Hillary Clinton Op-Ed in WaPo: How to Fix the Child Care Cost Crisis

[bigtree]

Jesse Ferguson ‏@JesseFFerguson 7m7 minutes ago
WAPO OpEd, May 20- Hillary Clinton: Child care now costs more than rent. Here’s how to fix this crisis.

Child care now costs more than rent. Here’s how to fix this crisis.

by Hillary Clinton

Jennifer lives in Loudoun County. She has three young boys. She pays $2,500 every month for child care. That’s more than her mortgage.

This month in Northern Virginia, I met several moms and dads who told me similar stories.





In every state in the country, child care for two kids now costs more than the average rent. You read that right — child care costs more than housing. And in many states, it’s even more expensive than college tuition.

For parents who need to work, this is more than an inconvenience. It’s a crisis.

And it’s particularly urgent in the District, which is now the priciest child-care market in America.

A recent national survey found that more than three-quarters of mothers and half of fathers say they’ve had to pass up work opportunities, switch jobs or even quit working because there was no other way to pay for child care. But working fewer hours or dropping out of the workforce altogether can have long-term consequences for families’ incomes.

A lack of quality child care can be dangerous, too. In 2014, nine children in Virginia died in unlicensed day-care centers. Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) recently signed a bill to improve statewide safety standards, but without more federal funding, there’s only so much that states can do.

We’ve got to make investing in child care a national priority, especially for young parents, many of whom are trying to pay off student loans.

I remember how difficult it was when Chelsea was born. I was a young lawyer in Arkansas trying to start a career. Bill was working hard all the time. We did everything we could to put our daughter first, and we had all kinds of advantages that many families didn’t. Still, it was a juggling act.





Today’s families have it worse. Child care, college and housing costs have skyrocketed while incomes have barely budged. And workplace policies haven’t changed even though families have, with women earning more of the family income than ever and men doing much more to care for kids and aging parents.

Many workers don’t have paid family leave. Many women don’t even get a single paid day off to give birth. The pressures are so intense that some workers worry that taking an earned vacation day will be seen as slacking off.

It’s not supposed to be easy, but it shouldn’t be this hard.

As president, I would work to make quality, affordable child care available to all families.

I’m committed to increasing federal investments and incentivizing states so that no family ever has to pay more than 10 percent of its income for child care. This is a big idea, and I’m determined to fight for it.

Let’s double our investment in programs I helped develop as first lady: Early Head Start and the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership program. These programs bring an evidenced-based curriculum to child care and make sure kids get the best possible start in life, no matter how much money their families have.

Let’s lighten the burden on the one-quarter of college students who are parents by providing scholarships of up to $1,500 per year for child care.

And because none of this would be possible without talented and hardworking child-care professionals, let’s make sure we’re paying them a decent wage, too.





In addition to affordable child care, working parents deserve the security of knowing they won’t lose income — or their jobs — for taking care of themselves or a loved one. One dad in Virginia told me that to stay home for his newborn’s early days, he had to cobble together sick days and vacation days. Many people can’t do even that.

It’s time we stopped being the only advanced economy in the world that doesn’t offer workers paid family leave. That’s why I strongly support the paid family leave proposal the D.C. Council is pursuing. We should encourage states and local communities to take action as long as Congress refuses to act.

Under my plan, working Americans would earn up to seven days of paid sick leave each year. They would be guaranteed up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to care for a new baby or sick family member or to recover from an illness or injury. And we can fully fund this program by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes.

It’s all too easy for “kitchen table issues” such as these to get overlooked in our politics. But they matter to families. They matter to kids. And they’ve been the work of my life.

So until America’s moms and dads can sleep a little easier, I’m going to keep bringing them up.

read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-child-care-now-costs-more-than-rent-heres-how-to-fix-this-crisis/2016/05/20/9055a200-1dd6-11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html

related:

Hillary Clinton Makes A Bold Pledge To Working Parents
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511933652



Hillary Clinton is hugged by a young student at a KinderCare daycare center May 9, 2016 in Fairfax, Virginia. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

[pinebox]

1. Along with supporting a living wage which helps people pay for it

but she didn't mention that, did she?

