was<\/a> $67,521. If this was your state\u2019s median income, then having a family income just $1 higher than that would result in you being ineligible for childcare subsidies in 2022, even as the unsubsidized price of childcare skyrockets due to the wage and other mandates in the Democratic proposal.<\/p>\nThis is obviously a perverse outcome, and it\u2019s not clear whether lawmakers even realize what they are about to do.<\/p>\n
Under this scenario, there will be many dual-earning couples who cannot afford childcare if both of them continue to work but could afford childcare if one of them quit their job and thereby brought their family income below the eligibility cutoff. Normally, people who quit jobs to take care of their kids do so in order to save the money they\u2019d have to spend on childcare. Under this plan, they would have to quit their job in order to afford childcare!<\/p>\n
For all the talk of childcare benefits being a boon to women\u2019s labor force participation, this design clearly pushes against it by making it virtually impossible for a dual-earning, middle-class couple to afford childcare in the first three years of the program.<\/p>\n
As with most of the goofy designs Democrats come up with, this problem is an easy one to solve. Making it so that all incomes are eligible for the income-based subsidies starting in year one would make it so that at least middle-class parents are spared from this perverse outcome, though higher-income parents would still be hit with it. And of course simply copying and pasting the Democrats\u2019 pre-K proposal but applying it to ages zero to two would solve the problem entirely.<\/p>\n
As it stands now though, the Democrats are walking towards disaster, both as a policy matter and, very likely, as a political matter.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trying to run a childcare system using market prices runs into three main problems. The\u00a0wages for childcare providers wind up very low. The\u00a0costs\u00a0for parents wind up very high. Paying the costs out of pocket requires families to undergo major drops in their standard of living when they have a child and creates asymmetries between identical [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2801,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357626"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":357627,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357626\/revisions\/357627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}