It was named the “Lie of the Year” by Politifact in 2013: “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it.” It’s what President Barack Obama said before the Obamacare bill took effect and millions of people were thrown off their health plans.
Now, Democrats are telling another whopper, this time promising affordable daycare to all who want it. If parents learned anything from the Obamacare debacle, they should know not to trust Democrats this time either.
The underlying problem that forced so many off their health plans and away from their doctors because of Obamacare is the same one that will disrupt many parents’ lives if President Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar spending plan becomes law. A slew of new federal regulations will drive up the cost of care, forcing providers to change significantly how they do business.
Under Biden’s daycare plan, providers would be forced to nearly double the wages paid to most employees. Since wages are the biggest cost for most providers, this will drive up the price of care for everybody.
In addition to the wage controls, Biden’s daycare plan forces states to adopt additional regulations to make sure the care provided is “high quality.” These additional rules could include minimum staff-to-child ratios, facility upgrades, and minimum educational requirements for staff. Again, all of these new regulations will only drive up costs and disrupt how daycare providers currently operate.
Democrats may claim that these disruptions will only be temporary — that once providers have adapted to the higher costs, then parents should be able to find daycare smoothly. But this ignores three other huge problems with the legislation.
First, in order to hide the true cost of the program, Democrats only authorized it for six years. So, by the time the industry has finally adjusted to the new regime, the funding will run dry.
Second, in another effort to keep costs down, the Democrats means-tested the daycare subsidies on a sliding scale in a way that severely punishes parents who marry. According to University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan, a couple in which each spouse made 75% of the median income would face a $10,000 a year penalty under this provision if they were to get married.
Third, subsidies create demand. Tens or hundreds of thousands of additional parents will immediately look to put their children into commercial daycare. Even without the new regulations, this would put a huge strain on supply. But with the new regulations, the dearth of available providers could be catastrophic, further driving up the cost of care. And to make the supply problem even worse, the legislation specifically discriminates against faith-based daycare providers by blocking them from accessing grants to upgrade their facilities. That could force some providers to shut down just when they are needed most.
For all the rhetoric from Democrats about how horrible the current daycare sector is —
and it is already overregulated
—
nearly three-fourths of all parents say they are happy with their current daycare programs
. These parents are going to be very unhappy when the daycare providers they currently rely on raise prices and disrupt services as they try to meet the slew of new federal regulations coming from the Biden administration.
Instead of punishing dual-earning married couples, and offering nothing to couples in which one spouse stays home with their children, a better approach would be simply to provide all families, regardless of marital or working status, a tax benefit for each of their children that they could then spend however they see fit. Sens. Mitt Romney, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee all have different plans that essentially do this.
Biden gave up on bipartisanship and governing by consensus long ago. But maybe our next president can reach across the aisle and find a way for Congress to make family life more affordable for everyone.
