. They work at the insurance company and they have three kids. They're paying $34,000. They would pay about $9,000. So they'd save $25,000. On average, nationwide, I think the estimate

is that it would cut child care costs in half for the average family. And what about improving pay for the workers? How does the bill address that? Well, it demands that child care centers raise the workers' pay. It requires them to pay a living wage, which it doesn't define, but it also requires them to pay parity with public school teachers of equal experience and education. So that's a different pay standard and another one where the definition isn't quite written in stone.

So it envisions a large increase in child care pay. I don't think anybody really knows how large or what it would end up being. But it would be more than the $10 or $11 an hour that many of the people you met are currently being paid. I think it'd be at least 25% more and perhaps considerably more than that. So this bill proposes fixing the two major problems that you found in Greensboro and that most people acknowledge exist in the current child care system. The cost, the low pay, and by what mechanism does that $250 billion get funneled in such a way that it would solve those two problems? Do we know? Well, the only way a child care center can take in less money from parents

and pay more money to workers is to get a government subsidy. The money's got to come from somewhere. So the money would go from the federal government to the states and from the states to the child care centers through a series of mechanisms which aren't entirely spelled out. And if you remember at the start of the conversation, I said I was really persuaded that the Democrats were right in identifying the scale of this problem. I'm not sure they've done as much to detail the solution as they have to identify the problem. I think there's a lot of questions still opening about how all this would work, starting with how much the workers would get paid. If you're a child

care center and half your budget goes to paying workers and you don't know how much the law is going to require you to pay your workers, then you really can't know how much subsidy you need. So I think it's pretty hard at the moment to know whether $250 billion is enough to do what the Democrats are setting out to do, whether you can really cap family expenditures at 7% and raise pay and do it for that amount of money? All kinds of questions could come up. How are you going to verify the family income? How are you going to know if that much money is enough to provide quality care? The Democrats are doing this on

the fly with this bill being just one of equally large portions of an even larger bill and trying to do it under very complicated procedural rules in the Senate. So I think we're only getting an outline of the solution and a lot will depend on details that probably won't be spelled out until after it passes, if it passes. So given all of that, what has the public reaction to this proposal been? What does it look like? You know what was really striking? Almost nobody I talked to in Greensboro had any idea about what the Democrats' proposal was. Few knew the Democrats had a proposal. This whole social safety net bill has been discussed in public as a matter of math, whether it's going to spend $3.5 trillion or $2 trillion. But I think the public's got very little sense of what's actually in it. If you ask people, would they

like cheaper childcare? Of course, they're going to say yes. If you ask whether they want a larger government role in providing childcare, you're going to get some hesitation. And I heard bits of both in Greensboro. Tell me what you mean. One woman who's now paying 20% of her income for child care said, gee, I'd love for this to pass. She's all for it. But remember Jessica and Matt Lally? She had really mixed reactions.

I mean, this is a woman who would save $20,000 a year by this proposal. And yet at the same time, she said, gee, I don't know, when the government gives you money, the government usually also brings rules. And I'd wanna know more about what strings are attached to this. If it changed the way my Baptist preschool operated, if it changed the feel of the place,

I'm not sure I'd want this. Child care is a burdensome expense, but as lots of parents said, it's also a time-limited expense. The kids eventually get to age five and go on to school. And there are some families, I think, who are just willing to gut it out rather than cede what they fear would be too much control of their children's lives to government rules. That's fascinating. So you found people who would directly and meaningfully benefit from this kind of proposal

skeptical or wary of it because of what it represents. Or at least ambivalent, yeah. Not like, you know, dead set against, but pause. You know, it wasn't like, oh man, I signed up for that. Save me $20,000. It was, well, yeah, that'd be nice. But gee, I don't know. Sometimes if you get the government money, you got to do what the government says. And I really like my preschool. And somebody else said, you know, if the government's giving you a benefit, they're going to be raising your taxes. And my kids are only going to be young for a short time. I'm not sure I want that. You know, you heard concerns about taxes as well as government rules and changing the environment for their kids. I heard hesitation on both those fronts. Jason, it sounds like some of that skepticism, maybe a good deal of it, is grounded in the idea that the government would suddenly become involved in a new sphere of life, which is child care. But you said without the government becoming involved in this sphere of life, the economics of it, the market failure of it, will remain

a serious problem. Everyone I talk to is persuaded there's a serious problem. Not everyone is persuaded that a significant expansion of government expenditure and control is an answer. Yeah, families would like to pay less for child care, but at the same time, they had concerns about higher taxes and a larger government say in childbearing decisions. And kindergarten was once controversial and pre-K was once controversial. You know, there may come a time when this isn't, but it does make some people uneasy right now. And the Democrats are asking Americans and asking Congress

to contemplate a big change. Democrats are proposing, you know, a paradigm shift into something from a very private responsibility to a public responsibility. I think for a lot of people, the question is, what makes them more uneasy?

The big problem they're living with or the big change that it would take to fix it? Jason, thank you very much. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times reports that in the coming days, the U.S. government is expected to take a major step toward offering booster shots of the COVID-19 vaccine

to a far larger group of Americans. The FDA, which has already approved boosters for Pfizer-BioNTech for vulnerable populations, will meet later this week to discuss recommending boosters for recipients of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson's vaccines as well. If, as expected, the FDA does approve the new boosters, millions more people will be eligible for the extra dose. And in the latest sign of how common extreme weather has become, the Biden administration said that so far this year, the U.S. has experienced 18 separate weather disasters that have cost at least $1 billion each.

Those weather events include heatwaves, droughts, tornadoes, and wildfires. Thank you. original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.