A new child care bill is being dropped into the legislative hopper of the 101st Congress almost daily, as our nation’s lawmakers rush to paint themselves as “caring and compassionate.” The many bills sort themselves into two very different varieties: liberal vs. profamily.
All the liberal child care bills have the essential requirement that, in order for a family to receive any benefits, daycare must be paid for in money. Mothers and other relatives who provide child care for love and without money are denied any and all benefits under the liberal bills.
The profamily bills would give benefits to children rather than only to paid caretakers. Using a tax-credit-per-child formula, the profamily bills assure 100 percent freedom of choice by parents and do not discriminate against mothers or other relatives who care for their own children without cash payments.
The liberal child care bills would create a federal administrator of baby-sitting and impose federal regulations and control that will interfere with the curriculum of religious daycare, cause legal harassment of religious daycare, raise dramatically the cost of neighborhood daycare, and drive low-cost daycare out of business or underground. The profamily child care bills would not create any federal bureaucracy of regulators, and they would preserve local control over daycare licensing.
The liberal daycare bills would subsidize upper-income families at the expense of low-income families. The explanation for this is simple: under the liberal daycare bills, the mother must be employed and, obviously, if she is the second wage-earner in the family, this makes the family income considerably higher than single-income families where the mother is a fulltime homemaker.
The profamily daycare bills, on the other hand, would benefit low-income families even when the mother is a fulltime homemaker. The profamily bills would especially help very low-income working families through an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a proven and popular formula in our current tax system that rewards people for working instead of for not working.
The liberal daycare bills would reward agencies that are paid for daycare services but penalize families that take care of their children out of love and commitment without payment. On the other hand, the profamily child care bills would not substitute government decisions or incentives for any parental choice.
The liberal daycare bills would increase taxes because the new federal baby-sitting bureaucracy and regulatory system would grow massively and rapidly. Their leading academic guru, Professor Edward Zigler, has talked grandiosely of a future in which the public schools assume control of children from the time they are in the womb, looking toward an eventual cost of $100 billion a year.
The profamily bills, on the other hand, are essentially tax reduction to help families spend their own money and take care of their own money and take care of their own members in whatever way they see fit.
The advocates of federalizing daycare use three catch words to promote their discriminatory and expensive plans. They claim that their goals are availability, affordability, and quality.
The truth is that their very proposals would reduce all three. Quality child care is clearly mother care or relative care, but the liberal daycare bills would blatantly discriminate against that kind of care and substitute stranger care.
The proposed federal regulations would greatly reduce both affordability and availability. Under a study made last year by Child Care Review, the principal liberal daycare bill would actually cost parents nearly $1.2 billion in additional payments and displace more than 786,000 children who are now in licensed facilities.
The liberal bill would have the effect of closing 12,600 daycare centers, or 20.3 percent of all licensed facilities now in operation, because of the cost increases resulting from federal regulations. The principal reason for the cost increases is that daycare is such a labor-intensive industry that more than half of daycare cost goes for staff.
If the federal regulations mandate lower staff-to-child ratios than are now required by state regulations, the cost of most daycare facilities will rise dramatically. The home states of Senators Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy already have stringent regulations, and so federal legislation appears to be an attempt to impose Connecticut and Massachusetts-style regulations on the entire country.
Finally, the liberal daycare bills prohibit any benefits to religious daycare and would effectively chase most of it out of business. That would be a tragedy because religious daycare is a principal source of available, affordable daycare in the inner cities.
