Can you afford to take care of your children and parents? Biden revives effort to lower costs
WASHINGTON — As President Joe Biden runs for re-election, he is reviving proposals to reshape American life from cradle to grave by lowering child care costs, expanding early childhood education options and making home health aides more available. make for the elderly.
The initiatives were once part of Build Back Better, Biden’s massive legislative agenda that stalled on Capitol Hill two years ago. Now they are what Neera Tanden, the Democratic president’s top domestic policy adviser, describes as “unfinished business.”
While the White House has tried to advance these ideas piecemeal through regulations and executive orders, Biden hopes to get another chance to push more ambitious legislation through Congress in a second term.
As Biden faces an inflation setback on his watch, his team sees an opportunity to promise lower costs for voters who are part of the “sandwich generation” — those simultaneously responsible for young children and aging parents .
Proposals involving what is collectively known as the care economy could prove particularly powerful among women, who are more likely to hold low-paid jobs as caregivers or have their careers sidelined by the need to care for family members. If successful, Biden would bring the United States more in line with other wealthy countries, where generous safety net programs are the norm.
“There are elements of our policy that often hold us back,” Tanden said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Families have to scrounge around for childcare, and they’re making that difficult decision about whether they can really get everyone to work. Family or not.”
Biden wants to put hundreds of billions of dollars into nationwide paid family leave, federal subsidies for child care, universal access to preschool and home care for the elderly and disabled.
The challenge is to convince Americans—and their representatives on Capitol Hill—that health care is not a private issue, but an economic issue that could be fundamental to more jobs and better opportunities. In 2022, more than 11% of parents had to refuse a job, quit a job or change jobs due to childcare problems.
“If we want the best economy in the world, we have to have the best healthcare economy in the world,” Biden said in a speech to healthcare workers and others in Washington last month. “Really and truly. They are not inconsistent. They are consistent.”
His goals have proven elusive. Republicans have pushed back against the high costs of Biden’s proposals and his plan to finance them by raising taxes on the wealthy. They also worry that efforts to increase wages for child care workers could ultimately raise costs for families who make too much money to qualify for a subsidy program.
Even a united front among Democrats is difficult to achieve. Although Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has been a supporter of preschool and child care programs, Biden failed earlier in his term to get him on board with other parts of his Build Back Better agenda, a fatal stumbling block because of the the party’s thin margins on Capitol Hill.
Due to Manchin’s opposition, several proposals related to the healthcare economy were jettisoned to create the more limited Inflation Reduction Act, which focused on addressing climate change and prescription drug costs.
Tanden said the White House was forced to find other ways to advance Biden’s ideas.
“Our view is that we should make progress wherever we can,” she said. “So when the legislation didn’t pass, we had to work on an executive order that was really progressive for the entire government.”
The decision, announced just over a year ago, increased wages for teachers in federally funded Head Start programs and lowered costs for families receiving federal child care subsidies. It also aimed to improve child care for military parents and provide better home care for veterans.
Biden announced it at a Rose Garden ceremony, where he described the healthcare economy as “fundamental to who we are as a nation.”
The president talks about the issue in personal terms. Shortly after he was elected to the US Senate in 1972, his first wife and daughter were killed in a car accident, and his two sons, then aged almost three and four, were seriously injured.
“My sister and her husband gave up their house and moved to where I lived just to be there to help me with my children,” he said. “People, you know, without their help I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have made it.’
Despite legislative hurdles and divided control of Congress, Democrats have managed to secure an additional $1 billion for Head Start preschool and child care subsidies for low-income families.
James Singer, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said strengthening the healthcare economy will be central to the president’s pitch to voters, drawing on his upbringing in a working-class area of Pennsylvania.
“President Biden sees the world from the kitchen tables in Scranton and will finish the job of giving families more breathing room at the end of the month, including by tackling the high costs of child and elder care,” Singer said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment, and Trump has not focused on healthcare economy issues as he runs for another term.
Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a group that promotes the rights of such workers in the US, said the government is using “every lever they can” to make progress.
“They’ve done, I think, the most that could be done without Congress actually putting more money into the system,” she said.
Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, has put forward a new regulation that would raise nursing home staffing standards.
“It was also a big political fight against a pretty powerful industry,” Bivens said, adding that the White House “gets some credit for not watering down the rule into irrelevance or even dropping it.”
However, he said more progress must be made through legislation because the central challenge is financial. Americans need help where they are strapped for cash, such as when they have young children or are elderly and no longer working.
“The money has to come from somewhere and for me that is the public sector somewhere, funded by taxes,” Bivens said. Without legislation, “they won’t move the dial much.”
The president’s latest budget request would provide generous child care subsidies for households making less than $200,000 a year, so they would pay about $10 or less a day, while the poorest families would pay nothing. It would also spend money on creating more kindergartens. Biden has requested nearly $15 billion for the programs, but Congress, where Republicans control the House, is unlikely to even consider them.
Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said Biden is approaching these issues from the wrong perspective.
By flooding these sectors with money, he says, “you end up with higher prices and not more access.”
The best approach is to reduce regulations, such as allowing childcare workers to care for another child, which reduces overall costs, Lincicome said.
“There are still plenty of policy reforms possible,” he said. “It will be very rare for DC to make another show.”
___
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives funding from several private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s Standards for Working with Charities, a list of supporters, and funded coverage areas at AP.org.