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Biden Looks to Lower Care Costs 05/08 06:09
WASHINGTON (AP) -- As President Joe Biden runs for reelection, he's
resurrecting proposals to reshape American life from the cradle to the grave by
lowering the cost of child care, expanding preschool opportunities and making
home aides more available to the elderly.
The initiatives were once part of Build Back Better, Biden's gargantuan
legislative agenda that stalled on Capitol Hill two years ago. Now they're what
Neera Tanden, the Democratic president's top domestic policy adviser, describes
as "unfinished business."
Although the White House has tried to advance these ideas in a piecemeal
fashion through regulations and executive orders, Biden hopes to have another
opportunity to push more ambitious legislation through Congress in a second
term.
PRESSURES ON THE 'SANDWICH GENERATION'
As Biden faces blowback for inflation under his watch, his team sees an
opportunity to promise lower costs for voters who are part of the "sandwich
generation" -- those responsible for young children and aging parents at the
same time.
Proposals involving what's collectively known as the care economy might
prove particularly potent with women, who are more likely to hold low-paying
jobs as caregivers or see their careers sidelined by the need to take care of
family members. If successful, Biden would bring the United States more in line
with other wealthy countries, where generous safety net programs are the norm.
"There are elements of our policies that tend to keep us back," Tanden said
in an interview with The Associated Press. "Families need to scrounge around
for child care, and they make those hard decision about whether they can really
have everyone working in the family or not."
Biden wants to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into nationwide paid
family leave, federal subsidies for child care, universal preschool access and
home care for the elderly and disabled.
The challenge is convincing Americans -- and their representatives on
Capitol Hill -- that caregiving is not a private issue but an economic one that
could be foundational to higher employment and better opportunities. In 2022,
more than 11% of parents had to turn down a job, leave a job or change their
job because of child care issues.
"If we want the best economy in the world, we have to have the best
caregiving economy in the world," Biden said last month in a speech to care
workers and others in Washington. "We really do. They are not inconsistent.
They are consistent."
RESISTANCE ON CAPITOL HILL
His goals have proved elusive. Republicans have bristled at the high cost of
Biden's proposals and his plan to fund them by raising taxes on the wealthy.
They're also concerned that efforts to raise pay for child care workers could
end up increasing costs for families who make too much money to qualify for a
subsidy program.
Even a united front among Democrats is hard to achieve. Although Sen. Joe
Manchin, D-W.Va., has been a supporter of preschool and child care programs,
Biden was unable to get him on board with other parts of his Build Back Better
agenda earlier in his term, a fatal stumbling block due to the party's thin
margins on Capitol Hill.
Because of Manchin's resistance, several proposals involving the care
economy were jettisoned to create the more limited Inflation Reduction Act,
which focused on addressing climate change and the cost of prescription drugs.
WITH LEGISLATION STALLED, LOOKING FOR WORKAROUNDS
Tanden said the White House was forced to find other ways to push forward
Biden's ideas.
"Our view is that we should make progress wherever we can," she said. "So
when the legislation wasn't passed, we got to work on an executive order that
really was forward-leaning across the government."
The order, which was announced a little more than a year ago, raised pay for
teachers in federally funded Head Start programs and lowered costs for families
receiving federal child care subsidies. It also aimed to improve child care for
parents in the military and provide better home care for veterans.
Biden announced it in a Rose Garden ceremony, where he described the care
economy as "fundamental to who we are as a nation."
The president talks about the issue in personal terms. Soon after he was
elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, his first wife and baby daughter were
killed in a car accident, and his two sons -- nearly 3 and 4 years old at the
time -- were badly injured.
"My sister and her husband gave up their home and moved into where I lived
just to be there to help me with my kids," he said. "Folks, you know, I
couldn't have done it without their help. I couldn't have made it."
Despite the legislative hurdles and divided control of Congress, Democrats
succeeded in getting an additional $1 billion for Head Start preschool and
child care subsidies for low-income families.
DUSTING OFF BIDEN'S PITCH FOR THE ELECTION
James Singer, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said that bolstering the
care economy will be central to the president's pitch to voters, drawing on his
upbringing in a working-class area of Pennsylvania.
"President Biden sees the world from kitchen tables in Scranton, and will
finish the job to give families more breathing room at the end of the month,
including by tackling the high costs of child and elder care," Singer said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment, and Trump has
not focused on care economy issues as he runs for another term.
Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a group
that promotes the rights of such workers in the U.S., said the administration
is pulling "every lever that they can" to make progress.
"They've done the maximum, I think, of what can be done short of Congress
actually putting more funding in the system," she said.
Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal
think tank, singled out a new regulation increasing standards for staffing
nursing homes.
"It was also a big political fight against a pretty powerful industry,"
Bivens said, adding that the White House gets "some real credit for not
watering the rule down to irrelevance or even just dropping it."
However, he said, more progress would need to come through legislation
because the central challenge is financial. Americans need help at points where
they're strapped for cash, such as when they have young children or are elderly
and no longer working.
"The money has to come from somewhere and that somewhere to me is the public
sector, financed by taxes," Bivens said. Without legislation, "they are not
going to move the dial a ton on this."
PROPOSALS TO TARGET ASSISTANCE BY HOUSEHOLD INCOME
The president's latest budget request would provide generous child care
subsidies for households that make less than $200,000 a year so that they would
pay around $10 or less a day, with the poorest families paying nothing. It
would also dedicate funding to creating more preschools. Biden has asked for
nearly $15 billion for the programs, but it's unlikely to even be considered by
Congress, where Republicans control the House.
Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato
Institute, said Biden is approaching these issues from the wrong perspective.
By flooding these sectors with money, he said, "you're actually going to end
up with higher prices and not more access."
The best approach is to reduce regulation, such as allowing child care
workers to take care of another child, reducing overall costs, Lincicome said.
"There's plenty of policy reforms to be had," he said. "It's just very
rarely going to be D.C. creating another program."
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