Vance’s Terrible Idea To Dilute Existing Childcare Funds

Trump started a trade war with Canada and Vance wants to foment a culture war here at home. I guess they hope both will keep you from noticing how expensive they’re making your life.

Instead of recognizing the simple fact that raising kids is a) expensive in America, and b) one of the best investments governments can make in our nation’s future well-being, Vance proposes to add a new group of recipients to a childcare assistance program whose resources are already horribly overstretched. That means less help for working parents, especially single moms, a group that is already highly economically vulnerable.

Still, there’s something buried in here worth elevating: even though this idea would do more harm than good, Vance is right to highlight the affordability challenge of doing something any self-interested society should make economically easy: raising children!

The working/non-working distinction is a distraction, one which this admin is all over the map on. They added work requirements (really, paperwork requirements) to Medicaid and SNAP, and are taking the other side of that on this proposal for childcare support for non-working parents (which, ftr, I’m not sure is even a real proposal—they’d need Congress to avoid the courts on this one).

Here’s how the NYT correctly characterized this mess:

And here’s fact one you need to know about this: 84% of the children already eligible for help with the costs of their childcare get nothing from the deeply underfunded existing program, the Child Care and Development Fund, a $12 billion block grant to states to help low/mid income working parents (only families in the bottom half of the income scale are eligible) offset part of their childcare costs. According to a (slightly dated) gov’t report from the agency that runs to the program (HHS), among almost 12 million federally eligible kids, just under 2 million got the subsidies.

Even if 100% of eligible kids got help, adding more eligibles would require more resources, but when the vast majority who are supposed to get help aren’t getting it, this becomes a straight-up Hunger Games play.

Note that few experts in childcare policies oppose any caretakers getting help, regardless of their employment status. For the record, about 75% of moms are in the labor force, higher for those with kids 6-17, lower w <6:

And further note that two groups of non-working parents are apparently INeligible as per Vance’s plan: single moms and non-married partners. The single mom thing is particularly harmful, as the vast majority have no choice as to whether they work or not. They must do so to survive (the myth that a family can get by on public assistance is just that) and they are therefore the group most hurt by this additional stretching of CCDF’s already vastly insufficient resources. The non-married partners exemption is surely illegal—the law frames this support in terms of caretakers, as it should—but that never stops this crew.

Two more points.

First, every affordability agenda must include a childcare plan, one that does not make harsh distinctions between working and non-working caretakers. Moms—80% of parental caretakers—go in and out of the paid workforce and the benchmark here is unconditional support for parents with limited means for raising kids. In a future post, I’ll do a rollup of these plans, as many are under construction, which is as it should be. Should those of us who want to get back to good governance have a chance to do so, we need to be ready to hit the ground sprinting!

Second, the last word on this goes to MomsRising, a “grassroots organization of more than a million people who are working to increase family economic security, stop discrimination against women and moms, and build a nation where businesses and families can thrive.”

Put plainly, this plan would make child care even more expensive and harder to find for families across the country, with disproportionate harm to single parents in the workforce; as it would also hurt stay-at-home moms by limiting their decisions related to family composition, caregivers, and economic opportunity.

If our nation has the money to spend $1 billion per day on the highly unpopular Iran war, then we can fund health care, paid family and medical leave, and child care, and restore the refundable Child Tax Credit and Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, which open doors so all moms, families, and our economy can thrive.

That’s what I’m talkin’ about!