New York Desperately Needs Universal Childcare
It’s time to end the nightmare of means-tested and debilitatingly expensive childcare in New York, socialist state senator Jabari Brisport writes in Jacobin. We need a universal childcare system, paid for by taxing the rich.
After touring New York talking to parents and child care providers, it is abundantly clear that the entire system of assigning subsidies based on income (known as “means-testing”) is fundamentally flawed. (Segun Osunyomi / Unsplash)
For three and a half years, the director of a Long Island childcare center has not taken home a paycheck. She has woken up early and stayed up late running the center, but to keep it open and keep paying her staff, she had to take herself entirely off the payroll.
Even so, the program has only lasted because members of the local community have contributed their own time, money, and energy painting the walls, fixing the boiler, paying for medicine, and more. As the director explains all this to me at her center, she pauses regularly to help care for the children that surround us.
I met her and visited her center during a ten-week childcare listening tour across New York State. On this tour, it quickly became clear that her story and the story of this center are not the exception, but the norm. The entire childcare industry is hanging on by a thread.
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