--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Anna North: Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job or are you stuck in one you've outgrown or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's talk about infrastructure. Infrastructure Week. It's Infrastructure Week on Today Explained. We've been talking about building things, transit, sewage systems, bridges, and roads, but what about working on ourselves?
--:-- Anna North: Seriously, a big part of President Biden's infrastructure vision is about something they're calling human infrastructure. If those words don't mean much to you, maybe these two will. Childcare.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I recently received a letter from my child's daycare for rate increases. So now five days per week for preschoolers is $1,257 a month. And for toddlers, it's going to be $1,495. I mean, that's $3,000 a month for two kids. That's crazy.
--:-- Anna North: How are you supposed to afford that? I'm just so shocked, I guess, at how much it is and how much of a financial strain that is essential into just living and working and not really understanding, like, how has it gone on so long being this much?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how are people doing this? Like, we're doing it. We're making it work. But it's just like, I just feel like the majority of Americans have to be, like, crushed.
--:-- Anna North: So we got pregnant in the middle of the pandemic, and which was just kind of a strange experience. But I think there's a lot of changes going on when your son's pregnant and then you have the baby, which is this obviously life-changing experience.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you're new parents and scrambling and just trying to survive. And then there's just this lingering thing in the back like, wait, what's going to happen when we have to send them to child care? We don't have anything lined up.
--:-- Anna North: There's just the wait list that these places can be a couple of years and then other times they don't take infants. And there's really just, there's not a clear path of, hey, I have my first baby. We want to continue to both work full time. How do we get into a child care facility?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you're kind of on your own, constantly calling. And they'll say, check back in next month.
--:-- Anna North: It's hopefully a relief to the Today Explained listeners you just heard from that child care is having a big moment right now. And to find out how we got to this moment, we reached out to Nancy Fulbright.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I hate audio. Just so you know, I hate all audio. I hate all things audio. She's more of a print person. Professor Emerita of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: Back to the big moment. Childcare, eldercare, both, I think, having a big moment. And I think big moments come when people kind of face a shock together and they realize that they have something in common and they have a lot to gain by cooperating to solve it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And was the shock the pandemic? Yes, the shock was the pandemic, which led to school and childcare closures, which led to a realization that a lot of us are doing two or three things at the same time and juggling family responsibilities and work responsibilities, and that it's a very fragile kind of vulnerable system that we rely on and we would do better to develop something a little, you know, more reliable, more stable, more of a base.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: It's important to remember here, though, that this is not the first time the nation faced a shock like this on child care, right? America goes to war. Men of the army, navy and marines reinforce the battlefront on six continents to save the homes and ideals of free men from Axis domination. We are still short millions of hands. We must call upon women.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Basically, federal funding for daycare centers was set up in order for mothers to enter the labor force. You know, at that time, because of soldiers being abroad, there was a real labor shortage.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: Women are called upon to leave their homes and take jobs. We have a large reserve. They discover that factory work is usually no more difficult than housework. Employers find that women can do many jobs as well as men. Some jobs better.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think a lot of people in our audience might be surprised to learn that there was a functional national childcare plan during World War II.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people point to that as an example of how successful and how efficient a national childcare system was. 27% of Richmond shipbuilders were women. Feminine workers with small children inspired the founding of 35 nursery school units and 10 extended daycare centers which mothered over 1 youngsters at a time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It really helped the war effort. It moved women into factories to engage in production that was really needed.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: You know, overall satisfaction with it was really high. So it was kind of a win-win, considered a real win-win situation, even though it was pretty unconventional.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On their way to work, parents left their hopefuls at one of the nursery schools, knowing that the daily routine, commencing with a physical checkup and followed by organized play would make their children both healthy and happy.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: The 50-cent daily fee included mid-morning and afternoon nourishment, as well as a hot, balanced lunch. Indeed, these were the future citizens in the making.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so what happens when the soldiers come home after the war? Well, there was a lot of concern after the war that there would be a lot of unemployment among veterans.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: And the last thing that the country wanted to do to its veterans was make it hard for them to return to civilian life. So there was a lot of pressure on women who had moved into untraditional, nontraditional jobs to go home and to resume their responsibilities as homemakers and moms.