Today, Explained - Human infrastructure

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

President Biden wants infrastructure spending to include child care, elder care, food assistance, even community college. Vox’s Anna North explains how he might convince Republicans in Congress. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Infrastructure, infrastructure week. It's infrastructure week on Today Explained. We've been talking about building things, transit, sewage systems, bridges and roads. But what about working on ourselves? Seriously, a big part of President Biden's infrastructure vision is about something they're calling human infrastructure. If those words don't mean much to you, maybe these two will. Child care. I recently received a letter from my child's daycare for rate increases. So now five days per week for preschoolers is $1,257 a month. And for toddlers, it's going to be $1,495. I mean, that's $3,000 a month for two kids. That's crazy. How are you supposed to afford that?'m just so shocked I guess at how much it is and

how much of a a financial strain that is essential into just living and working and not really understanding like how has it gone on so long being this much and how are people doing this like we're doing it we're making it work, but it's just like, I just feel like the majority of Americans have to be like crushed. So we got pregnant in the middle of the pandemic and which was just kind of a strange experience. But I think there's a lot of changes going on

when you're, my wife's pregnant and then we have the baby, which is this obviously life-changing experience. And then your new parents and scrambling and just trying to survive. And then there's just this lingering thing in the back, like, wait, what's going to happen when we have to send the child here? We don't have anything lined up. There's just the wait list that these places can be a couple of years. And then other times they don't take infants. There's really just there's not a clear path of, hey, I have my first baby. We want to continue to both work full time.

How do we get into a child care facility? And you're kind of on your own, constantly calling and they'll say, check back in next month. It's hopefully a relief to the Today Explained listeners you just heard from that child care is having a big moment right now. And to find out how we got to this moment, we reached out to Nancy Fulbray. I hate audio. Just so you know, I hate all audio. I hate all things audio. She's more of a print person. Professor Emerita of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Back to the big moment.

Child care, elder care, both, I think, having a big moment. And I think big moments come when people kind of face a shock together and they realize that they have something in common and they have a lot to gain by cooperating to solve it. And was the shock the pandemic? Yes, the shock was the pandemic, which led to school and childcare closures, which led to a realization that a lot of us are doing two or three things at the same time and juggling family responsibilities and work responsibilities, and that it's a very fragile kind of vulnerable system that we rely on. And we would do better to develop something a little, you know, more reliable, more stable, more of a base. It's important to remember here, though, that this is not the first time the nation's faced a shock like this on childcare, right? America goes to war.

Men of the Army, Navy, and Marines reinforce the battlefront on six continents to save the homes and ideals of free men from Axis domination. We are still short millions of hands. We must call upon women. Basically, federal funding for daycare centers was set up in order for mothers to enter

the labor force. You know, at that time, because of soldiers being abroad, there was a real labor shortage. Women are called upon to leave their homes and take jobs. We have a large reserve. They discover that factory work is usually no more difficult than housework. Employers find that women can do many jobs as well as men, some jobs better. And I think a lot of people in our audience might be surprised to learn that there was a functional national childcare plan

during World War II. Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people point to that as an example of how successful and how efficient a national childcare system was. 27 percent of Richmond shipbuilders were women. Feminine workers with small children inspired the founding of 35 nursery school units and 10 extended day care centers, which mothered over 1,400 youngsters at a time. It really helped the war effort. It moved women into factories to engage in production that was really needed.

You know, overall satisfaction with it was really high. So it was kind of a win-win, considered a real win-win situation, even though it was pretty unconventional. On their way to work, parents left their hopefuls at one of the nursery schools, knowing that the daily routine, commencing with a physical checkup and followed by organized play, would make their children both healthy and happy. The 50-cent daily fee included mid-morning and afternoon nourishment, as well as a hot, balanced lunch.

Indeed, these were the future citizens in the making. And so what happens when the soldiers come home after the war? Well, there was a lot of concern after the war that there would be a lot of unemployment among veterans. And the last thing that the country wanted to do to its veterans was make it hard for them to return to civilian life. So there was a lot of pressure on women who had moved into untraditional, nontraditional jobs to go home and to resume their responsibilities as homemakers and moms. And then with that movement, the rationale for the federal provision of daycare was diminished. And I think the country kind of wanted to return to a pre-war normalcy, as it was called at the time. And that's what happened?

