$10-a-day day care, eh?

Monday, December 18, 2023

Good afternoon,

Here's the agenda today:

UP FIRST: $10-a-day day care in Canada

CATCH UP: America's other economy

—Dylan Scott, senior correspondent

UP FIRST

Canada's $10-a-day day care experiment

Canada is rolling out an ambitious plan to dramatically reduce child care costs, potentially providing a roadmap for early-childhood advocates working in the United States.

One of the first lessons the policy's success might offer to American activists: Keep it simple.

Advocates pushing for the program kept their slogan to the point: $10-a-day child care (that's in Canadian dollars, equivalent to $7.50 US). That's now the hallmark of the plan, adopted in 2021. As Vox senior correspondent Rachel Cohen observes, progressives in the US still often frame their plans in less digestible terms, such as promising to cap child care costs at a percentage of a person's income.

As somebody with three kids in day care right now, I have to agree: Pledging to keep our family's costs to $10 a day per child resonates a lot more than asking me to do a math equation.

There are two other takeaways for Americans hoping for a similar program: Be persistent and start small. This is a policy project decades in the making. Some Canadian activists trace its lineage all the way back to a 1970 report on how to provide equitable economic opportunities for women. Once the idea began to gain steam, it was presaged by local trial runs. The province of Quebec enacted a universal child care program in the late '90s and progressives in British Columbia campaigned on the $10-a-day model on their way to big wins in the 2017 elections.

It's still early, but on its own terms, the program looks like quite a success.

Much of Canada has reached the $10-a-day goal ahead of schedule. Five of the 13 provinces and territories have already met that goal before the 2026 deadline. Others are not quite there yet but have still slashed average costs by 50 percent. The country has also opened 52,000 new child care slots.
The hardest part is expanding child care spots. Cutting the fees families pay is fairly straightforward. Expanding the workforce so more kids can find a spot at day care is a bit trickier. Local policymakers believe they will still need to find additional funding to improve salaries and benefits to attract more child care workers. Immigration is another possible avenue.
Some US activists are already starting to follow the Canadian model. Local initiatives could lay the groundwork for national action, with Vermont and New Mexico approving child care programs in recent years. Democrats in Congress have written a child care bill that adopts the $10-a-day goal outright.

Read the rest of Rachel's illuminating analysis here.

CATCH UP

The economic realities for Black and Latino Americans

President Biden walking in front of a crowd of workers and a sign reading ''Bidenomics, investing in America.''

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

If you are looking for a skeleton key to understand how so many Americans could be dissatisfied with an economy that by many indications is quite strong, take a look at Black and Latino Americans.

Two reports reveal that not everybody is experiencing the same economy, Vox's Christian Paz writes. Black and Latino communities in particular have seen the gains that they made early in the pandemic, when the government stepped in to rescue the economy, starting to erode.

That economic precarity may help to explain why Biden continues to poll poorly among Black and Latino Americans, historically core to the Democratic voting base, despite the fact that the economy is strong overall.

The pandemic rescue packages were a boon to Black and Latino families. The median low-income Black household cut its debt by $6,000 (not enough to pull them out of debt entirely but helpful nonetheless) and the median Latino household saw their debt fall by $1,000 (enough to, on average, eliminate their debts).
But inflation hit Black and Latino Americans particularly hard. Yes, this is the same culprit that has been blamed for the general economic discontent. But the data reveals an outsized impact on these specific communities. Rising transportation and food costs fell disproportionately on Black and Latino Americans. They experienced "steadily higher price increases" than the rest of the country as a result, one analysis found.
They now have dimmer views of the economy. Nobody seems happy with the US economy these days, whatever the expert-preferred indicators may say. But more Black and Latino voters rate the economy as "poor" than do white voters.

VERBATIM

🗣️ "This may be just this little head-fake where interest rates went up and then they came back down and it was no big deal, or we may turn around and may look back at this moment in 10 years and say, 'That was the moment when people did start to worry about the deficit again and we started doing stuff.' I don't know which one it will be."

—Louise Sheiner, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and policy director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, on whether the federal deficit is actually a problem. [Vox]

AROUND THE WEB

Irish woman critical to D-Day's success dies at age 100. A centenarian we can celebrate: Maureen Sweeney, who worked with her husband on the coast guard during WWII, correctly forecasted a storm that could have stifled the Allied invasion. [BBC]
US homelessness has reached its highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis. More than 650,000 Americans were experiencing homelessness in a federal snapshot of the unhoused. More than 143,000 people reported being chronically without shelter, the highest number ever recorded. [Vice]
Police body camera footage remains largely concealed from public view. These devices were touted as an opportunity for more transparency amid the backlash to police brutality over the last decade — and yet a review of police killings captured by bodycams in June 2022 found that the majority have never been shared with the public. [ProPublica]