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then with that movement, the rationale for the federal provision of daycare was diminished. And I think the country kind of wanted to return to a pre-war normalcy, as it was called at the time.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: And that's what happened? Women returned home? Actually, a lot of women remained in the workforce after World War II. It had kind of a permanent impact. And women's participation in paid employment grew pretty steadily.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How did that affect child care? Periodically, the issue came up. I think it was recognized as a problem, but it just proved really hard to rally support around a national effort.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: But I think that's changing. And, you know, in a lot of states, there's been more efforts to extend services to kindergarten and pre-kindergarten levels. But, you know, what's really needed and what I think the Biden administration is pushing for is a much bigger and more organized expansion of child care services.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which would be, what, the first expansion of its kind since World War II. Yes, I think that's a very good way to put it. And what's distinctive about it is that it would be virtually universal. That is, most people would be eligible for a very subsidized level of child care services.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: It wouldn't just be targeted at a low-income population. And we know there are lots of people out there who struggle to see why this should be an infrastructure priority. Why should we dump money into childcare over, say, you know, bridges, roads, more conventional infrastructure items?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, first of all, I would say, don't talk about dumping money. Investment. We talk about investment. Investment is something that yields a future rate of return. Investment, by definition, is something that is going to benefit all of us.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: And, you know, some investments are private. We make individual investments and we capture some returns for those. Some investments are social and they benefit a wider group of people in the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, that's really what infrastructure means is investment in infrastructure is about investment in services that are going to yield very positive benefits that are not necessarily going to go to specific individuals or end up in specific bank accounts, but which are going to benefit everybody.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: Build a good road system and you take care of it. Everybody benefits from that. You build a good care infrastructure. Everybody's going to benefit from that. It is so clearly going to benefit everybody. It's so economically rational.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's so economically rational, but there's been no real desire to do something about it on a federal level since World War II forced the government's hand.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: Well, it's like, I think you'd really have to think about the economics of cooperation and how it works. It's very hard to get people to act together in a coordinated way to solve a common threat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's a real analogy with climate change. We have all this evidence about what it's doing, how it's going to harm our future, how it's causing stress right now.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: And yet it's really hard for individuals to see how they can deal with it on an individual basis. And it's very hard to coordinate a collective effort.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sometimes I think as a species, we're not as smart as we should be, but I think we are pretty good at learning. And I think we're getting some pretty profound lessons these days in the need to cooperate.
--:-- Nancy Fulbright: In a minute, why Congress doesn't want to cooperate on care.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today explained comes from chime nobody likes fees and complicated banking says chime and chime gets that says chime chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts so when you set up direct deposit through time they say you get access to fee-free features, such as free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, so much more.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can work on your financial goals through Chime today. You can open an account in two minutes at chime.com slash explained. That's Chime.com slash explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy It almost fall And that means it time to cycle your wardrobe to the cold setting Because while everyone loves a breezy summer outfit let be real layering is even more fun That's why Macy's Fall Fashion Guide has everything you need to piece together the perfect look for you.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can even throw in some textural layers for contrast, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris. Whether your old favorite sweater or coat is on its last threads or you're just craving a new vibe to switch things up, Macy's has got you covered this season.
--:-- Anna North: Find the perfect layering pieces for you by exploring the Macy's Fall Fashion Style Guide. Shop in-store or online at macy's.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anna North, your senior correspondent here at Vox. President Biden would like to do something about child care in America. Remind us what he wants to do.
--:-- Anna North: So the president has had this big push for infrastructure ever since he took office. Part of that is sort of, you know, what folks might more conventionally think of as infrastructure, roads and bridges. And part of it is human infrastructure. It's people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: His American Families Plan, which he announced at the end of April, would invest nearly $2 trillion in programs basically to help people, programs that he deems to be about human infrastructure.