Women returned home? Actually, a lot of women remained in the workforce after World War II. It had kind of a permanent impact, and women's participation in paid employment grew pretty steadily. How did that affect child care? Periodically, the issue came up. I think it was recognized as a problem, but it just proved really hard to rally support around a national effort. But I think that's changing. And, you know, in a lot of states, there's been more efforts to

extend services to kindergarten and pre-kindergarten levels. But, you know, what's really needed and what I think the Biden administration is pushing for is a much bigger and more organized expansion of child care services. Which will be, what, the first expansion of its kind since World War II. Yes, I think that's a very good way to put it. And what's distinctive about it is that it would be virtually universal. That is, most people would be eligible for a very subsidized level of child care services. Wouldn't just be targeted at a low-income population. And we know there are lots of people out there who struggle to see why this should be an infrastructure priority. Why should we dump money into child care over, say, you know, bridges, roads, more conventional infrastructure items? Well, first of all, I would say, don't talk about dumping money. Investment. We talk about investment. Investment is something that

yields a future rate of return. Investment, by definition, is something that is going to benefit all of us. And, you know, some investments are private. We make individual investments and we capture some returns for those. Some investments are social and they benefit a wider group of people in the future. I mean, that's really what infrastructure means is investment in infrastructure is about investment in services that are going to yield very positive benefits that are not necessarily going to go to specific individuals or end up in specific bank accounts, but which are going to benefit everybody. Build a good road system and you take care of it,

everybody benefits from that. You build a good care infrastructure, everybody's going to benefit from that. It is so clearly going to benefit everybody. It's so economically rational. It's so economically rational, but there's been no real desire to do something about it on a federal level since World War II forced the government's hand. Well, it's like, I think you'd really have to think about the economics of cooperation and how it works. It's very hard to get people to act together in a coordinated way to solve a common threat. And there's a real analogy with climate change.

We have all this evidence about what it's doing, how it's going to harm our future, how it's causing stress right now. And yet, it's really hard for individuals to see how they can deal with it on an individual basis. And it's very hard to coordinate a collective effort. Sometimes I think as a species, we're not as smart as we should be, but I think we are pretty good at learning. And I think we're getting some pretty profound lessons these days in the need to cooperate. In a minute, why Congress doesn't want to cooperate on care. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Thank you. share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Anna North, you're a senior correspondent here at Vox. President Biden would like to do something about child care in America. Remind us what he wants to do. So the president has had this big push for infrastructure ever since he took office. Part of that is sort of, you know, what folks might more conventionally think of as infrastructure, roads and bridges, and part of it is human infrastructure. It's people. His American Families Plan, which he announced at the end of April, would invest nearly $2 trillion in programs basically to help people, programs that he deems to be about human infrastructure. President Biden will introduce the American Families Plan. The administration said it would save the average family $13,000 and offer free...

Big part of that is child care and early education. $200 billion for free universal preschool for three and four-year-olds. And then another $225 billion for younger kids to help make childcare more affordable for infants and toddlers. As a single father, when I first got to the Senate, I had two young boys who had just lost their mom and their sister in an automobile accident. If I hadn't had the family I had, my sister, my younger sister, my best friend, and my brother and my mom help out.

I couldn't have done it. But not everybody has that kind of support. Families earning up to 1.5 times their state's median income would pay no more than 7% of their income for child care. If you don't pay for child care, that might not mean a lot to you, but today families in some states are spending as much as 30% of their income on child care, so it would be a big change. The most hard-pressed working families

won't have to spend a dime. And then the plan would also boost the wages of childcare workers, so they'd be making $15 an hour, or they'd be making as much as kindergarten teachers in certain instances. So it really, it tries to address problems both with how unaffordable childcare is, but on the flip side, how the folks who are doing it are making very little money.

And we sort of laid out the politics of this with our colleague Lee Zhou earlier this week. I believe all of this spending on so-called human infrastructure is going in the big reconciliation bill, which is, I believe, supposed to only get support from Democrats and not the bipartisan bill that might actually get some Republican votes. Is that correct? That's right. So my understanding is that the bipartisan bill includes roads, bridges, and broadband. So sort of things that Biden and the Democrats feel like they can get some Republican votes on and that everything else, child care, all of these other sort of more human infrastructure issues, they're figuring they're going to have to pass with Democrats only. Which is to say that all the spending on child care doesn't have bipartisan support?

It's a little complicated. I mean, we've seen a few more bipartisan moves toward child care and some of these things in the last few months. That said, generally, Republicans in Congress have not been a fan of the human infrastructure aspects of Biden's plan. Let me tell you about the reconciliation bill. It's no more about infrastructure than I am tall. I mean, they're not a fan of spending $2 trillion on this. Roads, bridges and ports, there's none of that in this bill. And then there's also a big partisan debate around should we, like, even have child care in America?

Historically, conservatives have been really against subsidizing child care, have been really against sort of, you know, universal child care ideas. And even sometimes the idea of, like, child care at all outside the home, there's been this idea that, you know, sending children to daycare is eroding the American family, or this is something basically that mothers should be doing. And that might sound archaic to some people, but it's a view that still exists. And, you know, it's certainly something that this legislation is going to encounter as it goes forward. Are Republicans proposing any alternative plans to Biden's? There have been some alternatives proposed.

I mean, in particular, there's a big debate around whether it's best for families to have the kind of thing that Biden is proposing, which is sort of a subsidized child care system where, you know, your daycare is partially paid for, or whether it's better to just directly give families money. So Senator Romney had a plan to give, you know, direct payments to families. It does seem like the administration strongly prefers getting kids out of the home and getting both parents into the workforce. And I understand there's an economic reality to that or advantage to that. And yet I also think there's a developmental advantage to a child. If parents want to have one or both remain home to raise a child, there's a child-rearing advantage to that as well.

