From an article in National Review criticizing Biden's proposed "Build Back Better" (BBB) legislation, "which," the author complains, "would create a large new federal childcare program":
Childcare costs are high enough already, but the new childcare program would increase them further. Under the heading of "quality regulation," BBB requires that childcare workers be paid as much as elementary-school teachers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020), elementary-school teachers earned an average of $63,930 annually in 2019, compared to an average of $25,510 for childcare workers. That is, under BBB, childcare facilities would have to pay childcare workers 151 percent more. Because $63,930 is nowhere near what equates supply with demand in the childcare market, its operation would have to change dramatically in order to comply with the statute. Perhaps childcare workers would be required to hold master's degrees, or be represented by unions that could otherwise limit supply the way they do for kindergarten teachers.
Suppose that this passage was on a standardized test measuring the reading comprehension skills of high-schoolers. You know the kind of thing I have in mind. One of the questions might be something like:
Which of the following statements would the author of the above passage most likely agree with:
A. Child care workers are under paid
B. Kindergarten teachers are over paid
C. Both child care workers and kindergarten teachers should be paid more
D. You can't tell what the author thinks about the salaries of child care workers and elementary school teachers.
It's clear that B. is the correct answer, right? The author is what I'd call a market fundamentalist (or evangelist). He thinks that raising the salaries of child care workers would throw off the balance between the supply of workers and the demand for their labor. Kindergarten teachers are paid astounding sums only because their union has accomplished just that—interrupted the sacred operation of supply and demand—and, if the author is trying to veil his disdain, he hasn't succeeded. The Biden administration wants child care workers to earn what elementary-school teachers earn. The author thinks that's exactly backwards. Elementary school teachers should earn what child care workers do: $25,510 per annum. For that's what the market has decreed.
"Childcare costs are high enough already," he asserts. The natural impulse is to agree, but, according to the god he worships, it isn't really true. Before my oldest (of two) started kindergarten, our household childcare costs were in the range of $30 to $35k per year. I thought that was "high enough"—essentially double the mortgage, for instance. Do the math, however. The kids got to what they called "school" at around 7 in the morning and were picked up by about 5:30 in the evening. Let's say, to keep the numbers round and the estimate conservative, 10 hours per day, times 5 days per week, times 50 weeks per year, times 2 kids. That's 5000 hours of care, conservatively, and including lunch and snacks every day. The cost was about $6 per hour, or a little more than $30,000 per year.
The problem with a free-market child care system is that it doesn't work. For the consumer, it isn't affordable, and for the supplier there is simultaneously no money to be made. Maybe the clearest way of demonstrating this is just to point out that the workers, if they have kids themselves, can only dream of being able to afford the child care that they are themselves providing. The system is plainly broken and the solution of the National Review writer is . . . whatever you do, don't tinker with the brokenness!
By the way, though with different details it's pretty much "ditto" for health care: the free market doesn't work in that field either, and Republicans can't bring themselves to admit it. Sort of a pattern.
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