--:-- Anna North: President Biden will introduce the American Families Plan. The administration said it would save the average family $13,000 and offer free... The big part of that is childcare and early education. $200 billion for free universal preschool for three and four year olds.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then another $225 billion for younger kids to help make childcare more affordable for infants and toddlers.
--:-- Anna North: As a single father, when I first got to the Senate, I had two young boys who had just lost their mom and their sister in an automobile accident. If I hadn't had the family I had, my sister, my younger sister, my best friend, and my brother, and my mom helped out, I couldn't have done it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But not everybody has that kind of support. Families earning up to 1.5 times their state's median income would pay no more than 7% of their income for childcare.
--:-- Anna North: If you don't pay for childcare, that might not mean a lot to you, but today, families in some states are spending as much as 30% of their income on childcare, so it would be a big change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The most hard-pressed working families won't have to spend a dime. And then the plan would also boost the wages of childcare workers, So they'd be making $15 an hour or they'd be making as much as kindergarten teachers in certain instances.
--:-- Anna North: So it really it tries to address problems both with how unaffordable child care is, but on the flip side, how the folks who are doing it are making very little money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we sort of laid out the politics of this with our colleague Lee Zoe earlier this week.
--:-- Anna North: I believe all of this spending on so-called human infrastructure is going in the big reconciliation bill, which is, I believe, supposed to only get support from Democrats and not the bipartisan bill that might actually get some Republican votes. Is that correct?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's right. So my understanding is that the bipartisan bill includes roads, bridges and broadband. So sort of things that Biden and the Democrats feel like they can get some Republican votes on and that everything else, childcare, all of these other sort of more human infrastructure issues, they're figuring they're going to have to pass with Democrats only.
--:-- Anna North: Which is to say that all the spending on child care doesn't have bipartisan support? It's a little complicated. I mean, we've seen a few more bipartisan moves toward child care and some of these things in the last few months.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That said, generally, Republicans in Congress have not been a fan of the human infrastructure aspects of Biden's plan.
--:-- Anna North: Let me tell you about the reconciliation bill. It's no more about infrastructure than I am tall. I mean, they're not a fan of spending $2 trillion on this. Roads, bridges and ports. There's none of that in this bill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then there's also a big partisan debate around, should we even have child care in America? Historically, conservatives have been really against subsidizing child care, have been really against sort of universal child care ideas.
--:-- Anna North: And even sometimes the idea of child care at all outside the home, there's been this idea that sending children to daycare is eroding the American family, or this is something basically that mothers should be doing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that might sound archaic to some people, but it's a view that still exists. And, you know, it's certainly something that this legislation is going to encounter as it goes forward.
--:-- Anna North: Are Republicans proposing any alternative plans to Biden's?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There have been some alternatives proposed. I mean, in particular, there's a big debate around whether it's best for families to have the kind of thing that Biden is proposing, which is sort of a subsidized child care system where, you know, your daycare is partially paid for, or whether it's better to just directly give families money.
--:-- Anna North: So Senator Romney had a plan to give, you know, direct payments to families. It does seem like the administration strongly prefers getting kids out of the home and getting both parents into the workforce.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I understand there's an economic reality to that or advantage to that. And yet I also think there's a developmental advantage to a child. If parents want to have one or both remain home to raise a child, there's a child-rearing advantage to that as well.
--:-- Anna North: There have been a few other plans floated in that vein. I think the idea behind those is maybe families don't want to send their kids to daycare. Maybe they want to have, for example, a parent stay home and that they should still get financial support to do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that maybe if we create a big daycare system in America that only helping the folks that want to use daycare So we should just give direct payments and that would help any parent with any kind of care situation that they want
--:-- Anna North: And that has pros and cons, and it's an interesting issue. One thing it doesn't address, though, is things like the pay for child care workers. You're not necessarily raising the wages of the folks who are caring for kids if you're just giving money directly to parents.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I guess the other issue there is that the cost of child care for a lot of people is just exorbitantly expensive. I mean, the cost of child care is a really interesting issue.
--:-- Anna North: A lot of people would argue that sort of in the aggregate, it makes sense for child care to be expensive, right? You're talking about people taking care of sometimes babies and toddlers, really young kids.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the reasons that child care is so expensive is that the ratio of workers to kids has to be pretty low. Like if you're taking care of babies, you know, you want like one person for every few babies.
