PAUL KRUGMAN: Democrats for family values

Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019 -- For millions of Americans with children, life is a constant, desperate balancing act. They must work during the day, either because they're single parents or because decades of wage stagnation mean that both parents must take jobs to make ends meet. Yet quality child care is unavailable or unaffordable.

Posted 10:00 a.m. Feb 23, 2019 — Updated 10:00 a.m. Feb 23, 2019

EDITOR'S NOTE: Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist for The New York Times since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography.

For millions of Americans with children, life is a constant, desperate balancing act. They must work during the day, either because they’re single parents or because decades of wage stagnation mean that both parents must take jobs to make ends meet. Yet quality child care is unavailable or unaffordable.

And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Other wealthy countries either have national child care systems or subsidize care to put it in everyone’s reach. It doesn’t even cost all that much. While other advanced countries spend, on average, about three times as much as we do helping families — so much for our vaunted “family values” — it’s still a relatively small part of their budgets. In particular, taking care of children is much cheaper than providing health care and retirement income to seniors, which even America does.

Furthermore, caring for children doesn’t just help them grow up to be productive adults. It also has immediate economic benefits, making it easier for parents to stay in the workforce.

Over the past 20 years, women’s prime-age employment in the U.S. has lagged ever further behind the rest of the advanced world — at this point we’re well below even Japan. And lack of child care is probably one main reason.

So child care really should be an important part of the progressive agenda. Hillary Clinton had a serious plan back in 2016, but the news media was too busy obsessing over emails to pay attention. And if you ask me, Elizabeth Warren’s new proposal isn’t getting as much attention as it should.

For the Warren proposal is the kind of initiative that, if enacted, would change millions of lives for the better, yet could actually happen in the near future.

Among other things, unlike purist visions of replacing private health insurance with “Medicare for all,” providing child care wouldn’t require imposing big new taxes on the middle class. The sums of money involved are small enough that new taxes on great wealth and high incomes, which are desirable on other grounds, could easily raise sufficient revenue.

The logic of the Warren plan is fairly simple (although some commentators are trying to make it sound complex). Child care would be regulated to ensure that basic quality was maintained and subsidized to make it affordable. The size of the subsidy would depend on parents’ incomes: lower-income parents would get free care, higher-income parents would have to pay something, but nobody would have to pay more than 7 percent of income.

Warren’s advisers put the budget cost at $70 billion a year, or around one-third of one percent of GDP. That’s not chicken feed, but it’s not that much for something that could transform so many lives.

It is, for example, well under half the revenue lost due to the Trump tax cut, which seems to have been used mainly for share buybacks. And it’s a tiny fraction of what it would cost to replace all private health insurance with a public program.

So what are the objections to this plan?

I’m hearing from a few people on the left who complain that the plan doesn’t go far enough — that it should involve free, direct public provision of child care, not subsidies to private provision. There’s certainly a case for a more expansive policy. There’s also no chance that it will happen anytime soon.

The perfect here is the enemy of the good.

Meanwhile, on the right there are the usual cries of “socialism,” which these days means anything to the left of eating poor people’s babies.

More interestingly, I’m seeing at least some commentary on the right that doesn’t just push back against the whole idea of making it easier for mothers to work, it wants us to go back to the days when families could “live on one income.”

Realistically, of course, that’s not going to happen, and not just because 30 percent of U.S. children live in single-parent households. And bear in mind that even as conservatives bemoan the decline of the traditional male breadwinner, they’re pushing policies like Medicaid work requirements that basically force mothers out of the home.

The bottom line is that Warren’s proposal is impressive: It’s workable, affordable and would do a huge amount of good.

And while this isn’t a horse-race column — I’m not arguing that Warren necessarily will or even should be the Democratic presidential nominee — the field needs more policy ideas like this: medium-size, medium-priced proposals that could deliver major benefits without requiring a political miracle.

Right now, all the real contenders for the Democratic nomination are solidly progressive, but so far some seem either underbriefed on policy issues — there’s been far too much fumbling over Medicare for all — or too committed to sweeping, maximalist policy visions to think seriously about what they might truly be able to do if their party takes the White House and Senate next year.

Visions and values are great, but Democrats also need to be ready to hit the ground running with plans that might actually turn into legislation. And so far, Warren is setting the pace.

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