[PowerToThePeople]

14. Nope. That is a unicorn. n/t

[oasis]

2. Hillary's team has put together common sense proposals for programs

which can be accomplished.

[snowy owl]

13. You don't know that but she said "she'd fight for it" and that's ok by me.

She can't promise any more than Bernie can. Fighting for these things is honest.

[Iliyah]

3. Yes please!

With my 4th daughter almost here and 3rd is 18 months, I welcome this!

[Perogie]

4. I've read all the links you provided

Nothing in them actually helps Jennifer with her 3 young boys.

Again empty Clinton promises that only sound good on paper but nothing of substance in the details.

[bigtree]

5. Hillary's plan intends

... to make sure that no family ever pays more than 10 percent of its income on child-care expenses. To accomplish this, Clinton would use a combination of subsidized child care and tax credits.

She's planning on rolling out the details in a couple of weeks.


Lily Adams ‏@adamslily
Clinton unveils child care agenda -- and makes audacious promise to families Via @CitizenCohn http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-child-care_us_57313fd7e4b096e9f09275b6 … via @HuffPostPol

[riderinthestorm]

9. Tax credits aren't feasible for most families who can't afford quality care now

They can't wait til April every year to recoup their monthly costs for example.

The parent in Hillary's OP is spending $28,000/ year on childcare. Hillary proposes a $1500/child tax credit for parents in college for example. That doesn't even come close to closing the gap.

Until we have details on how its financed this is all just umicorn promises.

Bernie’s plan to fully fund childcare like Headstart is through the EFT tax that would also pay for free tuition. He's provided a viable funding mechanism for his proposal with the dollar amounts clearly spelled out.

[bigtree]

10. Hillary has also proposed a cap on child care costs.

...you glossed over her proposal to restrict child-care expenses to 10 percent of income and misrepresented that as a $1500. credit.

I haven't found Sanders' 'viable funding mechanism' yet. maybe you can point me to the CC funding mechanism proposal.

[snowy owl]

15. Thanks. Didn't realize his specificity. Good for him.

Instead of tax breaks, why not public schools that start much earlier and are federally subsidized. Let's pick up all kids and give parents true relief. Head start for all starting at birth for those who need it. More taxes for something good. Health care, child care, decent wages and Sherman Anti-Tryst enforcement would do a lot to help our economy.

[polly7]

6. Imo, bringing back decent paying jobs should be a huge priority.

Subsidizing child-care is great, but when there's no work - what really does it do?

[bigtree]

7. kick

[joshcryer]

8. Are their any studies about social / economic benefits of subsidized child care?

[bigtree]

11. Heather Boushey: “Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict.”

Q&A: Heather Boushey on Why Work-Life Policies Aren’t Just ‘Something for the Ladies’

A: In today’s economy, most people who are caregivers are also in the workforce. Their ability to negotiate those day-in, day-out conflicts between the needs of their family and the needs of their job is critical for them to not only be at work, but to be the kind of highly productive workers that our economy needs them to be.

One way to think about this is as a labor-supply issue. If you’re caring for your ailing mom or your toddler, whether or not you can even get a job is entirely conditional on if you can get hours that work for that care, or find some sort of affordable care substitute like a child-care center or a home-health aide.

It’s also an economic issue on the demand side. We’ve seen rising labor-force participation among women, and especially for mothers, so that means family income is dependent on those people working. So to say addressing work-life conflicts is not an economic issue is no longer true. And there’s a really strong productivity argument as well that we see in the empirical literature.

The really striking trend is a decrease in the number of families across the income spectrum with a full-time stay-at-home caregiver. Even the majority of low-income families with children used to have a full-time caregiver, whereas now, increasingly, low-income families have just a single parent. The majority of children born to women under 30, those women are unmarried. If you’re a child in a professional family, chances are that family has two breadwinners.

So that’s a shift in the capacity at home. It’s very different than it looked a generation or two ago, when we laid out our nation’s labor standards and programs. Then, policy makers could look out at the economy and be able to say that for the most part, families had a single wage-earner. So you could talk about what was called a “family wage.”…But today, what does a “family wage” even mean?

...in terms of the hurdles, I think people think of these programs—child care, paid sick days, scheduling predictability—as giving some kind of handout to families. They’re not seeing these policies as things that make it possible for family members to go out there and get a job. It’s really about enabling people to work.

...And part of this also is that we still tend to see policies that help caregivers as just “something for the ladies,” which isn’t about hard-nosed economics….But in a world where women are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two-thirds of American families with children, how we help families cope with care isn’t a “women’s issue” by a long shot. It’s a serious economic issue.

read more: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/03/14/qa-heather-boushey-on-why-work-life-policies-arent-just-something-for-the-ladies/
_________________________________

Home Economics
The family is the building block of our economy. So why do we make it so hard for today’s families to balance home and work?
By Heather Boushey
_______________________________________

Child Care Costs Exceed Rent in Most American Cities, Study Finds

The cost of child care for two children exceeded rent in 500 out of 618 family budget areas, according to a new paper by the Economic Policy Institute - article


Child care

We utilize the Child Care Aware of America (2014) publication Parents and the High Cost of Child Care, which relies on data from the January 2013 State Child Care Resource and Referral Network survey. For the purposes of this study, we use Appendix Table 1, “2013 Average Annual Cost of Full-Time Care by State.” Several states in the survey report data on a delay, including Alabama, California, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming, which report 2012 data, and Nevada, New Hampshire, and New York, which report 2011 data. If an MSA is in multiple states, the dominant state containing the primary city, as defined by the Office of Management and Budget, is used.

For available years, we inflate all data to reflect real 2014 dollars using the Consumer Price Index of child care and nursery school for all urban consumers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2014b).

We calculate our child care costs for our family types based on the following assumptions:

One child = cost of 4-year-old care
Two children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of one school-aged child
Three children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of one school-aged child + one-sixth the cost of one school-aged child
Four children = cost of 4-year-old care + cost of one school-aged child + one-sixth the cost of one school-aged child

The following subsections explain these assumptions in greater detail.

Center care

We use cost estimates for center-based child care in the 570 MSAs. We chose center-based care because it is more regulated than family care, and because the costs of center care do not fluctuate as much as the costs of family care.

Family care

We use cost estimates for family-based care for the remaining 48 rural areas, operating under the assumption that they are simply more accessible to those located in rural areas.

Infant care

The family budgets do not include infant care in their child care costs because we do not have an infant as part of any family type. It should be noted, however, that infant center care is significantly more expensive than 4-year-old center care, so the child care component for some families may be underestimated.

Four-year-old care

Four-year-old care is full-time care. To approximate MSA and non-MSA care costs, we use center and family-based care estimates for all 4-year-olds, taken from Appendix 1 in CCAA (2014).

School-age child care

The survey for school-age care specifically represents the average annual cost of before- and after-school care, and therefore it does not include full-time, weekend, or full-day summer care. Because of the need for 8-year-olds to be in care during the summer, the cost of school-aged child care is somewhat underestimated.

We estimate that 12-year-olds need full-day care during the summer months only; thus, one-sixth the cost of care for one school-aged child is added to families with three and four children. For families with four children, we assume child care is not necessary for the fourth child, who is assumed to be 16 years old.

State-level estimates for school-age child care are not available for Minnesota and North Dakota. Regional averages, based on the Census Bureau regions and divisions, are taken for these states. Minnesota and North Dakota fall into the West North Central Division; for these states we thus use regional averages constructed from the states in this division (Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota).

more: http://www.epi.org/publication/family-budget-calculator-technical-documentation/#definition-of-areas

[joshcryer]

12. Thanks bigtree.

I'm on my phone and googling can be quite tedious ( wasn't doubting, just curious). That EPI report looks good.

[bigtree]

16. »

[mcar]

17. Great OpEd

[Autumn]

18. Looks like a unicorn farting rainbows to me as you hillary supporters so eloquently descibe

campaign issues. It will never happen and to borrow from one of your own co supporters

"why should my tax dollars go to free loaders"

after all,they aren't my kids

But like everything Hill does it's a nice campaign promise.