--:-- Anna North: You don't want a situation where it's like one person taking care of 20 little babies. That's not a great situation for their health and development. So it's a resource intensive thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think, you know, for a lot of folks, there's a sense like, look, taking care of kids is incredibly important. It's fine if it's expensive. It's just not fine that parents have to bear that entire expense.
--:-- Anna North: So like, yeah, maybe workers should be making $15 an hour. Maybe they should be making a lot more than that, you know, and the facility should be nice and kids should have access to enrichment and healthy food and all these things cost money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But parents can't really bear that entire expense. So, you know, the Romney plan gives some of that money back to parents. I don't know that it would necessarily bring costs down, but I'm not sure that anyone totally has a plan for bringing costs down.
--:-- Anna North: I think the Biden plan is more like saying what a lot of countries in Europe have said, which is this is just a costly thing. The government is going to help families bear some of this cost.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Biden's plan, of course, is not just about child care. There's other human infrastructure pieces at play in this proposal.
--:-- Anna North: The American Families Plan is very wide ranging, really hits on a lot of things that folks have been asking for, including it would launch national paid family medical leave programs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To give folks time off to care for a child. You know, we're one of the few wealthy countries that doesn't really have mandated parental leave. So this would start to fix that.
--:-- Anna North: It would also provide folks leave to recover from their own serious illness or seek help after a domestic violence incident. It would provide two years of free community college to anybody who wants it, expanded food assistance for children and adults.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it would also make the child tax credit that's been part of the American Rescue Plan and that folks have started to see the money from, it would make that permanent so that that money would continue to come in and wouldn't expire.
--:-- Anna North: And this is where we really start getting into things that at least some Republicans are not on board with. There's a mandate in this bill to require every employer to offer paid family leave. That sounds good, I guess, on its face until the employer has to come up with the cash to meet the mandate in this bill.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is Biden going to win this argument that infrastructure should include all of these sort of social programs, all of these sort of human elements? This is a liberal wish list.
--:-- Anna North: And how does it add to inflation? Well, spending three and a half to five trillion dollars is not a good idea when you have an inflationary economy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The debate around what is infrastructure is a really interesting debate. And ultimately, it's sort of a debate about terminology and a debate about like salesmanship.
--:-- Anna North: What this would do is incentivize women to rely on the federal government to organize their lives. It takes away from them the ability to organize their family life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The way that advocates will frame this to me is sometimes these things get dismissed as like quote unquote girl stuff, like stuff that's good for women. It's marginal. It doesn't really matter to like everyone. It's just lady things.
--:-- Anna North: Biden has made the decision to say, no, they're infrastructure. Infrastructure is this like, you know, for lack of a better term, this like manly words, like hard hat. I'm always focused on shovel ready jobs, what we can do immediately to get the money out in communities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But that's what care jobs are. They are shovel ready. The workers are ready now.
--:-- Anna North: He's hoping that that's going to get him some support, probably not among your most conservative Republicans, but maybe among voters, maybe among your moderates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Getting folks to look at these things not as like handouts or something negative, but as like something important to really, you know, build the backbone of America.
--:-- Anna North: We'll see if he succeeds. Republicans clearly have not bought into the idea that infrastructure should include human stuff. You know, they're much more on board with it being about roads and bridges. So the push might not work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I think it's been really interesting because it's been just part of this larger argument by Democrats that things like care and things like paid leave are not these ancillary issues, these afterthoughts, but they're actually core to the American economy and core to American well-being.
--:-- Anna North: It's an argument that I hadn't necessarily heard as much before, and it has the potential to be powerful.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Anna North writes about care and education for Vox. You can find her reporting at vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. It's Today Explained. We wrap up Infrastructure Week tomorrow with Secretary Pete, formerly Mayor Pete, before that Pete Buttigieg.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're going to talk about how the Biden administration plans to get basically everything we talked about this week done. Stay tuned. Thanks for listening.
