We hear ad nausea from politicians about "American exceptionalism." Much of the bloviating is based on a sanitized version of American history and a wilfull blindness as to where other advance nations far exceed America. Once such area is investment in the nation's children compared to other advanced nations. There's a reason for America's embarrassing level of child poverty and the fact that the potential of so many of our youth is thrown away. As the chart above from a New York Times article shows, America pays almost nothing towards investing the nation's children and ultimately in our future. A column in the New York Times looks at this embarrassing and shameful reality - a reality the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats (save Joe Manchi and one must assume Sen. Sinema) would like to recity if only by a small measure. Meanwhile, Republicans at both the state level - Glenn Youngkin would slash spending on children and public education to give tax cuts to the wealthy - and federal level continue to pursue their reverse Robin Hood agenda and would eliminate the social safety net entirely,and not just for children. Just as shameful is the fact that the vast majority of evangelicals (who disingenuously claim to be Christ's followers) support the GOP's anti-child policies out a warped belief that non-whites receive the bulk os social safety net spending. Here are column highlights:
If you’re active on social media there’s a decent chance you came across this chart this month from a Times article about how much less the U.S. government spends on young children’s care than other rich countries.
The infrastructure and family plan that President Biden proposed and that’s now being negotiated in Congress is an attempt to shrink the gap through four key policies: a federal paid family and medical leave program, an extension of the child tax credit (in the form of a monthly payment) that debuted this year, subsidized day care, and universal pre-K.
Two weeks ago, however, the unofficial kingmaker of the Senate, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, said Democrats would have to choose only one of the first three proposals. “I don’t believe that we should turn our society into an entitlement society,” he said.
Why does the United States have such an exceptional approach to family and child care benefits, and what are the arguments against expanding them now? Here’s what people are saying.
As Mona Siegel, a historian at California State University, Sacramento, explained in The Times in 2019, the origins of paid parental leave programs date back to 1919, when the first International Congress of Working Women — a group of female trade unionists, feminists and allies from around the world — convened in Washington and called for 12 weeks of paid maternity leave as a medical necessity and a social right.
European and Latin American countries began enacting these policies over the next two decades, but the end of World War II accelerated the process, particularly in Europe, whose economies had been ravaged by mass death and destruction.
“Part of it had to do with fears of demographic decline . . . . . European countries also looked to the welfare state as a means of safeguarding democracy against authoritarianism. In the United States, by contrast, opposition to the Soviet Union — and to any political program that might be maligned as socialist or communist — made building support for social insurance more difficult.
Where things stand today: Out of 185 countries with available data, the United States and Papua New Guinea are the only ones whose citizens are entitled to no paid parental leave. In Europe, on the other hand, parents have paid leaves of 14 months, on average, and children commonly start public school at age 3. Before that point, governments pay a significant portion of the cost of child care. A child allowance similar to the new child tax credit is also common among America’s peer nations.
Half of Americans live in places where there is no licensed child care provider or where there are three times as many children as slots. One in three children also doesn’t attend preschool; those who don’t are more likely to be Hispanic or from low-income families.
[T]the “entitlement” critique that Manchin voiced this month is a running theme in the history of America’s opposition to a larger social safety net. At its root is a centuries-old tendency to sort the population into productive makers and unproductive takers, a binary that formed the basis of “producerism”: the idea that people who made and grew things were most valuable to society.
“Entitlement” logic may be one reason the child tax credit is less popular than its proponents had hoped. When the Biden administration made all but the most well-off families eligible for monthly checks of up to $300 per child this summer, Democrats predicted that the program would be a big hit. But in a recent poll of registered voters, only 36 percent said it should be made permanent.
Today, many social conservatives still oppose state-subsidized child care as a form of social engineering. “Democrats don’t want to put the option to stay home on equal footing with day care,” The Washington Examiner wrote in an editorial in May. “They know that, overwhelmingly, it would be mothers who choose to care for children full time, and these are the very complementary gender roles that they want to eradicate.”
It’s a similar story with opposition to universal pre-K. New research has shown that public pre-K programs have the potential to improve children’s development and long-term well-being, if not their standardized test scores. But some argue that these benefits can be achieved through other methods — more time at home with a parent, for example — and that it’s not the government’s role to favor one at the exclusion of others.
In some conservative intellectual circles, “entitlement” logic still shapes opposition to state-sponsored paid leave programs. “If the private sector doesn’t provide it and we have to go to the government to get it, then you’re relying on the government,” Rachel Greszler of the Heritage Foundation said in 2019. “You’re not relying on yourself.”
But this argument may hold less sway with the American public on paid leave than it does with the child allowance: A recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that 73 percent of adults surveyed supported federal funding for paid leave. According to another poll conducted in May, 69 percent of respondents, including 55 percent of surveyed Republicans, would support such a policy even if it raised their taxes.
Public pre-K for children ages 3 and 4 was the winner, with half the experts choosing it. They said it was most likely to achieve multiple goals of family policy:
· It could help decrease poverty and ease family life by making child care free for toddlers.
· It could increase gender equality by enabling mothers to work.
· It could decrease long-term inequality by giving children from different backgrounds the same preparation for kindergarten.
“When my collaborators and I have explored different outcomes — employment, wages, poverty — across a range of wealthy countries, the policy that has had the most powerful effect has been universal early childhood education,” said Joya Misra, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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