There have been a few other plans floated in that vein. I think the idea behind those is maybe families don't want to send their kids to daycare. Maybe they want to have, for example, a parent stay home and that they should still get financial support to do that. And that maybe, you know, if we create a big daycare system in America, that's only helping the folks that want to use daycare. So we should just give direct payments and that would help any parent with any kind of care situation that they want. You know, and that has pros and cons, and it's an interesting issue. One thing it doesn't address, though, is things like the pay for child care workers. Like, you're not necessarily raising the wages of the folks who are caring for kids if you're just

giving money directly to parents. But I guess the other issue there is that the cost of child care for a lot of people is just exorbitantly expensive. I mean, the cost of child care is a really interesting issue. A lot of people would argue that,bitantly expensive. I mean, the cost of childcare is a really interesting issue. A lot of people would argue that sort of in the aggregate, it makes sense for childcare to be expensive, right? You're talking about people taking care of sometimes babies and toddlers, really young kids. One of the reasons that childcare is so expensive

is that the ratio of workers to kids has to be pretty low. If you're taking care of babies, you know, you want like one person for every few babies. You don't want a situation where it's like one person taking care of 20 little babies. That's not a great situation for their health and development. So it's a resource intensive thing. And I think, you know, for a lot of folks, there's a sense like, look, taking care of kids is incredibly important. It's fine if it's expensive. It's just not fine that parents have to bear that entire expense. So like, yeah, maybe workers should be making $15 an hour. Maybe they should be making a lot more than that, you know, and the facility should be nice and kids should have access

to enrichment and healthy food and all these things cost money, but parents can't really bear that entire expense. So, you know, the Romney plan gives some of that money back to parents. I don't know that it would necessarily bring costs down, but I'm not sure that anyone totally has a plan for bringing costs down. I think the Biden plan is more like saying what a lot of countries in Europe have said,

which is this is just a costly thing. The government is going to help families bear some of this cost. Biden's plan, of course, is not just about child care. There's other human infrastructure pieces at play in this proposal. Can you tell me a little bit more about those? The American Families Plan is very wide-ranging, really hits on a lot of things that folks have been asking for, including it would launch a national paid family medical leave program to give folks time off to care for a child. You know, we're one of the few wealthy countries that doesn't really have mandated parental leave. So this would start to fix that. It would also provide folks leave to recover from their own serious illness or seek help after a domestic

violence incident. It would provide two years of free community college to anybody who wants it, expanded food assistance for children and adults, and it would also make the child tax credit that's been part of the American Rescue Plan and that folks have started to see the money from, it would make that permanent so that that money would continue to come in and wouldn't expire. And this is where we really start getting into things that at least some Republicans are not on board with. There's a mandate in this bill to require every employer to offer paid family leave. That sounds good, I guess, on its face

until the employer has to come up with the cash to meet the mandate in this bill. Is Biden going to win this argument that infrastructure should include all of these sort of social programs, all of these sort of human elements? This is a liberal wish list. And how does it add to inflation? Well, spending three and a half to five trillion dollars is not a good idea when you have an inflationary economy. The debate around what is infrastructure is a really interesting debate. And ultimately, it's sort of a debate about terminology and a debate about, like, salesmanship.

What this would do is incentivize women to rely on the federal government to organize their lives. It takes away from them the ability to organize their family life. The way that advocates will frame this to me is sometimes these things get dismissed as like, quote unquote, girl stuff. Like stuff that's good for women. It's marginal. It doesn't really matter to like everyone. It's just lady things. Biden has made this decision to say no. They're infrastructure. Infrastructure is this like, you know, for lack of a better term, this, like, manly words, like hard hat. We're always focused on shovel-ready jobs, what we can do immediately to get the money out in communities.

But that's what care jobs are. They are shovel-ready. The workers are ready now. He's hoping that that's going to get him some support. Probably not among your most conservative Republicans, but maybe among voters, maybe among your moderates. Getting folks to look at these things not as like handouts or something negative, but as like something important to really, you know, build the backbone of America.

We'll see if he succeeds. Republicans clearly have not bought into the idea that infrastructure should include human stuff. You know, they're much more on board with it being about roads and bridges. So the push might not work. But I think it's been really interesting because it's been just part of this larger argument by Democrats that things like care

and things like paid leave are not these ancillary issues, these afterthoughts, but they're actually core to the American economy and core to American well-being. It's an argument that I hadn't necessarily heard as much before, and it has the potential to be powerful. Anna North writes about care and education for Vox. You can find her reporting at vox.com. I'm Sean Ramos from It's Today Explained. We wrap up Infrastructure Week tomorrow with Secretary Pete, formerly Mayor Pete,

before that Pete Buttigieg. We're going to talk about how the Biden administration plans to get basically everything we talked about this week done. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening.