The Phony Children’s Crusade

Children are probably the easiest demographic to support without qualification in American political culture. They are, as Whitney Houston famously reminded us, the future, and no significant political actor can afford to be seen as an enemy of the future.

Yet even here there’s a catch, as New Republic contributor Elliot Haspel writes. Some of the most prominent advocates of expanded early childcare in America are the leaders of the corporate business community—and these selfsame defenders of a better-resourced system of child support and education that can benefit children and working parents alike are determined to undermine any public funding for any nationwide childcare initiative to get any serious traction. The basic regressive playbook runs as follows, Haspel writes:

By pushing for deeper and deeper cuts to corporate taxation and taking advantage of every available tax loophole, corporations are further starving a system that is not working for parents, childcare practitioners, or children. The harm here is obvious: With corporate taxes bottomed out, there’s not only less public money overall, but the need arises for additional sales or income tax, costs that are largely borne by the same struggling workers who already can’t find or afford quality early care. It allows the richest people in the country to pass the check to middle- and low-income families.

Even as businesses seek to sidestep footing the bill for federal childcare programs, they know all too well how the status quo set of arrangements harms their profits. “There is now sizable data,” Haspel writes, “on how a lack of reliable, affordable, high-quality childcare hurts employee recruitment, retention, and productivity—and keeps many potential workers out of the labor force altogether—which is a particular problem in a tight labor market.” One recent study places the business costs associated with the ad hoc system of mostly parent-subsided childcare at $13 billion—and that’s just for families with children aged three and under.

This self-serving, hypocritical posture also has a family-entitled avatar—first daughter Ivanka Trump, who has eagerly seized the mantle of family-care advocacy while no less eagerly celebrating the many cruel policies of family deprivation issuing from the Trump White House. Last December, Ivanka Trump presided over a White House summit on childcare and paid family leave, even as the administration led by her father has beggared basic social service provisions to subsidize corporate tax cuts—and brought a vicious regime of family separation to America’s southern border. The rank dishonesty of the summit provoked a letter of protest from nearly 100 child and family advocacy groups, which called out “the administration’s callous track record on family policy, which has been nothing less than devastating for children and families.”

Even with some modest hikes in childcare subsidy funding, the latest Trump federal budget has rolled back support for several key programs lending aid to women and children in need. And the fallout from the 2017 tax cut continues to be disastrous. Even a return to a still-generous marginal corporate tax rate of 28 percent (over the present 21 percent rate) would produce a boost in childcare spending of $700 billion over the next decade, according to a childcare bill recently introduced by Democratic Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey. But don’t look for any such largesse to come from the corporate citizens of Trump’s America. They learned long ago that, important as the issue of early childcare support may be for their bottom lines, one key dictate always takes precedence: Talk is cheap.

—Chris Lehmann, Editor