In other words, child care simultaneously is too expensive for parents and brings in too little revenue for programs to operate sustainably. Child-care providers have very high fixed costs due to the need for low child-to-adult ratios, so they can’t pay their staff well without significantly increasing parent fees (many child-care workers make less than parking attendants). The instinct to make for any policy port in a storm is understandable, and the American child-care system is stuck in a years-long hurricane. Since Joe Manchin and 50 Republican senators killed the bill, however, many policy makers have started following a tired old playbook: If at first you fail to make something a universal right, try making it an employee benefit. This overhaul would have put child care squarely in the same category as Social Security, Medicare, and other guaranteed supports: It would have, in other words, become a right.
The act also would have capped all but the wealthiest families’ child-care bills at 7 percent of their income. When the House of Representatives passed the Build Back Better Act in 2021, it included $400 billion in funding, part of which would have paid programs enough to boost providers’ wages, in turn increasing the supply of available slots. For a brief moment, it looked like America could get a real child-care system-one that wasn’t defined by lengthy waitlists, sky-high fees, and crossed-fingers quality.
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