Amid Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, cratering markets and retirement accounts, and inflation at a 40-year high, President Joe Biden gave his first State of the Union address.
Biden couldn’t help but cover for the crimes of his cronies in the teachers unions during COVID-19.
To fight inflation and, as he laughably claimed, lower the deficit, Biden pledged to cut the cost of child care. Buried in this fallacious argument was an even more insidious falsehood: “My plan will cut the cost in half for most families and help parents, including millions of women, who left the workforce during the pandemic because they couldn’t afford child care, to be able to get back to work.”
It’s true that millions of women were forced out of the workforce over the past two years, but it wasn’t due to the pandemic — and it wasn’t due to the pandemic’s impact on paid child care. It was due to school closures, plain and simple. It was the fault of Biden’s teachers union allies.
Nearly two-thirds of the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic were once held by women. As recently as January, 6% of elementary school parents still couldn’t work due to child care obligations. Daycares reopened, but in blue cities, schools did not. Women paid the price.
“For each additional day of in-person schooling, we calculated between a half- and a one-percentage-point narrowing of the gap in mothers’ labor force participation relative to women without children and to fathers, respectively,” a Duke University study found. “These associations remained significant when controlling for state-level COVID-19 infection rates.”
Although child care remains a wildly overregulated industry, it was the teachers unions keeping classrooms closed and subject to ridiculous quarantine rules, not greedy au pairs, that robbed mothers of their careers. Biden does not deserve a pass for what he and his political allies helped cause here.
