Sometimes The Scrapbook thinks that the D.C. city government exists solely so that Congress won’t be the most incompetent political entity in Washington. We’re no strangers to writing about the effects of terrible regulations, and we really have to give D.C. credit for cooking up this one: The city plans to require all daycare workers to have college degrees.
While we can think of a few basic legal safeguards and background checks that might reasonably be required to keep the kidlets safe, the idea that you need a college education to watch young children is preposterous. There are couple of blindingly obvious negative effects such a requirement would have. The first is that it would reduce the pool of jobs available to less-educated, lower-income workers. The second is that it would dramatically raise the cost of childcare in a city where it’s already largely unaffordable.
Regulatory skeptics aren’t exactly lining up to endorse this proposal. “The average D.C. family with a toddler and infant would have to spend up to 63.6 percent of their annual income to enroll their kids in childcare,” says Shoshana Weissmann, a digital media specialist at the R Street Institute. “I appreciate D.C.’s efforts to limit the availability of childcare to the elite, and to keep peons away from children of the few who will be able to afford it.”
The really depressing thing is that this move by D.C. is just the latest in a long line of onerous regulations related to occupational licensing. States and localities have required such absurdities as 600 hours of training for those doing African hair-braiding or 1,825 days of experience and education to become a painting contractor. A 2011 study by University of Minnesota and Princeton economists concluded that occupational licensing excesses kill 2.8 million jobs and cost consumers $203 billion annually.
In recent years, there’s been widespread agreement among Republicans and Democrats on the need for occupational licensing reform. And yet new harmful and pointless regulations such as D.C.’s proposed daycare law keep cropping up. If we didn’t know better, we’d say America’s politicians aren’t sincere about reducing the size of government, even when they publicly admit it must be done.
