Related Articles
In a Tuesday vice-presidential debate studded with surprising points of agreement between two starkly different candidates, an extended discussion of child care stood out.
Over the past three years, Congressional Republicans, with the help of one key moderate Democrat, essentially killed President Biden’s attempts to create a national affordable child-care system and extend a generous pandemic-era tax credit for families with children.
Nevertheless, on the debate stage, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Donald J. Trump’s running mate, wholeheartedly agreed with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the running mate of Vice President Kamala Harris, that shortages of affordable child care are a crisis for American families, and that the federal government should provide cash payments to parents.
“A lot of us care about this issue,” Mr. Vance said. He deftly used the line of questioning to rebut the image of him that has been painted by critics in recent months, as a right-wing scold with dated views on women and motherhood.
“I’m married to a beautiful woman who is an incredible mother to our three beautiful kids, but is also a very, very brilliant corporate litigator,” he said. “A lot of young women would like to go back to work immediately. Some would like to spend a little time home with the kids. Some would like to spend longer at home with the kids. We should have a family care model that makes choice possible.”
In sketching out his beliefs on child care, Mr. Vance sounded more like the moderate Republican he was perceived to be before he became so closely allied with Mr. Trump and the very-online right. He has long been loosely affiliated with a group of conservative intellectuals who have pushed the Republican Party to embrace government spending on child care and cash benefits, in part to encourage parents to have more children as access to abortion has become more limited.
At the debate, he argued that one way to bring down costs for child care was to allow the federal government to subsidize the informal care that takes place at home or outside of child-care centers.
There were still important differences between his position and how Democrats talk about the issue. Mr. Vance’s rhetoric on choice in child care is, in part, a reference to making it easier for parents — particularly mothers — to stay home with their children. Democrats tend to talk about child-care benefits as gender-neutral and as a crucial way to get more parents into the work force.
The morning after the debate, Oren Cass, a Republican who has been pushing for the party to embrace more generous child-care benefits, sounded elated. He is a former adviser to Mitt Romney and the founder of American Compass, a think tank trying to shift Republican social policy to become more populist.
“Outside of the highly educated, upper-income segment, the overwhelming majority of parents prefer either a stay-at-home parent or informal care over the commercial or government day care option,” he said.
“The only way to help people arrange the lives they want is to give people the resources directly,” he added.
Mr. Cass said he viewed the vice-presidential debate as a significant moment of change in national politics that signaled the potential for bipartisan cooperation on family policy in the coming years.
“Generational shifts are inevitable,” he said, noting Mr. Vance’s age — 40. “This is what conservatism will be.”
Of course, during the debate, Mr. Vance melded his instincts on child care with a hefty dose of Trumpism. He repeated the former president’s claim that tariffs on imports would raise so much money that paying for federal child benefits would be a breeze. Economists are dubious, and Mr. Walz pointed out that tariffs would raise the cost of goods for American households, potentially offsetting gains from more generous child benefits.
Mr. Walz promoted the universal paid family leave program he signed into law in Minnesota, which will be funded by a payroll tax shared between workers and employers. On child care, he gestured, albeit a bit vaguely, toward the fact that the business model is, essentially, broken.
The core problem in the sector is that the fees most parents can afford to pay do not cover the cost of doing business for providers, with money left over for profit. And one reason tuition at American child-care centers is so burdensome is that unlike most other developed nations, the U.S. government generally does not subsidize the cost. That has put care providers among the lowest-paid workers in the American economy.
“You can’t expect the most important people in our lives to take care of our children or our parents to get paid the least amount of money,” Mr. Walz said.
Julie Kashen, a child-care expert at the liberal Century Foundation, a think tank, said that as governor of Minnesota, Mr. Walz “has the receipts” showing he actually created more generous family benefits.
“Vance’s perspective has been, ‘Just ask grandma, just ask an aunt,’” she said. “The reality is most families have already tried that, and it’s not enough. Grandparents and aunts are helping out. We still need a system that pays child-care educators better and is affordable for families.”
During the debate, Mr. Walz did not dwell on the Republican opposition to the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan, which would have capped child-care tuition at 7 percent of income for all but the wealthiest families.
Nor did he take the opportunity to point out that Mr. Vance recently missed a Senate vote on expanding the child tax credit, which failed because of Republican opposition.
Instead, Mr. Walz said, “I don’t think Senator Vance and I are that far apart.”
<
