Elizabeth Warren’s Childcare Proposal Should Be Better
Elizabeth Warren’s childcare proposal is a good start — but it needs to go much further and be a truly free program guaranteed as a social right.
A little girl sits with a doll house and baby carriage, undated. (Flickr)
Elizabeth Warren unveiled a childcare proposal earlier this week. The basic idea is to charge parents a fee equal to 0 to 7 percent of their income to attend various local childcare options with the federal government making up the rest of the cost of that care via grants. I told the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein that I thought it was a good start. Below are four other notes on it based on the way I think about this issue.
1. It needs a home childcare allowance.
In my Family Fun Pack program, parents are given the option of sending their kids to a free public childcare center or receiving a home childcare allowance if they prefer to care for young kids in the home. Warren’s plan currently does not offer support to stay-at-home carers, though her 2006 book The Two-Income Trap acknowledges that such support has to be part of a childcare benefit system.
Home childcare allowances, which provide cash to at-home carers, make a childcare benefit system equitable to all kinds of families and are especially important to rural people and immigrants, who disproportionately do childcare in the home.
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