Meghan Daum
I’m Happily Child-Free but I Still Support Universal Daycare
Elizabeth Warren’s plan would be good for everyone. It might also help us rethink the gender pay gap.
The Green New Deal contains a lot of great ideas that would be tough to pull off: net-zero greenhouse emissions in 10 years, the right to free public college education, student loan forgiveness programs, and immediate halts to home foreclosures and evictions, to name a few. Like many, I was perplexed that there seemed to be at least one glaring omission. What about universal subsidized daycare? “Gee, finally!” I said when Democratic Presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren announced such a plan a few weeks ago, calling on the very wealthy to foot the bill for a $70 billion-a-year program that would allow families to enroll children under 5 in daycare that would not exceed more than 7 percent of their incomes.
It’s hardly a new idea. Plenty of Democrats have floated subsidized daycare proposals in the past. Whether or not Warren’s plan is economically or politically feasible, the candidate deserves props for prioritizing an issue that the shapers of the Green New Deal somehow forgot about. Labor statistics show that over the last 50 years, the number of parents in the workforce has…
