In her parting remarks to her staff this week, Elizabeth Warren took a moment to talk about the lasting mark her candidacy had left on the race. “You know, a year ago, people weren’t talking about a two-cent wealth tax, universal child care, canceling student loan debt for 43 million Americans while reducing the racial wealth gap or breaking up big tech,” she said. “And now they are.”
She’s right — particularly about child care. Ms. Warren led the pack by putting out a groundbreaking proposal for public child care last February; Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg eventually followed suit. Three candidates with universal child care plans may not sound like all that much — but consider that before this race, no major candidate running for the White House had mentioned universal child care since the 1970s. That three top-tier contenders had competing plans demonstrates that this issue is an increasingly salient one for American voters. Child care is also an increasingly dire crisis facing the country — one that demands an equally aggressive response.
Of course, two of those contenders have left the race; the Democratic primary has essentially narrowed to a two-man contest between Mr. Sanders and Joe Biden. But where is Mr. Biden’s plan for how to address the broken child care system American families face? Without one, he risks being out of step with this historic moment.
It wasn’t so long ago that the notion of not just universal child care but publicly run universal child care was downright mainstream. The United States has had such a system in place before: During World War II, as men were shipped off to fight abroad and women were called to work in factories, President Franklin Roosevelt funneled funding from a wartime infrastructure bill to creating and running a network of child care centers. They cost about $10 a day in today’s dollars for 12 hours of care year round, and the quality was high. They attracted qualified, trained teachers and had low child-to-teacher ratios.
Mothers loved them. In exit interviews in California, women gave them a nearly 100 percent satisfaction rating. They also improved children’s education, employment and earnings later in life, while increasing how much their mothers were able to work. But while child advocates lobbied to keep the program in place after the war, President Harry Truman shut it down as soon as Japan surrendered.
The idea of enacting a federally funded universal child care system didn’t disappear, however, and it nearly became a fixture of American life in the 1970s. As more women entered the paid work force, and research started to coalesce around the importance of early education for children’s development, Congress drafted legislation in the late 1960s that would create a federally funded but locally administered network of child care centers.
It was a bipartisan initiative, one that, at first, President Richard Nixon seemed to support. He himself had called for “a national commitment to providing all American children an opportunity for healthful and stimulating development during the first five years of life.” The legislation passed in 1971.
Then Nixon did a 180 at the behest of his special assistant Pat Buchanan, who told me in 2014, “My view back then was that it was philosophically out of the question for the Nixon administration to support a major new welfare program.” Nixon issued a scathing veto that called it “family-weakening” and “truly a long leap into the dark for the United States government,” comparing it to communism.
The toxicity of his words infected the debate over child care for decades — and helped bury the history of public child care in America. The 1980s and ’90s were consumed with stories of satanic rituals at day cares and studies claiming that child care would ruin children. Even as recently as 2016, the Republican Party platform initially opposed universal preschool because it “inserts the state in the family relationship in the very early stages of a child’s life.”
But it’s an issue that policymakers can no longer afford to ignore. The cost of child care has increased nearly exponentially in recent decades, far outpacing inflation. Now it consumes more of the average family’s budget than health care, transportation or food, and in most places it rivals housing, too. Full-time center care often costs more than tuition and fees for public college. That money still doesn’t buy quality, though. A 2006 survey found that fewer than 10 percent of American day care centers provided high-quality care. And that’s for the families lucky enough to get their child a spot: More than half of Americans live in a neighborhood without enough child care seats for all the children who need them.
Even the Democratic presidential hopefuls who didn’t release plans as detailed and bold as Ms. Warren’s or Mr. Sanders’s talked about child care. Amy Klobuchar sponsored the Child Care for Working Families Act, a Democratic proposal in Congress with similar aims of universal coverage. Mike Bloomberg’s early-education plan supported higher-quality and lower-cost child care and universal preschool. Even President Trump has talked about child care, proposing on the campaign trail to increase tax deductions to cover the cost and calling for a one-time $1 billion investment in his White House budget.
This is a vast, complicated crisis that is dampening our entire economy. It makes sense for presidential hopefuls to put forward ideas that are bold enough to match the stakes.
But so far, although Mr. Biden has supported universal preschool in the past, he has been more or less silent on what parents of younger children should do. And while today he supports an increased child tax credit that can help families cover the cost, he wrote an op-ed article in 1981 arguing that the credit subsidizes the “deterioration of the family” and “encourages a couple” to “evade full responsibility for their children” by helping them put those children in day care. The article argued against any universal government child care assistance because it would go to well-to-do families, but it also repeated language from Republicans who fearmongered about child care.
The best way for Mr. Biden to disavow any antiquated positions and to assure voters that he is in tune with their most pressing needs would be to release his own universal child care plan. He doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel; he can simply look back at our own history and take inspiration from what we would have had if things had gone slightly differently.
Better late than never.
Bryce Covert is a contributor at The Nation and a contributing opinion writer.
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